Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘paleontology’

The Beauty of Scientific Illustration

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2016| 2 Comments »

I’m turning to Maria Popova again as she reviews a book on classic scientific illustrations for her blog.

“Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library … [spans] five centuries of anthropology, astronomy, earth science, paleontology, and zoology representing all seven continents. Each highlighted work is accompanied by a short essay exploring its significance, what makes it rare — scarcity, uniqueness, age, binding type, size, value, or nature of the illustrations — and its place in natural history. …

“What makes many of these illustrations particularly fascinating is that they represent a brief slice of history in the evolution of visual representation — after the advent of photography in the early 20th century, many of these lavish artistic illustrations were supplanted by photographic images, which shifted science to a much more aesthetically sterile approach to describing and depicting species.

“They’re also a heartening and enduring example of the magic that lies at the intersection of art and science as scientists not only sought out the best artists to illustrate their articles, but also versed themselves in drawing and produced exquisite artworks of their own.”

More at Brain Pickings. Hippos, crabs, owls, whales, monkeys, frogs, trilobites!

Illustration: Louis Renard (1678-1746)
Although there are coloration and anatomical errors in these drawings, all the specimens can be identified to genus, and some even to species. 

Read Full Post »

Canada: Where Camels Roamed

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Signs of a prehistoric camel have been found in the frozen north.

John rode a camel in Egypt a year ago, and my grandson still talks about it, but the camel found in Canada would have looked a little different. (Wikipedia has an image, here.)

Ian Austen writes at the NY Times, “A group of scientists reported on Tuesday that they had found fossilized remains of a giant camel, with a shoulder height of perhaps nine feet, in Canada’s frigid high Arctic.

” ‘It’s a surprise when you first hear it,’ said Natalia Rybczynski, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, who discovered the bone fragments in 2006. ‘But the Arctic in the winter was like a desert at that time.’ …

“The remains were found about 750 miles north of what was previously the northernmost known camel fossil, a giant found in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1913.

“It’s just kind of stunning that it’s more than 1,000 kilometers away,” said Dr. Rybczynski, the lead author of a paper about the camel published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

“She had accompanied a group of scientists to Ellesmere Island, which is in the Nunavut territory, who were studying the climate history of the region. At the time when the oversized camel lived, about 3.5 million years ago, the island was considerably warmer and covered by boreal forest. Still, it had unusually severe winters that lasted about six months, Dr. Rybczynski said.”

More.

Gate_sea_Aug08

Read Full Post »