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    All Featured Books
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with ichthyology

Blog Reel, User Stories

Getting Fishy with BHL: Empowering Discoveries and Connections Around Museum Collections

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Twitter is a popular communication channel amongst the scientific community. Scientists use the platform to communicate with colleagues and share their research findings with both other scientists and the public.

Twitter may also be a valuable source of data for researchers. For example, ecologists from the University of Gloucestershire found that “Twitter-mined” data is useful for phenological studies, such as winged-ant emergence or the appearance of house spiders in the fall.

Twitter conversations can also spark unexpected discoveries. For example, a recent @BioDivLibrary Twitter conversation helped uncover a connection between the scientific literature and a museum’s collections.

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September 5, 2019byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Mary Margaret Smith: Ichthyologist, Artist, and First Director of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology

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The Library at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity is named for Mary Margaret Smith (née Macdonald), the first Director of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology. Macdonald attended Rhodes University College in Grahamstown from 1934 to 1937. She was awarded her B.Sc. degree in 1936, majoring in physics and chemistry (with distinction), and became a senior demonstrator in the Chemistry Department.

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March 24, 2019bySally Schramm
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer: Beyond the Coelacanth

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Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (1907-2004) is ubiquitously remembered and celebrated for her part in recognising that the large fish trawled by Capt. Hendrik Goosen and the crew of the Nerine in December 1938 was an astonishing find. This was to be identified as the first live coelacanth known to Western science. JLB Smith, the ichthyologist who first described it, named it Latimeria chalumnae after Marjorie, and the Eastern Cape river mouth near which it was found.

Reading the Border Historical Society’s The Coelacanth journal Commemorative edition in honour of Dr Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (2004) we find a life dedicated to a great deal more that single event. Her contributions to the Eastern Cape town of East London, and to the Museum in particular, were immense.

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March 23, 2019bySally Schramm
Blog Reel, Featured Books

28,000 Pages about the Sea: Challenges and Solutions for Digitizing the Fowler Collection

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Henry Weed Fowler must have loved fish.

Ichthyology dominated his entire career. He started as a museum assistant at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1903. Other experts in his field soon recognized his prolific skill. In 1918, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian, Barton A. Bean, reached out to Fowler (then still an assistant) for help identifying fishes collected by the United States Exploring Expedition. Fowler dove into the work. He delivered a lengthy 750-page manuscript in two years, helping to discover 18 new species of fish in the process.

For reference, the average field book here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives is 110 pages.

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May 3, 2018byCharles Zange
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Renard’s Book of Fantastical Fish

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You may not recognize all (or even many) of the East Indian marine species portrayed in the first known book on fish to be published in color. Don’t worry. It’s not a lack of ichthyological proficiency on your part.
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August 4, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Happy Birthday, Louis Agassiz!

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Monday, May 28, marked Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz’s 205th birthday. Louis Agassiz was a famous Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, and geologist who made critical advances in the fields of ichthyology and glaciology. During his lifetime, he received the Wollaston medal, was named a member of the Royal Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and served as the head of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University.

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May 31, 2012byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Living Sea Mammoths of Myth and Legend

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This week, while browsing our Flickr site (which, by the way, has over 15,900 images!), we stumbled across the book Field Book of Giant Fishes (1949), by J.R. Norman and F.C. Fraser, and were intrigued. What exactly was a giant fish by this book’s standards, and what would we find when we delved into the pages of this enigmatic title?

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October 20, 2011byMichelle Strizever
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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