The Atlantic Wolffish, Anarhichas lupus, is an odd looking creature. The largest of the blennies, it can reach lengths of 5ft. or more. Its derpy expression is caused by the fang-like front teeth that protrude from the jaw. Creepy looking, but harmless to humans, they feed on mussels, crabs and other hard-shelled critters – using the anterior teeth to grasp, and the rounded molariform teeth to grind.

(c) California Academy of Sciences

This illustration of Anarhichas lupus is by Marcus Elieser Bloch, from the book Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische. Published in 1801, it was an influential work in early ichthyology. We displayed this illustration at Deep Sea Nightlife, along with a preserved specimen from the Steinhart Aquarium.

(c) 2013 Diane T Sands
gouache and pencil

What fascinated me about the wolffish was the huge contrast between the blue-grey, striped loner who eats shellfish, and the monstrous looking skull. It was the process of discovering this contrast that I chose to illustrate in the above study.

Today marked our semi-annual page turning of the Audubon Double-Elephant portfolio on display in the library reading room. Cameras were on hand to record this momentous occasion.

You may have noticed that we are not wearing gloves during this procedure.  While we use white cotton gloves for handling photographs and negatives, cotton can snag, tear, or abrade fragile paper, and the looseness of the gloves makes it difficult to get a secure grip on the text block.  However, we thoroughly wash all surfaces (including our hands!) before beginning.  If you would like more information, feel free to read “Misconceptions about White Gloves” from the December 2005 International Federation of Library Associations Newsletter (http://archive.ifla.org/VI/4/news/ipnn37.pdf) or email the library and we’ll put you in touch with our rare books librarian (library [at] calacademy [dot] org) who will happily explain the handling policies for rare book materials.

For all of his prowess as an artist and fundraiser, Audubon had his faults. Reading through his writings it is clear to me that he either trusted people not at all, or far too much. The Pirpiry Flycatcher plate is one good example of this. In his description of obtaining specimens (Ornithological biography, v.2.), Audubon mentions that the son of a friend told him this species were nesting in the College Yard in South Carolina, which he ignored completely, only to admit later they were noted to return every year for three years hence. In the same entry, he states he was told that the plant on which he depicted the bird was abundant in Cuba, so he believed it appropriate as a background. It may exist in Cuba and the Keyes, but it is native from Malaysia to North Australia.

“Gray Tyrant” by John James Audubon. Birds of America: From Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories (Octavo Ed. 1870). California Academy of Sciences Library, Rare Books QL674 .A9 1870.

As new research is added and collected accounts synthesized, plants and animals change names. The species depicted in this plate not only have several common names, but their genus names have shifted as well.

Pirpiry Flycatcher/ Gray Tyrant/ Pitirre/ Gray Kingbird

Muscicapa dominicensis/ Tyrannus dominicensis

Hummingbird Tree/ Scarlet Wisteria/ Agati/ Bokful/ Heron Flower

Agati grandiflora/ Aeschynomene grandiflora/ Sesbania grandiflora

Our Double-Elephant Folio was the gift of Edward E. and Florence Hopkins Hills of San Francisco. The set survived the 1906 earthquake and fire in the hands of the San Francisco Art Association, who sold the work to Hills in 1941.  The work came to the Academy in 1964.

This month’s Illustration Smackdown takes a look at the chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes.  One of the great apes, chimpanzees are, as these things go, closely related to humans. But how close? You can see the current classification chart here, courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Life.

(c) California Academy of Sciences

(c) California Academy of Sciences

(c) California Academy of Sciences

In the 1980s the Jane Goodall Institute “moved to the San Francisco offices of the California Academy of Sciences, where it functioned essentially as a USA/Africa “communication link” and as a repository for files.” (source) and Ms. Goodall continued to have a relationship with the academy after the JGI moved to DC.  She came to the Academy in 2008 to lecture and  promote her pioneering work in primatology. The above images are attributed to Jane Goodall and Hugo VanLanwick

