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Lyme Regis
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Lyme Regis /ˌlaɪmˈriːdʒɪs/ is a coastal town in West Dorset, England, situated 25 miles west of Dorchester and 25 miles east of Exeter. The town lies in Lyme Bay, on the English Channel coast at the Dorset–Devon border and it is nicknamed The Pearl of Dorset. The town is noted for the found in the cliffs and beaches. The town was home to Admiral Sir George Somers, its one-time mayor and he founded the English colonial settlement of the Somers Isles, better known as Bermuda. Lyme Regis is twinned with St. Georges, Bermuda, in July 2015 Lyme Regis was also tripled with Jamestown, Virginia to form the Historic Atlantic Triangle between Lyme, St Georges and Jamestown. In the 2011 Census the towns parish and the ward had a population of 3,671. In Saxon times, the abbots of Sherborne Abbey had salt-boiling rights on land adjacent to the River Lym, Lyme is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. In the 13th century, it developed as one of the major British ports, a Royal Charter was granted by King Edward I in 1284 when Regis was added to the towns name. The charter was confirmed by Queen Elizabeth I in 1591, John Leland visited the town in the 16th century and described it as a praty market town set in the rootes of an high rokky hille down to the hard shore. There cummith a shalow broke from the hilles about a three miles by north, and cummith fleting on great stones through a bridge in the botom. In 1644, during the English Civil War, Parliamentarians withstood a siege of the town by Royalist forces under Prince Maurice. The Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis at start of the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, on New Years Day,1915, the H. M. S. Formidable was torpedoed, the first major U-boat loss of World War I, a local lifeboat delivered bodies to the Pilot Boat Inn on Bridge Street. Lassie, the dog of the Inns owner, licked the face of Seaman Cowan, believed dead, the namesake of the cross-breed became a legend of books, radio, film and television. In 1965, the railway station was closed, in the Beeching Axe. The station was dismantled and rebuilt at Alresford, on the Mid Hants Watercress Railway in Hampshire, the route to Lyme Regis was notable for being operated by aged Victorian locomotives. One of these Adams Radial Tank engines is now preserved on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex, West Country Class steam locomotive No.34009 was named Lyme Regis after the town. In 2005, as part of the bicentenary of Admiral Nelsons victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, the actor playing the part of Trafalgar messenger Lieutenant Lapenotiere was welcomed at Lyme Regis
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Bedford Square
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Bedford Square is a garden square in the Bloomsbury district of the Borough of Camden in London, England. The square takes its name from the title of the Russell family, the Dukes of Bedford. Bedford Square is one of the best preserved set pieces of Georgian architecture in London, numbers 1-10,11, 12–27, 28–38 and 40–54 are grade I listed buildings. Bedford College, the first place for higher education in Britain, was formerly located in Bedford Square. Nos.1 and 2, Cameron Mackintosh Limited No,3, Winston House Nos.4,5 and 6, New York Universitys London campus No. 7, London School of Business and Management Nos.8 &9, London School of Hygiene,11, Royal Holloway, University of London No. 12, ACCENT International Consortium for Academic Programs Abroad, London Study Center No,16, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art No. 18, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London No.19 New College of the Humanities No.21 FSPG Chartered Accountants No.26 SIS Digital the home of Digital out of Home No,29, London office of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus No. 30, Sothebys Institute of Art No,32,33,34,35,36,37,38 and 39, Architectural Association School of Architecture No. 47, Yale University Press, London Nos.49,50 and 51,6, Lord Eldon — Lord Chancellor No. 10, Charles Gilpin — MP No,11, John Scarlett Davis - artist, died there in 1845 Henry Cavendish — scientist No. 13, Harry Ricardo — engine designer — born here No,22, Johnston Forbes-Robertson — actor No. 26, National Council for Voluntary Organisations,1928 –1992 No,30, Jonathan Cape — publishing company No. 35, Thomas Hodgkin — physician, reformer and philanthropist No,35, Thomas Wakley — founder of The Lancet No. 41, William Butterfield — architect No,41, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins — novelist No. 44, Margot Asquith — wife of the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, before that,48, Elizabeth Jesser Reid — anti-slavery activist and founder of Bedford College for Women No. 49, Francis Walker — entomologist, before that Ram Mohan Roy — Indian scholar and reformer No
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Ornithology
