Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from 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
  • 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
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
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with marine-biology

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Last Heath Hen, and Other News From the Collecting Net In Woods Hole

Read the full blog post

“On Martha’s Vineyard Island just across the Sound from the Marine Biological Laboratory is the home of the lone survivor of the Heath Hen. The death of this individual will also mean the death of its race, and then another bird will have taken its place among the endless array of extinct forms. The numbers of Heath Hen have been closely followed by ornithologists and since 1908 a detailed census has been taken of the birds each year. For the first time in the history of ornithology a species has been studied and photographed in its normal environment down to the very last individual.”

-Professor Alfred O Gross, Bowdoin College, as written in The Collecting Net: Volume 5, Number 3, 12 July 1930.

We came across a unique article, “The Last Heath Hen,” in the Biodiversity Heritage Library recently. The article from The Collecting Net newspaper is a beautifully-crafted account from 1930 of the then-last stand and near extinction of the last animal of the ground-feeding Heath Hen species (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), a member of the grouse family and subspecies of the Prairie Chicken. This species once ranged from Maine to the Carolinas in American colonial times and before but was all but extinct on the US mainland by 1870, except for it holding its own in the scrub brush, open fields, and low pine forests of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Continue reading
April 29, 2021byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, User Stories

Diving into Marine Biodiversity & Coastal Ecosystem Research

Read the full blog post
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.
Continue reading
June 9, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Darwin’s Early Love

Read the full blog post
Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist known around the world for his publication On the Origin of Species and contributions to evolutionary theory, was born on February 12, 1809. As such, February 12 is known as International Darwin Day – a celebration with a vision to: February 12 also happens to be just days before Valentine’s Day, a holiday now associated with love and the presentation of valentines as expressions of affection. How might these two, seemingly disparate holidays, be brought together?
Continue reading
February 12, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

A Small Town’s Large Research on the Health of the Seas

Read the full blog post

When whaling and fertilizer manufacturing ended in the latter half of the 19 century in the quaint village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the town turned to research, growing quickly into a world renowned center for marine science. In 1871, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (the antecedent of the National Marine Fisheries Service), founded by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer Fullerton Baird, published Report on the conditions of the sea fisheries of the south coast of New England.

Continue reading
June 8, 2015byMatthew Person and Diane M. Rielinger
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

World Oceans Day: Ernst Haeckel and Art Forms in Nature

Read the full blog post
This post is the fifth in our series leading up to the celebration of World Oceans Day on June 8. This series explores publications that represent important milestones in the progress of marine bioscience research and ocean exploration. This post is an abbreviated version of a longer feature published on the Smithsonian Ocean Portal.
Continue reading
June 5, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

World Oceans Day: A Bibliographic Exploration of Ocean Giants

Read the full blog post

When you think of the largest creatures in the ocean, what do you picture? You might be surprised about which creatures are largest, and about some of their fascinating histories and habits! A recent article in the journal PeerJ documents the body length of some of the longest animals in the ocean, and in preparation for World Oceans Day on June 8, we’re diving deeper into the top ten listed in that article.

Continue reading
June 4, 2015byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

World Oceans Day through Books: Corals, Oceanography, and the Deep Sea

Read the full blog post
This post is the third in our series leading up to the celebration of World Oceans Day on June 8. This series explores publications that represent important milestones in the progress of marine bioscience research and ocean exploration.

Charles Darwin will forever be remembered for his theory of evolution by means of natural selection and the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. But Darwin’s scientific contributions extend even beyond this monumental achievement.

Continue reading
June 3, 2015byGrace Costantino
Page 1 of 212»

Help Support BHL

BHL’s existence depends on the financial support of its patrons. Help us keep this free resource alive!

Donate Now

search

About BHL

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.”

Follow BHL

Join Our Mailing List

Sign up to receive the latest news, content highlights, and promotions.

Subscribe Now

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Subscribe to Blog Via RSS

Subscribe to the blog RSS feed to stay up-to-date on all the latest BHL posts.

Access RSS Feed

BHL on Twitter

Tweets by @BioDivLibrary

Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library makes it easier than ever for you to access the information you need to study and explore life on Earth…for free, anytime, anywhere.

62+ Million Pages of
Biodiversity Literature Online.

EXPLORE

Tools and Services
to Transform Research.

EXPLORE

300,000+
Illustrations on Flickr.

EXPLORE

 

ABOUT | BLOG AUTHORS | HARMFUL CONTENT | PRIVACY | SITE MAP | TERMS OF USE

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader