Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

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.

This week, Chris Mills, Head of Library, Art, and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, celebrates his retirement. Chris has served as the Head of the Library at Kew since 2006, before which he served as the Head of Collections and Services at the Natural History Museum, London. The Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has the distinction of being one of BHL’s 10 founding institutions, and now represents one of BHL’s 16 Member Libraries.

Halloween is quickly approaching and with it comes the traditional decorations of bats, pumpkins, ghosts and of course, skeletons. Back in the 1500’s, one man changed the way the medical world saw the skeletal and muscular systems of the human body. That man, Andreas Vesalius, illustrated anatomical features in his De humani corporis fabrica (On the structure of the human body) in a way never before seen.