(c) Diane T Sands. carbon dust on Ross board

Comparative anatomy is the study of the difference and similarities of different organisms. I will admit to having a fondness for comparing bones. There is something about placing the same bone from different species next to each other that I find both instructive and aesthetically pleasing. To this end, I created the above image with Pan troglodytes on the left and Homo sapiens on the right. The obvious differences in teeth point to differences in diet and acquisition of food. While both are omnivores, the chimpanzees large canines speak to the ripping and tearing of meat, while humans reduced canines likely came about from years of cutting bite sized portions via tool use. Also evident is the difference in size of the brain case. The human cerebrum is much larger than that of the chimpanzee. The extensive development of this cortex in humans is believed to distinguish the human brain from those of other animals

Last month I wrote about Leverett Mills Loomis, the two Guadalupe Storm Petrels, and the other items he rescued from the fire that destroyed the California Academy of Sciences in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. I discussed our fine copy of Marc Athanse Parfait Oeillet Des Murs’ Iconographie Ornithologique, which I have referenced multiple times over the years without realizing that Loomis had saved it. If you’d like to view a complete copy of this beautiful work online, visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library to see the Smithsonian’s copy.

I promised to return and discuss the part of Loomis’ letter of May 7, 1906 reading:

As I wanted to be the first donor to the Academy’s new ornithological library, I put Brown’s illustrations under my arm as I passed the store-room.

 This read to me as if Loomis was in possession of some of Captain Thomas Brown’s hand colored engravings, originally issued in 1835 as Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte, Prince of Musignano… The work was intended to serve as the illustrated atlas accompanying the original European edition of Alexander Wilson’s groundbreaking American Ornithology, first issued in Philadelphia between 1808 and 1814.

I found this shocking to say the least. I had never seen a copy of Brown’s Illustrations in the Library, and I only 12 copies are listed in OCLC WorldCat. It is a beautiful work, considered one of the rarest illustrated ornithologies, issued in Royal Folio (20 inches tall) with vividly colored plates.

(Left: Plate 16 “Carolina Parrot,” Yellow-billed Cuckoo,” and “Black-billed Cuckoo.” Right: Unnumbered plate “Honduras Turkey.” Both from Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte.)

None of the records I examined gave any clue as to what Loomis had done with “Brown’s Illustrations.” Remembering that the Rare Book collections were once upon a time cataloged differently than (and housed separately from) the rest of the Library, I decided to scan the shelves to see if anything seemed to fit the bill.

Scanning the oversize shelves in the range of QL674 – QL682 (the classification of the other Wilson volumes), I figured I might find a manila folder with a few loose plates, or something similar. Imagine my surprise at finding what appeared to be a large, complete folio volume, with a call number on a tag (made on a typewriter) but with no barcode or other label. A bookplate on the pastedown reads “Presented by Leverett Mills Loomis April 18, 1906.” It seems unlikely that Loomis would make a gift to the Library while the City was engulfed in flames, so I’m going to wager that this bookplate was created long after the book was rescued.

When I opened the volume, I discovered an inscription (in Latin) apparently written by Behr, gifting this book to Loomis in July of 1900 or 1901.

(Inscription from H.H. Behr to Leverett Mills Loomis, from Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte.)

The first plate in the book also boasts the inscription “Property of H. H. Behr” faintly in the upper right.

(Plate 1 “California Vulture” From Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte.)

Dr. Behr served as Vice President of the California Academy of Sciences and was an accomplished physician, collector of butterflies, and Curator of Entomology, as well as a speaker and scholar of at least six languages. He passed away in 1904 at the age of 85, and was lovingly eulogized by his Academy colleagues.

It would seem these are the illustrations Loomis saved in 1906; however, I have found no record of when this book came to the Academy Library. It was possibly transferred after Loomis’ death in 1928, or at some point when the Ornithology department merged their library with the Main collection. Regardless, we will soon finish cataloging the book, making 13 OCLC libraries with a copy of Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte by Captain Thomas Brown.

Becky Morin
Head Librarian

For those of you able to stop by the Library Reading Room, there is a newly installed exhibit featuring BATS!