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Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. The word ornithology derives from the ancient Greek ὄρνις ornis and λόγος logos, several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and the aesthetic appeal of birds. Most marked among these is the extent of studies undertaken by amateurs working within the parameters of strict scientific methodology, most modern biological theories apply across taxonomic groups and the number of professional scientists who identify themselves as ornithologists has therefore declined. A wide range of tools and techniques are used in ornithology, the origins of the word ornithology come from the Greek ornithologos and late 17th-century Latin ornithologia meaning bird science. Trends include the move from mere descriptions to the identification of patterns, Humans have had an observational relationship with birds since prehistory, with some stone age drawings being amongst the oldest indications of an interest in birds. Birds were perhaps important as a source, and bones of as many as 80 species have been found in excavations of early Stone Age settlements. Waterbird and seabird remains have also found in shell mounds on the island of Oronsay off the coast of Scotland. Cultures around the world have rich vocabularies related to birds, traditional bird names are often based on detailed knowledge of the behaviour, with many names being onomatopoeic, many still in use. Traditional knowledge may also involve the use of birds in folk medicine, hunting of wild birds as well as their domestication would have required considerable knowledge of their habits. Poultry farming and falconry were practised from early times in many parts of the world, artificial incubation of poultry was practised in China around 246 BC and around at least 400 BC in Egypt. The Egyptians also made use of birds in their scripts, many of which. Early written records provide information on the past distributions of species. For instance Xenophon records the abundance of the ostrich in Assyria, other old writings such as the Vedas demonstrate the careful observation of avian life histories and includes the earliest reference to the habit of brood parasitism by the Asian koel. Like writing, the art of China, Japan, Persia and India also demonstrate knowledge. Aristotle in 350 BC in his Historia Animalium noted the habit of migration, moulting, egg laying and life spans. Similar misconceptions existed regarding the breeding of barnacle geese, around 77 AD, Pliny the Elder described birds, among other creatures, in his Historia Naturalis. The origins of falconry have been traced to Mesopotamia and the earliest record comes from the reign of Sargon II, falconry made its entry to Europe only after AD400, brought in from the East after invasions by the Huns and Allans. Frederick II of Hohenstaufen learned about Arabian falconry during wars in the region and he had this work translated into Latin and also conducted experiments on birds in his menagerie
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Charles Darwin
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Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZS was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, by the 1870s, the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. In modified form, Darwins scientific discovery is the theory of the life sciences. Darwins early interest in nature led him to neglect his education at the University of Edinburgh, instead. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science, puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and he was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwins work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature, in 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, on 12 February 1809, at his familys home and he was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin. He was the grandson of two prominent abolitionists, Erasmus Darwin on his fathers side, and Josiah Wedgwood on his mothers side, both families were largely Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting Anglicanism. The eight-year-old Charles already had a taste for history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder and he found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his studies. He learned taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions from John Edmonstone, one day, Grant praised Lamarcks evolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished by Grants audacity, but had recently read similar ideas in his grandfather Erasmus journals, Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jamesons natural-history course, which covered geology - including the debate between Neptunism and Plutonism. He learned the classification of plants, and assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, as Darwin was unqualified for the Tripos, he joined the ordinary degree course in January 1828. He preferred riding and shooting to studying, when his own exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paleys Evidences of Christianity. In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree. Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June 1831, inspired with a burning zeal to contribute, Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics
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Fellow of the Royal Society
