To continue with another biological birthday, today would have been Ernst Haeckel’s 182nd celebration. Haeckel is undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential illustrators in the history of biology, and produced beautiful images for many zoological and botanical works of great importance including ‘The Art Forms of Nature’. This drawing, of the Peromedusae (jellyfish) demonstrates…
Tag: drawings
#fossilfriday: Early sketch of a plesiosaur by discoverer Mary Anning
This drawing shows one of the first plesiosaur (long-necked marine reptile) skeletons found by Mary Anning in the winter of 1823-4. Anning, an English woman living on the south coast in Dorset, was one of the most important fossil collectors in scientific history and, with her family, discovered the remains of many new species, including…
Happy #DarwinDay! Celebrating Charles’s 207th birthday with his favourite barnacles
These bright and beautiful barnacle illustrations are from a monograph of Darwin’s from 1851, Living Cirripedia. Barnacles, along with fancy pigeons, were an extremely important group to Darwin’s work, and he spent eight years studying them in minute detail and reclassifying the entire group. His studies, which interrupted to some extent his writing of On the Origin of…
Anatomy To You 