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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 scientific-illustration

Blog Reel, Featured Books

An Illustrated Natural History of German Frogs: Rösel’s Historia Naturalis Ranarum Nostratium

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Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium has been described as one of the most beautiful works devoted to frogs and amphibians.

The work of German artist and naturalist Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium describes the natural history of all then-known frogs and toads indigenous to the Nuremberg region in Germany. The title is noteworthy first for the extensive, accurate information in the text, printed in two columns in both German and Latin.

The work is equally (if not more) renowned for its illustrations. The twenty-four folio, hand-colored copper engravings portray habitats, anatomy, reproductive behavior, and larval development stages in intricate detail.

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August 2, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Bateman’s Orchidaceae: Exploring One of the Rarest – and Largest – Orchid Books

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“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

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July 19, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Art of Herpetology: Schlegel’s Reptiles and Amphibians

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German ornithologist and herpetologist Hermann Schlegel hoped that the publication of good illustrations would stimulate public interest in reptiles and amphibians. Thus, he produced Abbildungen neuer oder unvollständig bekannter Amphibian (1837-44).

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November 30, 2017byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

World Oceans Day: Ernst Haeckel and Art Forms in Nature

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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.
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June 5, 2015byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Zooniverse releases Science Gossip

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Zooniverse unveils its latest project called Science Gossip which is an investigation into the making and communication of science in both the Victorian period and today. This project is born from a collaboration between an Arts and Humanities Research Council project in the UK, called ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (ConSciCom) and the Missouri Botanical Garden who provided content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for knowledge about the natural world.
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March 4, 2015byTrish Rose-Sandler
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Sea Dog: Exploring the Discovery & Classification of the Shark

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It’s that time of year again! That special week set aside to celebrate the fabulously diverse Selachimorpha clade: Shark Week! If you were to ask an average person to differentiate between a tiger shark, Great White, whale shark, bull shark, or mako, most could probably do so, or would at least be aware that such varieties existed. This wasn’t always the case.

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August 12, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Art of Life Team Holds 2nd Face to Face Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri

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The NEH-funded Art of Life project recently held its second face to face meeting November 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Institutions represented were from the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL), and Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL). The team focused primarily on how to bring the algorithm work to a close.  The IMA developed four algorithms for identifying which pages in the BHL corpus contain images.  Those algorithms were run across a gold standard set of 40k pages to determine their accuracy and performance.  Two of the four algorithms were deemed to be useful (accuracy ratings were above 80%).

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December 10, 2013byCarolyn Sheffield
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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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