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As of 2016, there are around 1600 living Fellows, Foreign and Honorary Members. Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian newspaper as “the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar” with several institutions celebrating their announcement each year. Up to 60 new Fellows, honorary and foreign members are elected annually usually in May, each candidate is considered on their merits and can be proposed from any sector of the scientific community. Fellows are elected for life on the basis of excellence in science and are entitled to use the post-nominal letters FRS, see Category, Fellows of the Royal Society and Category, Female Fellows of the Royal Society. Every year, Fellows elect up to ten new Foreign Members, like Fellows, Foreign Members are elected for life through peer review on the basis of excellence in science. As of 2016 there are around 165 Foreign Members, who are entitled to use the post-nominal ForMemRS, see Category, Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Honorary Fellows include Bill Bryson, Melvyn Bragg, Robin Saxby, David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville, Honorary Fellows are entitled to use the post nominal letters HonFRS. Others including John Maddox, Patrick Moore and Lisa Jardine were elected as honorary fellows, statute 12 is a legacy mechanism for electing members before official honorary membership existed in 1997. Fellows elected under statute 12 include David Attenborough and John Palmer, prime Ministers of the United Kingdom such as Margaret Thatcher, Neville Chamberlain, H. H. Asquith were elected under statute 12, see Category, Fellows of the Royal Society. The Council of the Royal Society can recommend members of the British Royal Family for election as Royal Fellows of the Royal Society. As of 2016 there are five royal fellows, Charles, Prince of Wales, Anne, Princess Royal, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince Andrew, Duke of York. Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II is not a Royal Fellow, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was elected under statute 12, not as a Royal Fellow. The election of new fellows is announced annually in May, after their nomination, each candidate for Fellowship or Foreign Membership is nominated by two Fellows of the Royal Society, who sign a certificate of proposal. Previously, nominations required at least five fellows to support each nomination by the proposer, the certificate of election includes a statement of the principal grounds on which the proposal is being made. There is no limit on the number of nominations each year. In 2015, there were 654 candidates for election as Fellows and 106 candidates for Foreign Membership. The final list of up to 52 Fellowship candidates and up to 10 Foreign Membership candidates is confirmed by the Council in April, a candidate is elected if he or she secures two-thirds of votes of those Fellows present and voting. A further maximum of six can be ‘Honorary’, ‘General’ or ‘Royal’ Fellows, nominations for Fellowship are peer reviewed by sectional committees, each with fifteen members and a chair
6.
Elizabeth Gould (illustrator)
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Elizabeth Gould was a British artist and illustrator, married to naturalist John Gould. She produced many illustrations for his ornithological works, Elizabeth was born in Ramsgate, England. She married John Gould in January 1829, and he encouraged her to learn lithography and had his collaborator Edward Lear teach her, once proficient with the art form, she created illustrations from Johns drawings. The Goulds and the oldest of their surviving 4 children travelled to Australia in 1838 and she spent much of her time in Hobart as a guest of Jane Franklin. While John travelled extensively collecting specimens, she drew and painted his collection and her brother Charles Coxen also immigrated to Australia, where he and his wife Elizabeth Coxen were also interested in natural history and members of the Queensland Philosophical Society. She bore one son living in Australia, and gave birth to their eighth child when they returned to England in 1840. The drawings she produced in Australia were made into lithographs by H. C, richter and published under his name. Subsequently her reputation and importance became almost totally eclipsed by the fame of her husband, the Gouldian finch and Mrs. Goulds sunbird were named in her honour. A complete account of her life, The Story of Elizabeth Gould was published by Alec Chisholm in 1944, little was known about her until 1938 when a collection of her letters written from Australia was discovered. These letters were the basis for the book, although he spent less than two years in Australia, his monumental seven-volume publication The Birds of Australia remains the definitive work on the subject. The magnificent colour plates, some 681 of them, were executed by Elizabeth, list of wildlife artists Russell, Roslyn. Elizabeth Gould, mother of Australian bird study, John Goulds Birds of Australia Linda Hall Library Portraits of 12 Scientific Illustrators from the 17th to the 21st Century
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Edward Lear