Nearly 20% of all mammals are bats. There are roughly 1,240 bat species worldwide. The order Chiroptera (from the Greek, meaning “hand-wing”) is broken into two subclasses. The megachiroptera are large, primarily fruit-eating bats that rely on sight and smell to locate their food. The microchiroptera feed on insects, which they locate via echolocation.

bats from Buffon’s Natural History, 1797, courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

I saw this image on the  Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr stream . It is from Buffon’s Natural history, containing a theory of the earth, a general history of man, of the brute creation, and of vegetables, minerals, &c. &c. From the French, with notes by the translator.  London:1797-1807. And honestly, at first I thought they were some weird sheep, or blocky, ungulate-sized mice. What else for a scientific illustrator to do, but create an improved image?

(c) Diane T Sands 2013, pastel on paper

The three bats presented in the Buffon image done here in pastel, from top to bottom:

• Greater Bulldog bat, Nolctilio nigrita

• Ternat or Greater Yellow House bat, Pteropus vulgaris

• Senegal bat, Vespertilio nigrita

The bat exhibit will be on display in the Library Reading Room through the end of 2013.

In 1949, the California Academy of Sciences furthered its longstanding mission to engage and educate the public in the sciences by expanding to the media of television. With generous underwriting from the American Trust Company (now Wells Fargo Bank) the California Academy of Sciences was able to produce Science in Action, a half hour science program which consisted of  twenty-two and a half minutes of programming on a specific scientific topic, presented by the Academy’s then curator of the Steinhart Aquarium Earl Herald in tandem with a foremost expert on the show’s subject. Over its sixteen year run, the show included interviews with several Nobel Laureates, including Harold Urey, Linus Pauling, Glenn T Seaborg, and Wendell M Stanley, all recipients of the Nobel Prize for chemistry who spoke on topics ranging from the Earth’s origins (Episode 107) to Cancer research (Episode 191). Science in Action also featured great innovators of American craft and design like Buckminster Fuller and Charles Eames.

Episode #355, “Earth’s Radiation Belts,” explored the methods used by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to determine the intensity and effects of Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth.  This particular episode aired in 1959 – two years after Soviet dog Laika became the first animal in orbit, two years before Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed the first successful human spaceflight, and three years before astronaut John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 around the Earth.  In 1959, the question voiced by host Earl Herald was one of the key scientific mysteries at the start of the Space Race: “What [are these radiation belts] going to mean for the first person to take off from the earth as a space traveler?”

Herald interviewed three researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then known as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley). Dr. R. Stephen White (Leader of the Nuclear Effects Group), Dr. Stanley Freden (Senior Staff Physicist), and Mr. Albert Oliver (Head of Processing Department), explained LLNL’s  method of radiation testing in the Van Allen belts: mounting an emulsion stack on a rocket, which was then launched into the region of the radiation belts using a rockoon (a rocket suspended from a high-altitude balloon), recovered upon returning to Earth, and processed to test for radiation intensity.

In Dr. Herald’s own words: “Compared to the excitement surrounding the man/satellite program, this little box [the emulsion stack] may not seem like much.  But when you stop and think of the fantastic amount of vital information that has been derived from it, and what this information will mean to the safety of future space travel, and a better understanding of the mysterious forces which surround the earth, then this little box takes on quite a different meaning.” The subject interview was  followed by a three minute “animal of the week” segment featuring Academy Herpetologist Ted Papenfuss and a series of rattlesnakes he collected from Southern Arizona and New Mexico.

As the first science television show on the west coast, Science in Action quickly made a name for itself as the finest in family programming with praise and support pouring in from both the media and viewers. The media regaled the show as one which “far exceeds anything else in the field of educational and science television.”[i]  Fan mail from children, parents, and educators indicated that the show was regarded with great affection. In 1951, Science in Action’s ratings indicated that the show tied for second place in children’s programming alongside Howdy Doody and trailing only slightly behind Hopalong Cassidy and hedging out the Lone Ranger! Additionally, Science in Action went on to win five Emmy Awards for Best Cultural and Educational Program (1951 and 1952), Best Live Show (1952), Special Achievement Award (1954), and the Excellence in Education Award (1955). The show also received a host of local and national awards for excellence.

