All posts tagged with frogs

Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium has been described as one of the most beautiful works devoted to frogs and amphibians.

The work of German artist and naturalist Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium describes the natural history of all then-known frogs and toads indigenous to the Nuremberg region in Germany. The title is noteworthy first for the extensive, accurate information in the text, printed in two columns in both German and Latin.

The work is equally (if not more) renowned for its illustrations. The twenty-four folio, hand-colored copper engravings portray habitats, anatomy, reproductive behavior, and larval development stages in intricate detail.

One of the BHL partner institutions, The Field Museum Library, was recently awarded a small grant from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) to contribute titles to the growing BHL corpus. The proposal entitled “Empowering Biodiversity Research,” allowed The Field Museum Library to contribute 34 new titles to the BHL.

If you caught our blog post yesterday, then you know that this week we’re starting a mini-series within our larger BHL and Our Users series. This mini-series spotlights a few of the EOL Fellows – scientists who have been awarded a fellowship through the EOL Rubenstein Fellows Competition – and discusses not only their work but also how they use BHL to support it. For this, our first post, we feature Dr. Breda Zimkus, a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Genetics Resources Facility Project Manager at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

So often with scientific illustration, one finds that the depiction of species or specimens are limited to the isolated rendering of the subject in question, devoid of any habitat or environmental context that gives the reader a clear picture of what life is truly like for the animal in the wild. So, when we came across the illustrations in Deutschlands Amphibien und Reptilien. Eine Beschreibung und Schilderung sämmtlicher in Deutschland und den angrenzenden Gebietan vrokommenden Lurche und Kreichthiere (1897) by Bruno Dürigen, we knew we had to highlight them.

Per our user feature earlier this week on Dr. Charlotte Sleigh of the University of Kent, we feature a book that has been particularly important for Dr. Sleigh’s recent work: Dissertations relative to the natural history of animals and vegetables , volume 2 (1789), by Lazzaro Spallanzani. Dr. Sleigh’s current activities involve writing a book on the cultural history of frogs for Reaktion Books’ Animal series.