Explorer Naturalists 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Book Review/Science in the Media Explorer Naturalists Fernando E.Vega stripped of their historical signi?cance, specimens, including a 35-million- year-old fossil butter?y; the largest insect wing on record, belonging to a dragon?y-like creature collected in Oklahoma and having a wing span of 2.5 feet; and an unbelievable gynandromorphic morpho butter?y, with the wing colors and size of a male on one side, and those of a female on the other. Pick also presents cases of murder and fraud, including the famous case of John W. Webster, a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard Medical College, who murdered George Parkman. The tale involves Webster’s mineral collection and the purchase of a mastodon for the museum. Bearing witness to fraud in science is a painting by John James Audubon in the museum collection. In trying to prove he had depicted the common grouse (Bonasa umbellus) before his competitor, Alexander Wilson (known as the father of American ornithology), Audubon dated his chalk and watercolor some of Pick’s choices may seem, at ?rst glance, somewhat pedestrian. It is not until we read her description of the specimen of a common sand dollar, that we learn it was collected by Charles Darwin in 1834 during his journeys as a naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin sent the specimen to an echinoid specialist in Switzerland named Louis Agassiz, who later moved to Harvard and obtained funding for the Museum of Natural History, which opened in 1859. A contemporary of Agassiz at Harvard was the famous botanist Asa Gray, who, in contrast to Agassiz, was a strong believer in evolution. One of the items in the collection is an 1857 letter from Darwin to Gray (a photograph of the letter is shown in the book) describing his thoughts on natural selection, two years before The Origin of Species was published. Another specimen that’s uninteresting until we know its provenance is a turtle that Harvard College graduate Henry David Thoreau sent to