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Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. As an author, he is principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennysons poetry, Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of twenty-one children of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear. He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann,21 years his senior, owing to the familys limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal seizures, and bronchitis, asthma. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father, the event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition and his adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression and he suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as the Morbids. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from real live birds, Lears first publication, published when he was 19 years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830. One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he contributed to John Goulds works and was compared favourably with the naturalist John James Audubon. Unfortunately his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, thus he turned to landscape painting. Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49 and his landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour. Between 1878 and 1883 Lear spent his summers on Monte Generoso and his oil painting The Plains of Lombardy from Monte Generoso is in the Ashmolean Museum in the English city of Oxford. Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously and he had a lifelong ambition to illustrate Tennysons poems, near the end of his life a volume with a small number of illustrations was published. In 1842 Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula, travelling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. In personal notes, together with drawings, Lear gathered his impressions on the Italian way of life, folk traditions, and the beauty of the ancient monuments. Of particular interest to Lear was the Abruzzo, which he visited in 1843, through the Marsica, at Castel di Sangro, Lear described the winter stillness of the mountains and the beautiful basilica
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Henry Constantine Richter
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Henry Constantine Richter was a zoological illustrator who produced numerous lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly under the employment of John Gould. Henry was born in Brompton around 1821 and he was the son of Henry James Richter, a noted painter, engraver and member of the Water Colour Society and his wife Charlotte Sophia. Richter senior exhibited 150 paintings at London and his subjects included scenes from Shakespeare, the Bible, a disciple of Immanuel Kant, he studied transcendental philosophy. Henrys grandfather, John Augustus Richter, was also an artist, when his father died in 1841, they moved from Lisson Grove North to a ladies boarding house at 14 Clarendon Terrace. One of his sisters, Henrietta Sophia, also became a portrait artist. Richters earliest bird paintings were two published in George Robert Grays Genera of birds. These plates depicted owls and Clappertons francolin and attracted the attention of ornithologists, in 1841 he was contacted by John Gould, who required assistance after the death of his wife Elizabeth. Richter produced about 3000 lithographic plates and watercolours for his employer, in his will, John Gould wrote I bequeath to my Artist H C Richter a legacy of £100 as a kind remembrance for the purchase of a ring or any other article that he may prefer. His only work after Goulds death was for the Birds of Asia, the government of Tasmania published a monochromatic reproduction of the same image in 1934, the author Louisa Anne Meredith also copied it for Tasmanian Friends and Foes. Richter died on 16 March 1902 at Frithville Gardens, Hammersmith, while suffering from influenza. Jackson, bird illustrators, some artists in early lithography. London, H. F. & G. Witherby, the Birds of Australia The Mammals of Australia A Monograph of the Ramphastidae, or Toucans by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter,1854
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Joseph Wolf
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Joseph Wolf was a German artist who specialized in natural history illustration. He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the illustrator for explorers and naturalists including David Livingstone, Alfred Russel Wallace. Wolf depicted animals accurately in lifelike postures and is considered one of the pioneers of wildlife art. Sir Edwin Landseer thought him. without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived. Joseph was the first son of a farmer, Anton Wolf and he was originally called Mathias but later went by the name of Joseph. In his boyhood he assiduously studied bird and animal life, and he showed an early talent for art by cutting paper silhouettes of birds and animals which he pasted onto windows. The village folk termed him a bird fool and he later took an interest in hunting. He made himself brushes from the fur of a stone marten and he took a special interest in birds of prey, and considered art as a career but realized at the age of sixteen that he needed more training to be professional. With support from his father he was apprenticed to a firm of lithographers and he returned home after three years of apprenticeship, and for a while took up a temporary job with the village headman in searching homes for illegally concealed liquor. Wolf travelled to Frankfurt and introduced himself as a lithographer to the ornithologist Eduard Rüppell, Wolf moved to Darmstadt but went on working on Rüppells The Birds of North-East Africa. Kaup was impressed by his abilities and took one of Wolfs sketchbooks to a meeting in Leyden to show to Hermann Schlegel at the Natural History Museum, Schlegel immediately commissioned Wolf to work on some plates for Traité de Fauconnerie. The result was a set of magnificent