Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

Services at Internet Archive have been restored after an outage due to a storm. BHL images are now loading properly. Thanks for your patience!

What can a salamander brain tell us about human behavior? A lot more than you might think, discovered Lou Morgan, an independent researcher who has been studying the physiological underpinnings of human behavior for 30 years. While Morgan’s undergraduate education focused on mathematics, a history of familial psychological problems fueled an interest in understanding the underlying mechanisms of human psychology. In the 1950s, Morgan began taking the first of many college psychology courses. These courses, however, focused largely on human thought and behavior subsequent to their manifestation.

The sixteen women featured in the “Early Women In Science” exhibition are each extraordinary for unique reasons.  One trait they all share is that they were doing work in scientific fields reserved for men. They sometimes had to fight for recognition of their work—or went completely unrecognized for some of their major contributions. For instance, Maria Emma Gray (1787-1876) was a talented natural history illustrator.

We are pleased to announce the release of two new BHL online exhibitions: Early Women in Science and Latino Natural History. Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Women’s Committee awarded a one-year grant to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) to build online exhibitions to showcase the scientific and historical contributions of Women and Latino naturalists and illustrators.

Sharks, Passenger Pigeons, Scientific Illustrations, Crowdsourcing, National Agricultural Library, GBIF, and Semantic Metadata. What do all these things have in common? They’re all BHL news stories from the past few months! Get the latest BHL project news in our latest quarterly report and newsletter! Don’t get our newsletter?