Cows, Fox Hunting, and Mushrooms…oh my!

I guess combing the internet for digitized public domain scientific literature with lovely illustrations is my new hobby. But look what I found! The Biodiversity Heritage Library is:

a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”

So much stuff here! Easier to navigate than Botanicus.org, too (and I think everything there is also part of the collection here). They have a Flickr photostream where they’ve already pulled thousands of images out of the texts for you, and you can download individual pictures instead of the whole book. I must warn you that you can easily spend hours on there. Proceed with caution! Did everyone already know about this and not tell me?

I might need these fish for Abe’s nursery:

Or maybe this beaver for Milo and Gus’ room:

Maybe you want some fox hunting illustrations? Yeah, I think you probably do, because these are awesome.

Cows?

Eggs?

Mushrooms?

bat?

I could go on FOREVER! But you get the idea. I have big plans for a gallery wall in my dining room, and this sites figures very prominently in said plans.


Comments

Cows, Fox Hunting, and Mushrooms…oh my! — 17 Comments

  1. Oh, how I love all these old pictures…! Thanks for showing all the sources.
    I just fall madly in love with the old books, especially the dutch and german ones from your last post (In understand these languages and german’s my mother tongue) and I love the old written languages. It’s sometimes so different from what we write today but you can still understand and it really puts you in another, ancient, time.

    Love, Midsommarflicka

  2. Oh my goodness that sounds so much more accessible. This is going to be awesome for our art classes. Yes you definitely have a calling here 🙂 I have loved all the resources you have found so far. I should start compiling them so I don’t forget. These are some you can go back to over and over. Thank you!!!

    • Thanks so much! I get lots of page views from people searching for “chalk paint,” but my original chalk paint post is so unexciting I don’t think many of them stick around :). I would have painted something more fun if I’d realized how google-able that post was going to be!

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