Happy Birthday, Conrad Gesner! Celebrate #GesnerDay with a look at illustrations from Historiae animalium.
Happy first day of Spring! Spring officially began in the northern hemisphere this morning at 6:29 a.m. EDT. The Sun was then directly above a point on the equator at longitude 24° 52' East in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 500 miles west of Lake Victoria.
Explore the Museum's Digital Special Collections for #ThrowbackThursday. English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse advocated studying living organisms in their natural habitats. He spent eight years observing marine communities on the British coastline, and also in aquariums that he constructed at home. Gosse is famous for coining the term “aquarium.” His handbook on how to make and maintain aquariums set off a Victorian craze for collecting and keeping live marine organisms at home. Gosse recommended the ancient wrasse as a species hardy enough for amateur aquariums. Its natural behavior is to lurk under rock ledges, as pictured here.
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Happy birthday to Ernst Haeckel! The German artist, zoologist, and evolutionist was born on this day in 1834.
A prolific writer and talented artist, Haeckel became one of the most forceful and outspoken advocate for evolutionary ideas in continental Europe. He was also a great popularizer of science, and Haeckel’s lectures and his books—which at the time sold many more copies in many more languages than did Charles Darwin’s own—played a critical role in promoting evolutionary thought to a wide European audience.
While on a trip in Messina, Sicily, Haeckel first encountered huge aggregations of the marine microorganisms known as radiolarians. Viewed under a microscope, their glassy (silica) skeletons revealed unimaginably intricate, often perfectly symmetrical geometric forms. For Haeckel, who was struggling to reconcile his idealist romanticist beliefs with the seeming reductionism of modern biology, these extraordinarily beautiful creatures provided a way to resolve the conflict. Study of their endless forms provided an outlet for his artistic talents while revealing to him nature’s inner mysteries.
See more of Ernst Haeckel’s work in the exhibition, Opulent Oceans: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History, now on view at the Museum.
Earlier this year we partnered with Instagram for an #eatdrawgram event highlighting the amazing models in Dinosaurs Among Us. Check out some of the work produced by artists at the event, and don’t miss your chance to see the exhibition before it closes on January 2.
Some 10,000 species of copepods—tiny crustaceans related to crabs and lobsters—thrive in the world’s oceans. A vital link in the ocean food web, they eat bacteria and algae, and in turn are eaten by other invertebrates, fish and even whales. But until the late 1800s scientists knew little about them.
Create your own work of art during a painting course at the Museum. Register today to learn about the history and craftsmanship behind world-class dioramas. Register today!
About 1,000 species of brightly colored nemertean worms—also called ribbon worms—inhabit the world’s oceans. One specimen reached an extraordinary length of about 177 feet (54 meters). But most are less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) long. Most nemertean (ribbon) worms are active predators. Some emit sticky toxic secretions to immobilize prey, which includes annelid (segmented) worms, mollusks, crustaceans—and other nemerteans. German zoologist Otto Bürger researched nemertean worms at a famous marine zoological station located on the waterfront in Naples, Italy. In the late 1800s, new marine laboratories in many countries opened opportunities for scientists to study ocean life at the shore. This illustration comes from his 1895 Die Nemertinen des Golfes von Neapel und der Angrenzenden Meeres-Abschnitte.
Cuttlefish have an internal, gas-filled bony structure—a cuttlebone—that they use to control buoyancy. French naturalists Quoy and Gaimard collected these specimens near the Cape of Good Hope, as their ship rounded the southern tip of Africa. See more in the Museum’s Digital Special Collections.
The long spines of a blue-spotted fire urchin are sharp—but the short ones pack a painful sting. William de Alwis (1842-1916), a Sinhalese artist and native of Ceylon, illustrated this specimen for the 1887-1893 tome Ergebnisse naturwissenschaftlicher Forschungen auf Ceylon.
A #TBT look into the archives: English naturalist Mark Catesby set out in 1722 to explore colonial America’s Carolina and Georgia lowlands, as well as Florida and the Bahamas. To find his way through this virtually unknown wilderness, Catesby turned to Native peoples as guides.
Catesby’s book was among the first to illustrate North America’s natural wonders. In the Bahamas, the migration of land crabs to the sea, to breed and lay their eggs, particularly impressed him: “the Earth seems to move as they crawl about,” he wrote.
Catesby illustrated this Bahamian land crab holding a branch of a native shrub—whose fruit it eats—in its claws. It eats the fruits of this plant. These crabs live most of their adult life on land, returning to the sea only to breed
This mural was painted by the great illustrator of birds, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, who visited this colony of about 2000 pairs of flamingos with Dr. Frank M. Chapman in 1904. The colony pictured here was situated on Andros Island in the Bahamas. See more in the Digital Special Collections.
In his short but extraordinary life, Frenchman Pierre Belon was a physician, a naturalist and an explorer. From 1546 to 1549 he voyaged across Greece, Turkey and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In Belon’s time, the term “fishes” included all marine animals, from whales to invertebrates. His book described more than 100 fishes, sharks and marine mammals. He wrote other volumes, based on his travels, about medicinal cures, ancient ruins, and animals and plants, as well as peoples and customs. Before Belon, dolphins and whales often had been represented as fantastical sea monsters. Unlike many writers of his time, Belon relied mostly on his own observations. See more in Opulent Oceans.
The Portuguese man o’ war delivers a powerful sting to its prey—and sometimes to people—through venom-filled structures on its tentacles. It is not a jellyfish, but rather a colony of different types of zooids (small animals). Jean Louis Coutant engraved the plate for this illustration.
A new marine research laboratory on Monterey Bay in California gave Frank Mace MacFarland the ideal setting to begin, in 1892, his lifelong study of sea slugs (nudibranchs). MacFarland became a world expert on nudibranchs—colorful mollusks that have no protective outer shell, and include some 3,000 species. MacFarland’s wife, Olive Hornbrook MacFarland, worked alongside him and painted the watercolors that illustrate his publications. Many sea slugs warn away predators with striking patterns and colors that advertise their powerful chemical defenses. Some species produce their own toxins, including sulphuric acid. Others store poisons taken from prey such as toxic algae.
The world’s oceans abound with a truly astonishing diversity of life forms. Beginning some 400 years ago, European voyages of discovery began mapping the globe, and knowledge of ocean life flourished as never before. These explorers documented their discoveries in illustrated books. Learn more in Opulent Oceans: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History.
German biologist Ernst Haeckel illustrated and described thousands of deep-sea specimens collected during the 1873-1876 H.M.S. Challenger expedition. Haeckel used a microscope to capture the intricate structure of these radiolarians—single-celled marine organisms with glassy (silica) skeletons—for his 1879 work Report on the Radiolaria collected by H.M.S. Challenger. See this 45 other exquisite reproductions from 33 rare and beautifully illustrated scientific works in the exhibition, Opulent Oceans: Extraordinary Scientific Illustrations from the Museum’s Library, now open.