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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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  • 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 taxidermy

Blog Reel, User Stories

Tasting Platypus Milk: Linking Specimens and Stories

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Zoological knowledge typically comes from one of two primary sources: the living and the dead — observations of animals going about their business in their habitats; and the study of preserved specimens. We rarely get the whole picture of an animal’s natural history without both and each feed into how species are portrayed to those that have never seen them.

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July 7, 2020byJack Ashby
Blog Reel, Featured Books

To Contemplate Without Dread: Nineteenth Century Taxidermy and the Study of Natural History

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Natural history illustrations often aim to show life-like flora and fauna. Depictions of birds poised to take flight, fish swimming upstream, and mammals mid-stride are common in 18th and 19th century zoology and botany publications. What is lost in these often lavish illustrations is a certain truth about the way many naturalists interacted with their objects of study: many species of plant or animal were first encountered not in the wild, but in the display case, in the form of carefully prepared specimens.

One British naturalist, Captain Thomas Brown (1785-1862), made the practical observation that mounted animal specimens allowed naturalists to “contemplate, without dread, the most destructive and furious quadrupeds, and the most noxious reptiles.”

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October 25, 2018byAlexandra K. Carter
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Taxidermy: The Artistry of Preserving Bodies

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Thanks to reality television shows like “Oddities” on the Science Channel, “Immortalized” on AMC, and “American Stuffers” on Animal Planet, there has been a resurgence in the popularity of taxidermy. The first instance of a dead organism being preserved and stuffed for display or learning purposes is not known with certainty, but in our book of the week, we’ll learn several theories on the origins of taxidermy—and most interestingly, how to perform it.

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July 3, 2013byLaurel Byrnes

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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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