paintings of birds of prey in life size which established Wolfs reputation in Europe, at the age of 20, Wolf was to appear at Maien to join the Army. As a fit young man with sharp-shooting abilities he could not be rejected, but it was peacetime and the surgeon, who knew him, helped him avoid recruitment under the pretext of a weak chest. Back in Darmstadt, Wolf went on working on bird plates and he was a keen observer of wild birds and once had a pit dug in which he sat all day to watch the courtship of Black Grouse. In 1847, he left Darmstadt to join the Antwerp Academy to learn the Dutch oil painting techniques, while at work in the insect room of the British Museum, he met other naturalists including J O Westwood with whom he could converse in French. He was a friend of William Russell, an accountant and a Campbell related to the Duke of Argyll, Russell brought Sir Edwin Landseer and the Duke of Argyll to see the works of Wolf. The Duke soon became a patron and he was introduced to the Duke of Westminster. Wolfs paintings were appreciated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of London
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William Matthew Hart
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William Matthew Hart was an English bird illustrator and lithographer who worked for John Gould. Hart started medical training, but was unable to complete his studies for financial reasons and he began working for Gould in 1851, beginning an association that was to last thirty years. Early during this period he made the patterns for the plates for Gould’s work on hummingbirds. By 1870 Hart had become Goulds chief artist and lithographer, feather and brush, three centuries of Australian bird art
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Darwin's finches
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Darwins finches are a group of about fifteen species of passerine birds. They are well known for their diversity in beak form. They are often classified as the subfamily Geospizinae or tribe Geospizini and they belong to the tanager family and are not closely related to the true finches. The closest known relative of the Galápagos finches is Tiaris obscura and they were first collected by Charles Darwin on the Galápagos Islands during the second voyage of the Beagle. Apart from the Cocos finch, which is from Cocos Island, the term Darwins finches was first applied by Percy Lowe in 1936, and popularised in 1947 by David Lack in his book Darwins Finches. David Lack based his analysis on the collection of museum specimens collected by the 1905–06 Galápagos expedition of the California Academy of Sciences. The birds vary in size from 10 to 20 cm and weigh between 8 and 38 grams, the smallest are the warbler-finches and the largest is the vegetarian finch. The most important differences between species are in the size and shape of their beaks, and the beaks are adapted to different food sources. During the survey voyage of HMS Beagle, Darwin was unaware of the significance of the birds of the Galápagos, in Galápagos he mostly left bird shooting to his servant Syms Covington. Nonetheless, these birds were to play an important part in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection, on the Galápagos Islands and afterward, Darwin thought in terms of centres of creation and rejected ideas concerning the transmutation of species. From Henslows teaching, he was interested in the distribution of species. On Chatham Island, he recorded that a mockingbird was similar to those he had seen in Chile, in contrast, he paid little attention to the finches. As they sailed home about nine months later, this, together with other facts, including what he had heard about Galápagos tortoises, made him wonder about the stability of species. Following his return from the voyage, Darwin presented the finches to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, along with other mammal, the bird specimens, including the finches, were given to John Gould, the famous English ornithologist, for identification. Darwin had been in Cambridge at that time, in early March, he met Gould again and for the first time got a full report on the findings, including the point that his Galápagos wren was another closely allied species of finch. The mockingbirds that Darwin had labelled by island were separate rather than just varieties. Specimens had also collected by Captain Robert FitzRoy, FitzRoy’s steward Harry Fuller and Darwins servant Covington. From these, Darwin tried to reconstruct the locations from where he had collected his own specimens, the conclusions supported his idea of the transmutation of species
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Inception of Darwin's theory