Special thanks to Jim Oliver for generously providing the funding to transfer this classic from 16mm film to preservation-quality digital video.  We salute you!

For more information about Science in Action, visit http://research.calacademy.org/library/collections/archives/SIAtelevision and feel free to drop us a line.

- Heather Yager and Yolanda Bustos
Archives and Digital Collections

The Library’s Reading Room exhibit created by former, CIS intern Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski focuses on the Ecuadorian rainforest - the history of Western exploration of the region, and current issues facing the area’s immense biodiversity. She recently sent me an update to the continuing issues of oil exploitation. ” Thought I’d pass along this article I just read about Ecuador’s plans for the rainforest. It contains bad news, very bad news.”

Read the article(s) for yourself here:

Ecuador To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies

Ecuador auctions off Amazon to Chinese oil firms

Ecuador Extends to July 16 Deadline for Bids on 11th Oil-Licensing Round

To read more about what you can do to help preserve the Amazon Rainforest, click here.

The Remora remora, or common suckerfish, is an odd pelagic marine fish usually found in warmer parts of most oceans. They can be found offshore from San Francisco south to Chile. Their front dorsal fin has evolved into a giant sucker disc that they use to hitch rides on faster swimming sharks, rays, sea turtles, bony fishes and even marine mammals. Once thought to be purely parasitic, the relationship to their “host” is now considered to be symbiotic.

Not eaten themselves, they have been used by fishermen who attach a line to the Remora‘s tail, letting it free to swim. The tethered Remora then attaches it’s sucker disc to a larger fish as they are wont to do. At this point when it is noted that the Remora is accelerating,  the fisherman then reels it back in and captures the larger fish.

(c) Diane T Sands 2013.
carbon dust on illustration board.

(c) California Academy of Sciences.

In 1905, the California Academy of Sciences sent 11 men off for a year and a day on an eighty-five foot schooner destined for the Galapagos Islands. While the expedition was underway, the California Academy of Sciences would fall into ruin during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The specimens gathered during that expedition would come to form the crux of the new California Academy of Sciences’ collections. Of the young men on that voyage, entomologist Francis Xavier Williams kept field books (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/123606) and made drawings of all of much of the wild life he encountered. This illustration of the Remora remora was one of many fish Williams ran across in his exploration of the islands.

Mora Remora!

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accounts/Remora_remora/

http://www.fishbase.org/summary/Remora-remora.html

Part One: The Einstein Letter

As an archivist here at the California Academy of Sciences, it is our job to preserve, organize, and make available for use the records of scientific activity and discovery. We undertake this effort in a variety of ways; from making available new and beautiful images of the natural world freely available for educational, personal, and non-profit use through the Manzanita Image Project, to digitizing field books and linking the resources to newly digitized specimens and published materials through our work on the Connecting Content Grant, to more traditional processing of our large collection of scientific records in an effort to make the material accessible to those who wish to consult it. Archival materials may include formats such as paper, photographs, film, video and audio recordings on analog or digital media, works of art, and other realia of significance to our collections. In short, you never know what you’ll find when you open a box.

I often boast that this exciting discovery is the best part of the job. As archivists, we get to be part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes (with equally zany fashion sense) and we are given the opportunity to preserve and explore the treasures of the past and allow for new connections and discoveries to be made as a result of our making the collections available. Moreover, in making these collections available, we uncover exciting items that we want to immediately share with you. With that in mind, we have decided to do a monthly (or perhaps more often if we just can’t wait) series of posts dedicated to highlighting some of the exciting new discoveries in our collections.

In our inaugural installment  we would like to share with you a recent discovery (to us) when we opened a collection known to us as “Special Collections”. The records themselves were fairly straight forward and were comprised of documents that captured the history and processes that formed the California Academy of Sciences Special Collections but as we perused the contents, a series of “Files from the Rare Book Room” brought forth unexpected treasure. A few items stood out, including the hand written account of a meeting in 1885 between Adolph Sutro, California fish commissioner Joseph D Redding in which the “Sea Lion Question” was addressed. In case you are curious, the sea lion question was essentially, “ Do the sea lions who occupy the bays and coasts near San Francisco pose a threat to the fish populations?” We also found a California land patent for a small section of Mount Diablo signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.

