collection expeditions

Book review – On the Organic Law of Change: A Facsimile Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Species Notebook of 1855-1859

8-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, history of science

Having just reviewed James T. Costa’s biography of Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, I was keen to read more about one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of science: how two scholars independently hit on the same idea (evolution by natural selection) and how history has largely forgotten one of them. An important piece of evidence to support this claim is one of several notebooks that Wallace kept during his journeys. In On the Organic Law of Change, Costa unlocks this little gem for a broad audience by providing a facsimile, transcription, and a mountain of annotations to place this work in its historical context. You are getting a two-for-one, as I am reviewing this book simultaneously with its companion book Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, a book I have long been meaning to read.

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Book review – Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace

10-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology, history of science

The year 2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Best remembered as the father of biogeography, and only relatively recently pulled out of Darwin’s shadow as co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, he was an all-round fascinating person. I have long wanted to read more about him. Evolutionary biologist, entomologist, and Darwin and Wallace scholar James T. Costa gives an in-depth, intimate, and updated story of his life. This first of three reviews will prepare me for a descent down the rabbit hole on how two scholars independently hit on the mechanism driving evolution.

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Book review – Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea (Second Edition)

8-minute read

The deep past harbours many events, epochs, and places that are still a mystery to me. Case in point: once upon a time, North America was cut in half by an enormous ocean. Something I was only dimly aware of. Luckily, Indiana University Press’s flagship palaeontology series Life of the Past has just the book to remedy that. I may be three years late to the party, but this 2017 book provides all the details one could ask for, and then some.

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Book review – The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries: Amazing Fossils and the People Who Found Them

6-minute read

What is better than a good dinosaur story? How about 25 of them? Geologist and palaeontologist Donald R. Prothero returns to Columbia University Press for the third book in this format. Having covered fossils and rocks, he now serves up 25 fascinating vignettes of famous dinosaurs and the people who discovered them.

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Book review – Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle

6-minute read

Having just reviewed Nieuwland’s American Dinosaur Abroad, historian Lukas Rieppel’s book Assembling the Dinosaur seemed like a logical choice to read next. Whereas the former focused on the plaster casts of a Diplodocus skeleton that American business tycoon Andrew Carnegie donated to museums, Rieppel takes in a far wider sweep of history, studying the role of dinosaurs in America’s Long Gilded Age – the period from roughly 1880 to the Great Depression in 1929. This scholarly work charts the entanglement of economic transformation, notably the rise of large corporations, with the rise of palaeontology and changes in size, scope, and management of museums. Readers with an interest in the history of palaeontology will be particularly well-served by this book.

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Book review – Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past

What is better than archaeology? How about space archaeology. More properly known as remote sensing by satellite, the use of satellite imagery has set the field or archaeology alight. And professor of anthropology Sarah Parcak is one of its most enthusiastic torch-bearers. In a book that overflows with wonder, honesty, and hope, she takes the reader on a grand tour of remote sensing, showing how it is transforming this discipline.

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Book review – The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

The tropical birds-of-Paradise have fascinated generations of naturalists, from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (who risked life and limb to collect many specimens for museum holdings) to David Attenborough, who, together with Erroll Fuller, wrote Drawn From Paradise: The Discovery, Art and Natural History of the Birds of Paradise. They were at the centre of a Victorian fashion craze for bird feathers, which decimated many colourful bird families, but they were also at the heart of a far more obscure Victorian pastime: salmon fly-tying. A resurgence in interest led a young man to break into the ornithology collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring, stuff a suitcase with 299 specimens of various rare colourful bird species, and walk out again to sell their feathers.

Wait, what?

Welcome to the story of the natural history heist of the century.

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Book review – The Lost Species: Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums

Planet Earth is home to a staggering number of species. A 2011 article in PloS Biology gave an educated guess of 8.7 million known species of eukaryotes (this is the domain of life to which all multicellular life forms – plants, insects, fungi, mammals etc. – belong, but excludes single-celled life forms such as bacteria). More staggering still is that this probably is only 10-12% of all existing species, with an estimated 86% of terrestrial species and 91% of marine species as of yet undiscovered.

So, scientists describe new species of plants and animals all the time. This much you probably know. What might come as a surprise, however, is that many of these discoveries are not made in the field, but in the massive natural history collections housed in museums around the world. In The Lost Species, Christopher Kemp takes the reader on a tour through the collections to reveal the stories behind some of these discoveries.

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