Picturing the Museum: The American Museum of Natural History Photo Collection.
posted on Jun 26, 2008 - View this thread

"While we are generally horrified by monstrosities in the case of human beings, we love them in fruit" - Giovanni Battista Ferrari (naturalist, "discoverer" of the blood orange and the cure for scurvy). Illustrations in Ferrari's book Hesperides sive de Malorum Aureorum cultura (1646) are based on close collaboration with Cassiano dal Pozzo and his Paper Museum, called one man's project to "commission drawings of all known antiquities, and to attempt to systematically categorize this vast repertory of visual images."
posted on Feb 27, 2008 - View this thread

Deyrolle: The Strangest Shop in All of Paris. "Paris has many unusual shops, but one of the most unusual has to be Deyrolle."
posted on Jul 1, 2007 - View this thread

Alabama has many beautiful rivers, but the Cahaba is special. Its biodiversity is impressive. Boasting 131 different fish species, no other river in North America has more species of fish per mile. It's also the longest free-flowing river remaining in Alabama. It is home to a considerable number of rare plants*, including the Cahaba lilly. The proximity of Birmingham has taken a toll, but recovery efforts are underway, and the Cahaba remains popular with river and wildlife enthusiasts. *Page contains embedded quicktime
posted on Sep 7, 2006 - View this thread

A collection of bird skeletons (with 3d rotating skeleton goodness). The site also has tips on cleaning your own, and identifying those you might, uh, stumble across. Comparative pictures and anatomy of orangutan, chimp, marmoset, and lemur skeletons. Will's Skull Site, with close to 100 skulls and details (Cougar!). The California Academy of Sciences site on skulls, including this cool animal-to-skull match tool. Skeleton specimen tutorials from the Vetrinary Museum. The Human Osteology pages. A x-ray anatomy of the human skeleton. The Human Skull module at CalState Chico. And, you know, dragon physiology. And previously, the skeletal systems of cartoon characters.
posted on Mar 29, 2006 - View this thread

Owls are rad. Sometimes they look kind of metallic and scary, sometimes wise, sometimes puzzled, and sometimes like skulls, (Index); sometimes they sound like dogs or pigs, sometimes they sound like a little train, sometimes they sound alarmed, (Index of MP3s); sometimes you come across an extensive gallery of Central and North American owls with pictures, ranges, video, and even a description of the '04-'05 Northern Owl Invasion; sometimes it's a dynamic range map of Owls of the Western Hemisphere; sometimes it's the OwlCam homepage with downloadable owl movies, sometimes it's a series of articles on all things owl; sometimes at BiologyBase it's a printable owl sighting lifelist, sometimes it's Ruru, the morepork, New Zealand's native owl at NZBirds. Or, w0t! w0t!, it's attracting barn owls and building nest boxes at World Owl Trust. Previous MeFi birding FPP.
posted on Mar 28, 2006 - View this thread

Romantic Natural History: "A website designed to survey relationships between literary works and natural history in the century before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)." Including links to various natural historians from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, illustrations and illustrators, literary figures in Romanticism, and, of course, much more.
posted on Mar 6, 2006 - View this thread

Carl Buell, natural history illustrator, has started a blog. Interview with the man here.
posted on Dec 9, 2005 - View this thread

The orchid scrapbooks of John Day. Over the course of 40 years, John Day participated in the popular Victorian pursuit of orchid collection. He collected his stunning paintings of the plants into 53 scrapbooks, a selection of which is available online at the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. [via the remarkable BibliOdyssey]
posted on Nov 30, 2005 - View this thread

Electronic Biologia Centrali-Americana is a collaboration between the Smithsonian, Missouri Botanical and Kew Gardens, the British Natural History Museum and various other institutions which has enabled the digitizing of 58 volumes of natural history about central America produced between 1880 and 1920. It includes descriptions of more than 50,000 species with images of more than 18,000 birds, more birds, snakes, turtles, centipedes, spiders, more spiders, plants, mollusks, more plants, butterflies, orthoptera insects, more butterflies and their family's (moth-like) families, mammals and even some historic maps of the region. There is a parallel project attempting to provide access to much more scientific data and specimens between these institutions. Note: 'next' button at top +/- bottom of these large thumb pages; large high resolution jpegs work (in most cases) but zoom and .pdfiles are not yet enabled. I've only just scratched the surface.
posted on Sep 26, 2005 - View this thread

"A natural history of birds. Most of which have not been figur'd or describ'd, and others very little known from obscure or too brief descriptions without figures, or from figures very ill design'd." [1743] and "Birds of North America" [1903] Samples (the last 15 from each link): [1743]: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [1903]: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [MI]
posted on Sep 10, 2005 - View this thread

New York's Natural History Museum Pioneers Use of Internet2 "Sebastien Lepine, a post-doctoral fellow at the museum, had figured that it would take him a year, using the commercial Internet, to finish downloading two 360-degree digital sky surveys for his study of fast-moving stars. But that was before the museum connected to Abilene." This indication of how the "commmercial Internet" has become so clogged with crap annoys me intensely. Particularly when the article points out just a few of the research projects that need high bandwidth.
posted on Apr 17, 2002 - View this thread