“This image, Chip Clark’s most requested photo, shows Roxie Laybourne, Smithsonian research associate, in front, with Birds Division collections staff members Beth Ann Sabo, James Dean, Bonnie Farmer, and Dawn Arculus, in 1992. The Museum holds the largest collection of vertebrate specimens in the world, with over 5.8 million specimens representing fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution” (more)

About Chip Clark:

“Chip Clark came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1973, with a degree in biology and an interest in photography. He has been a photographer on staff ever since, documenting thousands of specimens and exhibits, and accompanying scientists on research trips around the world. He has photographed everything from dinosaurs and mummies to diamonds, butterflies, and, of course, his fellow staff members. In the field he has photographed in caves in Jamaica, the rainforest in Peru, the coral reefs in Belize, and on the ocean floor in a deep-sea submersible off the Bahamas. He thrives on the challenges of photographing the natural world in its environment, no matter what the conditions.” (“Chip Clark: Museum Photographer for More Than Thirty-Five Years”)

A Journey Round My Skull: #21, Russian elementary school textbook on The Miracle of Life, 1992

Read an excerpt from the book (in French). Buy the book online. Check out David’s blog 10 Secondes Tigre.

“Beastness” is the contraction of “fitness” (in a biological sense) and “beast”. It’s the name David Jaclin gave to the evolution of the relationship’s economy (“business”) bonding humans and animals since the dawn of time to the present day.

More of Gauld’s illustrations on Skandalon

Jessica Palmer from the Bioephemera blog has this comment about the concept of the campaign : “Of particular interest I think is this comment on the thread at fubiz, from kmaz: “Music, and overall classical music, plays on emotion, not on the nervous system. instead of putting the music emotion above all, it takes it down heavily and awkwardly, to tie it with simple physic reactions.” Really? “Plays on emotion, not on the nervous system”? Pardon me, but to a neurobiologist, that dichotomy is nonsensical. Our emotions and our nervous systems are inextricably entwined. Further, the complex physics and biology that make our emotional response to music possible only make the power of music and art more amazing, not less. Kudos to the Zurich orchestra for appreciating that.”

“The recent decoding of the cow genome follows in a series of cracked genomes. We now hold a growing number of keys to the complicated nucleotide patterns that make up life on Earth. Here are some of the most significant. Mouse over the illustrations to learn more about each project.”

“Dustin Yellin (born Los Angeles, July 22, 1975) is a contemporary artist living in New York. His artworks are based on a unique process of painting 3d forms in resin. Common subjects in his artworks are biological imagery. While historic artists like Leopold Blaschka and Ernst Haeckel have used their techniques to represent real biological forms, Dustin Yellin’s artworks exist as permutations of natural life and form. His paintings use a method to represent 3d forms that is reminiscent of both lenticular images and rapid prototyping. The technique approximates a static volumetric display and is autostereoscopic as his artworks appear three dimensional without the use of special glasses or viewing equipment.” (Wikipedia)

BibliOdyssey comments : “Some wonderful lithography work […] from plates in the 1857 Julius Victor Carus book on invertebrate animals: Icones Zootomicae, die Wirbellosen Thiere, available as always in enormous page images from the excellent Universities of Strasbourg Digital Library collection.”