All posts tagged with bhl-users

‘Queen of the dark, whose tender glories fade In the gay radiance of the noon-tide hours.’ ‘That flower, supreme in loveliness, and pure As the pale Cynthia’s beams, through which unveiled It blooms, as if unwilling to endure The gaze, by which such beauties are assailed.’ These elegant lines are quoted in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (v. 62, 1835) as part of the description for the Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) and serve as an artful conveyance of the species’ nocturnal blooming. But these lines represent more than just a whimsical representation of plant behavior.

Have you ever been to a museum and wondered about the history of the specimens on display? If you have, then you’d probably be interested in talking to the museum’s collections managers, as their jobs include not only caring for and improving accessibility to the collections, but also serving as a living knowledge repository for information about the history of the collections. Take the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, for example. Amongst the many treasures on display in that museum are five whale skeletons suspended from the roof. Where did those specimens come from?

Since the end of the twentieth century, the genus name Dixiphia has been associated with the white-crowned manakin. A recent investigation, made possible in part thanks to BHL, demonstrated that Dixiphia did not refer to a manakin at all, but was in fact a junior synonym of the white-headed marsh tyrant (genus Arundinicola). The white-crowned manakin was in need of its own, new genus-group name. The manakin mystery was first discovered by researchers Guilherme Renzo Rocha Brito and Guy M. Kirwan. Following the publication of a book on Cotingas and Manakins, Brito and Kirwan received an inquiry from James A.

If you have ever heard of entomologist Harrison Dyar, there’s a good chance that it was in relation to a series of tunnels that he dug beneath Washington, D.C. Or it may have been in relation to his bigamy. But if that’s all you know about Dyar, then you only know the tabloid tales. Harrison Dyar was Honorary Custodian of Lepidoptera at the United States National Museum for over 30 years. He studied sawflies, moths, butterflies and mosquitos and described hundreds of species and genera.

Australia has over 1,600 species of native bees. As a young university student in 1979, I was keen to learn all I could about these diverse species. However, I soon found that the original descriptions of many of these bees were in obscure books and journals dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, only available in specialised research libraries. Unravelling the secrets of Australian native bees would prove to be a challenge! When naturalist Joseph Banks arrived in Australia in 1770 with the first British expedition, he found an astounding new world of undescribed species. Amongst the hundreds of specimens that he collected were a blue-banded bee, a resin bee, a carpenter bee and a wasp-mimic bee.

On the eastern coast of Florida, about 120 miles north of Miami, there’s a very special research center. It serves as a field station specializing in marine biodiversity and Florida ecosystems, especially that of the Indian River Lagoon – one of the most biologically-diverse estuaries in North America.