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These points convinced Darwin that transmutation of species must be occurring, and in his Red Notebook he jotted down his first evolutionary ideas. Animal observations of an orangutan at the zoo showed how human its expressions looked and his speculations on instincts and mental traits suggested habits, beliefs and facial expressions having evolved, and considered the social implications. While this was his hobby, he was struggling with an immense workload. Having taken a break from work, his thoughts of marriage turned to his cousin Emma Wedgwood and he proposed to Emma, and was accepted. In his theory he compared breeders selecting traits to natural selection from variants thrown up by chance, on 24 January 1839 he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society, and on the 29th married Emma. The development of Darwins theory followed, Darwin was not the first to propose that species of organisms could become modified over time. After his early life in a Unitarian family, Charles Darwin developed his interest in natural history, Robert Jamesons course taught Darwin stratigraphic geology, and closed with lectures on the Origin of the Species of Animals. At Christs College, Cambridge to qualify as an Anglican clergyman, Darwin became passionate about beetle collecting, the geology course of Adam Sedgwick and summer work mapping strata in Wales emphasised that life on earth went back over eons of time. When the Beagle returned, Darwin was quick to take the home and arrived at the family home of The Mount House in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. He went straight to bed, then greeted his family at breakfast and began catching up with news of his family and of the country, all England appears changed. The Reform Bill had brought what the Tory Duke of Wellington described as a shift in power from decent Tory Anglicans to Whig manufacturers, shopkeepers, the government had not yet dared introduce these measures to London and the industrial north, and recession was bringing threats of mass unemployment. Darwin wrote to Henslow that he was still giddy with joy & confusion, Henslow took on the plants, and Darwin was given introductions to the best London naturalists with a warning that they would already be busy with other work. He went round the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Linnean, Darwin went in most exciting dissipation amongst the Dons in science, and as Charles Bunbury reported, seems to be a universal collector finding new species to the surprise of all the big wigs. While geologists were quick to take on the samples, zoologists already had more specimens arriving than they could deal with. Their institutions were in turmoil as democrats argued for reforms replacing the aristocratic amateurs with professional salaried scientists as in the French research institutes, at the Zoological Society the reformers were led by Darwins tutor from Edinburgh days, Robert Edmund Grant. Darwin now had an allowance plus stocks from his father, bringing him around £400 per year, the geologist Charles Lyell invited Darwin to dinner on 29 October 1836. Owen was rapidly ousting Grant as the countrys leading anatomist, Darwin went to visit him at his Royal College of Surgeons, and Owen agreed to work on some animal specimens in spirits and the fossil bones. He was a proponent of German ideas of organising energy and vehemently opposed to Grants evolution, at around this time Grant was one of the few to volunteer his help with cataloguing the collection
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Evolution
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Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the LUCA of all living on Earth. The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite, to microbial mat fossils, existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped both by speciation and by extinction. More than 99 percent of all species that lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates of Earths current species range from 10 to 14 million, more recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described. In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection. This teleonomy is the quality whereby the process of natural selection creates and preserves traits that are fitted for the functional roles they perform. The processes by which the changes occur, from one generation to another, are called evolutionary processes or mechanisms, the four most widely recognized evolutionary processes are natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene migration. Natural selection and genetic drift sort variation, mutation and gene migration create variation, consequences of selection can include meiotic drive, nonrandom mating and genetic hitchhiking. In the early 20th century the modern evolutionary synthesis integrated classical genetics with Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection through the discipline of population genetics, the importance of natural selection as a cause of evolution was accepted into other branches of biology. Moreover, previously held notions about evolution, such as orthogenesis, evolutionism, evolutionary computation, a sub-field of artificial intelligence, involves the application of Darwinian principles to problems in computer science. The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander, such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura, in contrast to these materialistic views, Aristotelianism considered all natural things as actualisations of fixed natural possibilities, known as forms. This was part of a teleological understanding of nature in which all things have an intended role to play in a divine cosmic order. In the 17th century, the new method of modern science rejected the Aristotelian approach, however, this new approach was slow to take root in the biological sciences, the last bastion of the concept of fixed natural types. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 explicitly recognized the nature of species relationships. Other naturalists of this time speculated on the change of species over time according to natural laws
14.
