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In 1854, Alfred Russel Wallace began an eight year collecting trip to Southeast Asia, through the region he called the Malay Archipelago (now Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and East Timor). It was during this expedition, in the midst of a fever in 1858, that Wallace conceived (independently of Darwin) of the theory of natural selection. Wallace expanded his idea into a detailed article which he sent to Charles Darwin for comment, unaware that Darwin himself had come to the same conclusion, though he had yet to publish the theory.

In 1860, Charles Darwin had an epiphany. This was not an epiphany on the origin of species, as his monumental publication on the subject had been published one year earlier in 1859. This epiphany, which Darwin shared in a letter to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, was that flowers in the genus Primula display two distinct forms which differ in the length of the pistil’s styles and the height of the stamen’s anthers.

In 2016, Beatrice Steinert, a recent BA in Biology (2016) from Brown University, was an inaugural Catherine Norton Fellow. Steinert’s project, in conjunction with the History of the Marine Biological Laboratory Project, studied Edwin Grant Conklin’s (1863-1952) work in embryology and cell biology. Conklin documented the stages of embryo development in the marine slipper snail Crepidula fornicata using a camera lucida device.

Amoebozoans are believed to have existed for hundreds of millions of years. These ancient protists are characterized by the presence of pseudopodia, cytoplasm-filled projections that are used for locomotion and feeding. Today, over 2,000 species of Amoebozoa are recognized. The phylum itself was first scientifically described by Max Lühe, a professor at the University of Königsberg (Germany), in 1913. Dr. Leigh Anne Riedman, a NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences), specializes in Precambrian paleontology.

Located in central Singapore, just minutes away from the city’s main shopping district, sits the first and only tropical botanic garden listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Established at its present site in 1859, the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG) covers 82 hectares and is home to thousands of plant species. Since 1875, the SBG Library has supported research at the Gardens. Over the years, the Library has amassed a large collection of rare and scholarly literature and artworks that are housed in climate-controlled spaces. Access to these materials has traditionally been limited to privileged, on-site researchers.