EOL

Notes from William Brewster: "The Development of an Ornithologist"

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant.

In 1890, Wiliam Brewster (age 39) wrote a letter of encouragement to a younger ornithologist, Frank Michler Chapman. Both ornithologists suffered from chronic pain, and Brewster suspected that Chapman was afraid of losing enthusiasm for his work. Brewster’s gesture opened up a closer personal friendship with Chapman, who was then 26 and working at the American...

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What’s in a name? Emmett Reid Dunn and the Oedipus salamanders

When scientists describe a new animal species, they give it a name, according to rules of the ICZN, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.   Species names can honor a person or the place where the animal lives, or reflect the personality of the describer, as in the case of the beetle Gelae donut (Miller and Wheeler 2004).  Emmet Reid Dunn (1894-1956), who earned his PhD at Harvard under Thomas Barbour, expressed his sense of...

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EOL reaches "one million species pages"

Encyclopedia of Life reaches historic "one million species pages" milestone

Free online biodiversity encyclopedia meets key metric with addition of content from Smithsonian Institution

Washington, DC - May 9, 2012 - The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL; eol.org) has surged past one million pages of content with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Launched in 2007 with the support of...

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