1872 land patent for lots on Mt. Diablo

Additionally, we found a letter signed by Albert Einstein!

Letter from the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists dated February 10, 1947.

The letter itself is a form letter asking for money to fund an educational endeavor regarding the responsible use of atomic energy after the tragedy of Hiroshima . Einstein was at the head of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists for its brief existence. The University of Chicago holds the organization’s records, and you can read more about the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists here: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.ECAS

I can only speculate that this letter came to the Academy by way of ECAS member and Nobel laureates Harold Urey and Linus Pauling, who were closely affiliated with the California Academy of Sciences and appeared on several episodes of our Academy produced television program, Science in Action.

Stay tuned for more great finds as we dig into our archives and uncover the history and intrigue of our past!

-Yolanda Bustos

Connecting Content Project Manger & Archives and Digital Collections Assistant Librarian

Happy May!

T.S. Eliot famously wrote “April is the cruelest month,” and when I look back on 160 years of the California Academy of Sciences, I am inclined to agree with that sentiment. The Library and Archives are involved in preserving and sharing the history of the Academy, and we all know quite a bit about April 18, 1906 and the massive earthquake and devastating fire that destroyed nearly all of the Academy’s collections. After the fires were extinguished, the Academy had 1497 botanical types, saved by Alice Eastwood, the original Minutes of Academy meetings, some other historical records and specimens, and two Guadalupe Storm Petrels (Oceanodroma macrodactyla).

Above, the Oceanodroma macrodactyla specimens housed in Ornithology & Mammalogy
Below, the tags on the specimens reading “Saved From The Fire”

When I have occasion to talk about Academy history (a regular occurrence), I have rarely given much thought to any books or other print matter that may have been rescued besides the Minutes and a valuable manuscript by Theodore Henry Hittell. We are grateful to have those, as they inform much of what we know about the founding and early days of the Academy. And to be honest, I never like to think very hard about all of records and literature lost in the disaster. But, I always bring up Alice Eastwood, and I always mention these two petrels, which were saved by the Academy’s Director Leverett Mills Loomis. Loomis studied this variety of seabird, and possessed excellent foresight in securing the type specimen (described by W.E. Bryant in 1887) as O. macrodactyla would cease to be seen alive in the wild after 1911. But the birds are small, and I imagine the chaotic, post-earthquake scene of Mary Hyde rescuing the heavy, unwieldy books of Academy Minutes, and Alice Eastwood, working with a friend to tie up and save nearly 1500 herbarium sheets, while Director Loomis plucks just two small birds and then…gives up?

I turned to some letters that Loomis wrote to naturalist Edward W. Nelson of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and later the U.S. Biological Survey, which are reprinted here and were also sent anonymously and published in a lightly-censored form in Science in May 1906. In one of these letters, dated May 7, 1906, Loomis writes:

“As a starter for the bird collection I selected the types of Oceanodroma macrodactyla and as the beginning of the bird library I took your favorite Des Meers. As I wanted to be the first donor to the Academy’s new ornithological library, I put Brown’s illustrations under my arm as I passed the store-room. So you see we made a beginning before the end had come.”

 So, it would seem that Loomis was not stingy with his rescue efforts, and instead managed to save both the two Guadalupe Storm Petrel specimens collected by Bryant and two books. Upon review, it became clear to me that Loomis was referencing Marc Athanse Parfait Oeillet Des Murs’ Iconographie Ornithologique, a magnificently illustrated work from the 1840s, of which the Academy Library has a beautiful copy.

Above, plate of the Scaly Ground Roller (Geobiastes squamiger) of Madagascar, from Des Murs’ Iconographie Ornithologique

When I pulled it from the book from the shelf, I noticed for the first time the notation on the bookplate, stating “SAVED.”

The reference to “Brown” proved more of a mystery, and one that I will revisit shortly in another blog entry. Stay tuned!

-Becky Morin
Head Librarian