Natural selection
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Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time, Charles Darwin popularised the term natural selection, and compared it with artificial selection. Variation exists within all populations of organisms and this occurs partly because random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and offspring can inherit such mutations. Throughout the lives of the individuals, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations in traits, the environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic environment. Individuals with certain variants of the trait may survive and reproduce more than individuals with other, less successful, variants, therefore, factors that affect reproductive success are also important, including sexual selection and fecundity selection. Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological niches, in other words, natural selection is a key process in the evolution of a population. Natural selection can be contrasted with artificial selection, in which humans intentionally choose specific traits, Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The concept of natural selection originally developed in the absence of a theory of heredity, at the time of Darwins writing. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical genetics formed the synthesis of the mid-20th century. The addition of molecular genetics has led to developmental biology. While genotypes can slowly change by random genetic drift, natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution, empedocles idea that organisms arose entirely by the incidental workings of causes such as heat and cold was criticised by Aristotle in Book II of Physics. He posited natural teleology in its place, and believed that form was achieved for a purpose, nevertheless, he accepted in his biology that new types of animals, monstrosities, can occur in very rare instances. And in like manner as to the parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view, for teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way, but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do, nor heat in the dog-days, therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature. The struggle for existence was later described by the Islamic writer Al-Jahiz in the 9th century, the classical arguments were reintroduced in the 18th century by Pierre Louis Maupertuis and others, including Darwins grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Until the early 19th century, the view in Western societies was that differences between individuals of a species were uninteresting departures from their Platonic ideals of created kinds. However, the theory of uniformitarianism in geology promoted the idea that simple and this theory, Lamarckism, was an influence on the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenkos antagonism to mainstream genetic theory as late as the mid 20th century
15.
On the Origin of Species
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On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwins book introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream, the book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T. H. Huxley, during the eclipse of Darwinism from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size, resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time. Individuals in a population significantly from one another. Much of this variation is heritable and this slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species. In later editions of the book, Darwin traced evolutionary ideas as far back as Aristotle, Nature was widely believed to be unstable and capricious, with monstrous births from union between species, and spontaneous generation of life. After the turmoil of the English Civil War, the Royal Society wanted to show that science did not threaten religious, in Gods benevolent design, carnivores caused mercifully swift death, but the suffering caused by parasitism was a puzzling problem. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 also viewed species as fixed according to the divine plan. In 1766, Georges Buffon suggested that some species, such as horses and asses, or lions, tigers. The Ussher chronology of the 1650s had calculated creation at 4004 BC, wernerians thought strata were deposits from shrinking seas, but James Hutton proposed a self-maintaining infinite cycle, anticipating uniformitarianism. Charles Darwins grandfather Erasmus Darwin outlined a hypothesis of transmutation of species in the 1790s and this process was later called Lamarckism. Lamarck thought there was an inherent progressive tendency driving organisms continuously towards greater complexity, in parallel, Georges Cuvier strongly disputed such ideas, holding that unrelated, fixed species showed similarities that reflected a design for functional needs. His palæontological work in the 1790s had established the reality of extinction, in Britain, William Paleys Natural Theology saw adaptation as evidence of beneficial design by the Creator acting through natural laws
16.
