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    All Featured Books
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

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Blog Reel, User Stories

Following Early Naturalists of the American West

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Yellowstone National Park is famous worldwide for its vast forests, abundance of wildlife – including a wide variety of North American megafauna, and its natural landmarks like Old Faithful Geyser. The Park, which spans over 3,400 square miles, was established by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, making it the first national park ever established. In addition to over 350 species of animals, over 1,000 plant species call the park home. [1] The first actual flora of the park was published in 1886 by a man named Frank Tweedy. [2] Tweedy was a topographical engineer born in New York City in 1854. Between 1884-85, Tweedy was in Yellowstone mapping the topography of the park for a project with the U.S. Geological Survey.
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March 7, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Early Land Plants and the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

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Bryophytes are green land plants that lack true vascular tissue. They encompass mosses (Bryophyta), hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) and liverworts (Marchantiophyta). Bryophytes form an important component in many ecosystems, offering microhabitats for an abundance of biodiversity including single-celled eukaryotes, protozoa, and many invertebrates (Gerson 1982). They also play an important part in the global carbon budget and can support climate change research by serving as “indicators of past climate change, [validating] climate models, and as potential indicators of global warming”.

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March 1, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Resolving a 180 Year Old Taxonomic Mystery

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Hardwicke’s bloodsucker is an agamid lizard found in western and central India. It is a small, stocky, and pot-bellied lizard with a short tail that is currently recognized under the scientific name Brachysaura minor. This species, however, has a rather convoluted taxonomic history. The first scientific description of the species comes from Hardwicke and Gray in 1827 and is based on a color sketch by Hardwicke which now resides in the Archives of the Natural History Museum, London.  They named the species Agama minor.
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February 11, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL: Continuing to Inspire a Love of Natural History

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In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter season is well underway. Cold temperatures mean that species of all kinds must face many new challenges in order to survive the next few months. Spiders are no exception. One might assume that spiders die off once winter hits. While this is true for some species, it is not true for all spiders – many remain active in winter months. How do they manage this? Through a variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations. Behavioral adaptations include moving their homes to “overwintering sites” such as the “subnivean zone,” an area between the snow and the ground, or concealed locations in leaf litter or under bark, where it’s warmer. Spiders also have a physiological adaptation that helps them brave the cold months.
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January 14, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL Isn’t Just For Biologists

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Charles Darwin is famous for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The theory hinges on the mutability of species, whereby the propagation of certain favorable traits within members of a species may gradually result in the evolution of that species. The question of when Darwin first came to believe in the mutability of species – when he became a “convinced transmutationist” – has long been a point of contention among historians of science. There are two prevailing theories on the topic. The early conversion hypothesis states that Darwin developed a belief in the transmutation of species while on the Beagle voyage based on observed similarities between the fossils he was collecting and extant species in the area.
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December 17, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

The Australian Lepidoptera Heritage

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Have you ever stumbled across a caterpillar and wondered what kind of adult moth or butterfly it would metamorphose into? Short of catching the caterpillar and actually observing what adult it becomes, this answer might be harder to come by than you might think. Most taxonomy and identification has been performed on the adults of various Lepidopteran species, and there are still many species whose caterpillar forms are not readily known. This is particularly true for many Australian species whose early life stages remain a scientific mystery.

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November 12, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories, User Stories

From the Experts: Recommended Fossil Books!

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We hope you’ve been enjoying the fossil-mania this week with Fossil Stories! We’ve been exploring the fascinating history of paleontology, learning some great fossil facts, and hearing from experts (via a series of live webcasts) about current fossil research. Our posts have demonstrated the important role that natural history publications have played in the history of paleontology. These works disseminated new research and ideas, documented the evolution of human knowledge about fossils and their origins, and recorded the first scientific descriptions of many ancient creatures. But this literature is important not just for the historical information it provides.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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