Finding the ark in the archive
Of the 7,000 just-released digitized images from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, there are several beautiful and historic illustrations of animals.
You can search online through all the images, or go straight to the Rare Book Collection to see owls, a zebra, extinct thylacines (also called Tasmanian tigers or Tasmanian wolves), platypuses, and more. You’ll find famous names such as Durer and Darwin popping up in the descriptions.
According to the Washington Post:
For over a century, the amazing photographs in the American Museum of Natural History’s vast archives were squirreled away in the fourth-floor research library of a museum in Manhattan’s upper West Side. But thanks to a large-scale digitization project begun in 2006, more than 7,000 images went online this week — and they’re just the start of an eclectic, legitimately wonder-inducing collection of 1 million photos the museum eventually wants to put online.
–Vicki Croke