Treasures Of The Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum, London is home to one of the world's most important collections of natural history specimens, literature and artworks. This book showcases treasures, selected both from objects on display and those stored behind the scenes. Each one is chosen for its scientific importance, striking beauty or intriguing story - and sometimes all three. Among the many exceptional natural wonders featured are: a rare meteorite from Mars; Darwin's celebrated finch specimens; a lethal claw from the dinosaur Baryonyx; one of the first forms of life on Earth; and some immaculately dressed fleas. The book also includes many architectural treasures from the magnificent Museum building itself. With intriguing stories behind each entry, this is a fascinating insight into the Museum's unrivalled collections.

"The Natural History Museum, London, is home to one of the largest and most important natural history collections in the world. [This] is a celebration of some of these exceptional natural history objects including world-famous specimens and little known curiosities, together with a selection of architectural treasures of the immense 200-year-old building itself. The treasures are selected both from objects on display and those stored behind the scenes ... They have all been chosen for a variety of reasons - scientific importance, striking beauty or sometimes simply because they have an interesting story to tell"--Introdcution.

Since its foundation in 1860, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History's world-renowned collections have become a key centre for scientific study and its much-loved building an important icon for visitors from around the world.The museum now holds over seven million scientific specimens including five million insects, half a million fossil specimens and half a million zoological specimens. It also holds an extensive collection of archival material relating to important naturalists such as Charles Darwin, William Smith, William Jones and James Charles Dale. This lavishly illustrated book features highlights from the collections ranging from the iconic Dodo (the only soft tissue specimen of the species in existence) and the giant tuna (brought back from Madeira on a perilous sea crossing in 1846) to crabs collected by Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle, David Livingstone's tsetse fly specimens and Mary Anning's ichthyosaur. Also featured are the first described dinosaur bones, found in a small Oxfordshire village, the Red Lady of Paviland (who was in fact a man who lived 29,000 years ago) and a meteorite from the planet Mars.Each item tells a unique story about natural history, about the history of science, about collecting, or about the museum itself. They give a unique insight into the extraordinary wealth of information and the fascinating tales that can be gleaned from these collections, both from the past and for the future.

This edition has 65 new images, making a total of 500. The original configurations were altered so that there is only one species per plate. The text is a revision of the Ornithological Biography, rearranged according to Audubon's Synopsis of the Birds of North America (1839).

Highlights 40 masterworks of illustrated scientific art from the Rare Book Collection of the American Museum of Natural History.

An insider's guide to the natural treasures of New Zealand's national museum. Since the Colonial Museum opened in 1865 and the first director, Sir James Hector, began collecting items of geological and natural history significance, the collections of New Zealand's national museum have become enormously significant--not to mention enormous. The objects housed by the Museum range from fossilized bones of the extinct Haast's Eagle and specimens collected by Joseph Banks on Cook's first voyage to deep sea-dwelling fishes and a plethora of insects. In this fascinating book Te Papa's science team of experts showcase 100 collection objects that demonstrate the breadth and depth of the collection and the museum's important ongoing research. Te Papa's expert curators and collections managers tell the fascinating stories of everything from the colossal squid to the flaming flagfins and from sea spiders to beaver fleas.

This edition does not include illustrations. ‘Dry Store Room No. 1’ is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination.

Created in partnership with the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History, this beautiful, informative card deck captures, in pictures and words, 100 of the museum's most important artifacts, specimens, and exhibits—from a fossilized dinosaur's nest to the largest blue star sapphire in the world (563 carats!). The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is one of the world's preeminent natural history museums and research institutions. Its collections contain more than 32 million specimens of plants, humans, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and cultural artifacts. Now, for the first time, this acclaimed collection is represented in a stunning and informative card deck featuring 100 treasures, hand-selected by the museum's curators, that encompass the most fascinating, iconic, and wide-ranging of the museum's artifacts. The card deck covers each of the museum's major areas of exhibition, including Birds, Reptiles, and Amphibians; Earth and Planetary Science; Fossils; Human Origins and Culture; Mammals; Biodiversity and the Environmental; and the Hayden Planetarium. Some of the 100 objects include the Cape York Meteorite, discovered in Greenland in 1894; the Haida Canoe, built in 1878 by the Indians of the Pacific Northwest and carved from the trunk of a large cedar tree; the Blue Whale, a fiberglass replica of a 94-foot whale caught in 1925 off South George Island and the Warren Mastodon skeleton, the first complete mastodon skeleton discovered in the United States. Each card presents a full-frame photograph of the object on the front and a 200-word description on the back that tells of the origin and age of the object and its scientific and historic significance.