All posts tagged with mammals

Here in the Washington, D.C. area, where the BHL Secretariat is housed, North American wildlife is a hot topic with the grand opening of the new National Zoo American Trail exhibit. The exhibit features some of the most iconic American species, including the Bald Eagle, Gray Wolf, North American Beaver, and the Otter. We’ve been celebrating the exhibit all week on Twitter and Facebook, and we thought it only natural to further commemorate American fauna with our book of the week. To do so, we’ve selected Wild Animals of North America (1918), contributed by the American Museum of Natural History.

This week for our book of the week, we feature a title that Charles Darwin himself called “one of the great monuments of science in the 19th century.” The book? Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale(1835-47), by Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny. The work chronicles d’Orbigny’s travels to South America for the Paris Museum from 1826-1833. As a result of this voyage, d’Orbigny returned to Paris with more than 10,000 natural history specimens.

Ever wanted to get a systematic view of the animal kingdom in picture-book style? Well, this week you’re in luck, because we’re featuring Illustrations of Zoology (1851), with engravings by F.W. Lowry and Thomas Landseer, after the original drawings by Sowerby, Varley, Holmes, Bone, Pyne, Lowry and Charles Landseer. It contains no less than 87 illustrations of animals from all walks of life!

For the past couple weeks you’ve seen a lot from us on the blog, Twitter and Facebook about Charles Darwin with our recent release of the Charles Darwin Library on BHL. This week, we feature a user dedicated to saving the remaining two endemic non-flying mammal species of Hispaniola, and his project, “The Last Survivors,” is funded by the Darwin Initiative Fund. The beauty of this story from a socially-networked perspective? This user actually discovered BHL via Twitter! Social Media is a beautiful thing! So, without further ado, meet Dr. Jose Nunez-Mino!

Earlier this week we did a Species of the Day tweet on Twitter (@BioDivLibrary) about the Abyssinian or Ethiopian Wolf – the most endangered canine in the world. For the tweet, we linked to a lovely portrait of the animal in Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals (1930), illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Little did we know what a fascinating work this actually is.