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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 myth

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Page Frights

Bishops in the Sea for Halloween!

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Apparently, clergymen in the 16th century had a lot of extra time on their hands to masquerade as sea monsters and make their marks on the annals of natural history as sea monks and bishop fish. All this month, we’ve been exploring curious creatures in natural history as part of Page Frights. Today being Halloween, we thought we’d continue the fun by highlighting another “clergyman monster in disguise,” the bishop fish! Earlier this month, we highlighted the ‘sea monk,’ or Piscis monachi habitu (“Fish with the habit of a monk”), a specimen of which was reportedly caught in the seas between Sweden and Denmark in the 1540s.
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October 31, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ancient Myths Inspired by Fossils

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The study of mythology associated with fossils is a relatively new field, which Adrienne Mayor (2005) terms “the folklore of paleontology”; she continues by saying that “[c]ombining oral traditions and paleontology, and drawing on history, archaeology, anthropology, and mythology, the investigation of fossil legends offers a new way of thinking about pre-Darwinian encounters with prehistoric remains” (Preface, p. xxiv). Drawing from several resources, one can create a dynamic picture of what a large variety of cultures around the world and throughout time have thought were the myths associated with dinosaur, bird, and other prehistoric fossils. Due to extensive travel, Greeks and Romans discovered fossils throughout the Mediterranean and into India (Mayor, 2000b, p. 8).
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October 13, 2015byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Monsters Are Real

The Quest for the Sea Serpent: An Oarfish or Something More?

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  In the 16th century, the ocean was a terrifying place. Creatures of unimaginable size and ferocity stalked the waters. One such beast was Soe Orm. Olaus Magnus gave this gripping description of his sea serpent, accompanied by an equally formidable woodcut, in the 1555 masterpiece Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (ca. 1557 edition available in BHL).
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October 29, 2014byGrace Costantino

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