All posts tagged with bhlimpact

In the early 20th century, the British Colonial Office and the Discovery Committee of the British Government undertook a series of major investigations into the biology of whales in the Southern Hemisphere.

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.

We live in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change. Documenting Earth’s species and understanding the complexities of swiftly-changing ecosystems is more important than ever before. To do this, scientists need something that no single library can provide – access to the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity.

Fortunately, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is revolutionizing scientific research by providing free and open access to the collections of natural history and botanical libraries around the world.

2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL, www.biodiversitylibrary.org)!

Since 2006, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has transformed the way scientists, researchers, and librarians around the world access knowledge about and study life on Earth.