Guildford
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Guildford /ˈɡɪlfərd/ is a large town in Surrey, England, located 27 miles southwest of central London on the A3 trunk road midway between the capital and Portsmouth. It is the seat of the borough of Guildford, on the building of the Wey Navigation and Basingstoke Canal Guildford was connected to a network of waterways that aided its prosperity. In the 20th century, the University of Surrey and Guildford Cathedral, in Sir Thomas Malorys 1485 fictional series Le Morte dArthur, Guildford is identified with Astolat of Arthurian renown, however only rural Celtic Bronze Age pieces have been found in the town. Continuing the Arthurian connection, there is a public house. Some of the tiles built into Guildford Castle may be Roman, and it is proven by archaeology and contemporary accounts that Guildford was established as a small town by Saxon settlers shortly after Roman authority had been removed from Britain. The settlement was most likely expanded because of the Harrow Way crosses the River Wey by a ford at this point, alfred the Great, the first Anglo-Saxon king of unified England, named the town in his will. Guildford was the location of the Royal Mint from 978 until part-way through the reign of William the Conqueror, Guildford Castle is of Norman design, although there are no documents about its earliest years. Guildford appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Geldeford and Gildeford, the King officially held the 75 hagae in which lived 175 homagers and the town rendered £32. Stoke, a suburb within todays Guildford, appears in the Book as Stoch and was held by William. Its Domesday assets were,1 church,2 mills worth 5s,16 ploughlands with two Lords plough teams and 20 mens plough teams,16 acres of meadow, and woodland worth 40 hogs. Stoke was listed as being in the Kings park, with a rendering of £15, William the Conqueror had the castle built in the classic Norman style, the castle keep still stands. A major purpose of Norman castle building was to overawe the conquered population and it had £26 spent on it in 1173 under the regency of the young Henry II. As the threat of invasion and insurrection declined, the status was demoted to that of a royal hunting lodge, Guildford was, at that time. It was visited on occasions by King John, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1611 the castle was granted to Francis Carter whose grandsons initials EC, the surviving parts of the castle were restored in Victorian times and again in 2004, the rest of the grounds became a public garden. In 1995, a chamber was discovered in the High Street, while this remains a matter of contention, it is likely to be the oldest remaining synagogue in Western Europe. Guildford elected two members of the Unreformed House of Commons, from the 14th century to the 18th century the borough corporation prospered with the wool trade. In the 14th century the Guildhall was constructed and still today as a noticeable landmark of Guildford
17.
Ripley, North Yorkshire
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Ripley is a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire in England, a few miles north of Harrogate on the A61 road towards Ripon. The village name derives from Old English and is believed to mean wood of the Hrype or Ripon people, a castle dating from the 15th century, Ripley Castle, has been the home of the Ingilby family for 700 years. The present owner is Sir Thomas Ingilby, 6th Baronet, the 28th generation, the castle, which has a priest hole, is open for public tours. The landscaped castle grounds and ornamental lakes are open to the public. A nineteenth century Ingilby tore down the old village and modelled it after an Alsatian village with an hôtel de ville style town hall, the castle and the parish church were not affected by the reconstruction. In March 2017, the village was named number 17 out of the 20 Best Villages in Britain to live in, the listing describes it as a popular satellite village of Harrogate and that families from London having been moving here and commuting to London twice-weekly. Ripley Group - Ripley Fine Foods Limited, Ripley Traditional Sweet Company, The World Famous Ripley Ice Cream and Ripley Store Ripley castle Ingilby History Site
18.
Yorkshire
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Yorkshire, formally known as the County of York, is a historic county of Northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Due to its size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been undertaken over time by its subdivisions. Throughout these changes, Yorkshire has continued to be recognised as a geographical territory, Yorkshire has sometimes been nicknamed Gods Own County or Gods Own Country. Yorkshire Day, held on 1 August, is a celebration of the culture of Yorkshire. Yorkshire is now divided between different official regions, most of the county falls within Yorkshire and the Humber. The extreme northern part of the county falls within North East England, Small areas in the west of the historic county now form part of North West England, following boundary changes in 1974. Yorkshire or the County of York was so named as it is the shire of the city of York local /ˈjