More pictures from the Museum:
We found a Coturnix:
Enormous insects:
Linnaeus, Ernst Mayr and Charles Darwin:
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Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull.
The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in…
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have…
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with…
During my recent trip to New York I found some time to visit the American Museum of Natural History. I wanted to see their spider exhibit, you see.
Of course, step one was finding the place. Seventy-eighth and Central Park West, as I recall. Ah, this looks right:
The exhibit itself was a…
What's that impossible-looking thing? The one that looks like an insect with four compound eyes on a giant stalk coming out of its head?
It's some species of cicada. I guess entomological readers can pitch in an help with the exact Latin name.
The body looks like a cicada; the head looks vaguely familiar but maybe that was just a nightmare I had sometime.
The people to ask are here.
So......... a flash of enlightenment?
And that cicada, or whatever it is, looks like an alien invader from a 50s monster/sci fi movie. Cool!
One thing that has stuck in my mind that I learned in this museum: aardvark is an ungulate. A lovely phrase.
Ah, found it. I had snapped a picture of both the exhibit label as well as the wax effigy. That alien invader cicada was named Bocydium globulare. The function of the globes was said to be unknown; in an adult they are hollow.
This is currently one of the best museums I know in Berlin! Good for you to have had a chance to see it while you were here.
I love the pictures of the aardvark. They're such funny animals to me. I know they're anteaters and not related to either pigs or rabbits, but it's as though nature said, "Let's make a pig with rabbit ears...and a big long tail!"