All posts in Featured Books

In this day and age, science is a serious business pursued by experts who are mostly employed by universities or research facilities. These rational organisations like to trace their lineages back to the late 18^th Century Enlightenment, but such narratives are never linear or straight-forward. In 2001 the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, acquired an extraordinary manuscript, The Naturalists Companion, Containing drawings with suitable descriptions of a vast variety of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpent and Insects; &c accurately copied either from Living Animals or from the stuffed Specimens in the Museums of the College and Dublin Society. This volume, of a miscellany of museum artefacts, natural history specimens, and material culture, exemplified the way many Europeans encountered natural history from the new world: not with Enlightenment rigour but with eclectic and unsystematic enthusiasm.

I’m a Deep Time – Peter Buck Fellow in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where I study the ecology and evolution of prehistoric vertebrates, especially fossil mammals from the Indian subcontinent. The Indian subcontinent has one of the richest mammalian fossil records anywhere in the world. The Siwalik Hills and surrounding regions in Northwest India and Pakistan have a fossil record ranging from about 23 million years ago to about half a million years ago, making this region an ideal place to study how mammalian communities have changed through time.

Fossil mammals in India were first discovered by British explorers and naturalists in the 1830s and 40s. Hugh Falconer, Proby Cautley, W.E. Baker, and H.M. Durand discovered one of the largest deposits of fossil mammals from the Pliocene and Pleistocene (3.6 million years to 0.6 million years) in the region between the rivers Yamuna and Sutlej. These fossils eventually made their way back to the Natural History Museum in London and form one of the most important fossil collections in the world. These collections form the basis of my research on the reassessment of the taxonomy of fossil mammals from India, the biogeography of South Asian mammals, and paleocommunity change.

Not many birds bedazzle as thoroughly as the adult male Painted Bunting. No matter how many you’ve seen or how often, every one remains a source of startlement, whether it is emerging shyly from a Florida thicket, swaying on a heavy grass halm in the deserts of Arizona, or chewing steadily at a feeder in snowy Massachusetts. This, the most gaudily colored bird north of Mexico, is guaranteed to create a stir.

That stir was even greater three hundred years ago, when European natural historians first confronted this novel beauty. So colorful was the bird that the first scientists to describe it believed that it must be native to regions even more exotic than America. Eleazar Albin, in the notes accompanying his or his daughter Elizabeth Albin’s 1737 engraving of the species, reported that the bird had been brought to England from China for the pleasure “of a curious Gentleman” (Albin 1738). A dozen years on, Linnaeus, having failed to find the bird described or depicted in the handbooks available to him, diagnosed it as a new species, which he inscrutably named Emberiza ciris, and determined that with so brightly colored a plumage, the specimens could have come only from India (Linnaeus 1750).

With the benefit of nearly three centuries’ hindsight, such wild geographic speculation was strictly speaking unnecessary. As early as the 1720s, the natural historian Mark Catesby had seen, drawn, and described the Painted Bunting in southeastern North America, an account that he published in London in 1729 (Catesby 1729).

In my job as the manager of the Library at Museums Victoria (Australia), I am frequently required to conduct rare book research for programs, displays, online projects, or to establish the provenance of a book. I remember being a little daunted by this task at first, not knowing quite what to cover or what the relevant references were in this field. I have put together this quick guide as a reference for newcomers, using digitised books in BHL to demonstrate how to “read” a book for rare book research. I’ve also included some useful links and further reading if you’d like to delve deeper.

The Island of Newfoundland was nicknamed “The Rock” because of its rocky terrain and high cliffs.

I’m Elizabeth Smith, and I work at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Library & Archives as Acquisitions and Cataloguing Officer. In this capacity, I have the privilege of caring for a rare book collection consisting of approximately 4,000 pre-20^th century monographs, manuscripts and periodicals, including a special unpublished manuscript, Entomologia Terrae Novae by Philip Henry Gosse — which I had the privilege of hand couriering to St John’s Newfoundland for a short exhibit and panel talk at Memorial University’s QEII Library this past September.

My name is Michelle Pinsdorf, and I am a paleontologist and preparator of fossil vertebrates in the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum’s Department of Paleobiology. Preparators’ work can cover a wide variety of duties, from fieldwork to discovering new fossil specimens, to freeing those specimens from their surrounding host rock in our laboratories, to safely housing specimens for research collections, and helping to build exhibits for specimens going out on display. We call it “grave to cradle” work.

Most of the time you’ll find a fossil preparator leaning over a lab bench with a fine tool in hand, peering through a microscope and exposing the details of a fossil that helps researchers identify and publish about it. But for the past five years, my lab colleagues and I have been working on the renovation of the Natural History Museum’s fossil exhibits. This has involved the dismantling of many previously exhibited fossil mounts to allow for the conservation of the fossils and remounting them in new poses and settings. With the significant scientific value of these fossils, a lot of research and planning happens before each individual specimen is worked on.

Halloween is just around the corner, and the skeletons have come out of the closet. From front yards reimagined as graveyards to bone-chilling retail displays and party backdrops rattling with more than a few spare ribs, bones are on display to awaken the Halloween spirit and set a ghoulish mood to the delight of trick-or-treaters everywhere.

The modern-day Halloween is derived from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. With the Celtic new year celebrated on November 1, October 31 marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the cold, dark winter. Samhain, celebrated the evening of October 31, was believed to be a time when the boundary between the worlds of life and death were blurred, allowing the ghosts of the dead to return (History.com 2019).

Over time, Halloween has evolved into the costume-wearing, trick-or-treating holiday that it is today, but the season’s association with death has remained, evidenced by the proliferation of ghosts and skeletons intertwined with modern-day celebrations.

Embracing the Halloween season’s bony obsession, this month’s book of the month is one devoted to the skeleton — Osteographia (1733), which has been described as “one of the most important and beautiful books in the British anatomical tradition” (Neher 2010, 517). This work is freely available in BHL thanks to the Library and Archives of the Natural History Museum in London.