Digitized Central American Biological History

September 26, 2005 11:54 AM

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 by peacay (9 comments total)

posted by peacay at 11:59 AM on September 26, 2005

If you're interested in caterpillars, check out Dr. Dan Janzen's Costa Rican caterpillar, butterfly and moth database. Tens of thousands of records, each with hi-rez, high-quality mounts and live pictures in various life cycle stages. You can browse for hours...
posted by Rothko at 12:08 PM on September 26, 2005

Another excellent post peacay. I particularly like the passel of snakes plates, which manage to look both sexy and menacing at the same time.

(I also like how the pictures seem to load: very quickly in outline and then through a series of refining sharpenings. How do they do that?)
posted by OmieWise at 1:36 PM on September 26, 2005

Peacay, you always have the prettiest, most excellent posts. Thanks!
posted by WaterSprite at 4:17 PM on September 26, 2005

Brilliant find as always Peacay. Bookmarked for further browsing. OmieWise, when you save a jpg your graphics program may give you the option of 'Baseline' or 'Progressive' (with a further option to select how many scans you want - in Photoshop you are offered 3-5).
posted by tellurian at 4:55 PM on September 26, 2005

Excellent post! Thank you.
posted by rawfishy at 9:28 PM on September 26, 2005

There are many beautiful images in there: I love the tapir: thanks, peacay.
posted by misteraitch at 12:51 AM on September 27, 2005

Unfortunately my computer won't load the links, I was particularly interested in the butterflies and turtles (I had a little turtle as a child). Not to worry.
posted by Chimp at 2:30 AM on September 27, 2005

tellurian-Thanks, I've always wondered how it worked (and also what those options in GraphicConverter were for).
posted by OmieWise at 5:55 AM on September 27, 2005