All posts tagged with paleontology

Over the past few months, I’ve been working as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr Content Volunteer. As someone who really values the cross-section between art and science, it’s a fascinating task. The Flickr page is full of beautiful images of flowers, birds, and butterflies.

On March 9th, the world marked the 166th anniversary of the death of Mary Anning, one of the bravest and most diligent amateur naturalists in history. Despite remarkable discoveries for which she was well compensated, her status as a self-taught, working-class woman meant that Mary Anning’s existence in the published record of science is spotty at best. Her story is nearly unbelievable from the start.

Here at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the story of the so-called Bone Wars is well known.

In short, the Academy’s Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), also affiliated with U. Penn, and Yale University’s Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899), also affiliated with the United States Geological Survey, were both prolific, well respected paleontologists. Both unearthed, described, and published their finds of fossil fauna in the post-Civil War era when the discipline of vertebrate paleontology was quite young in the U.S.

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.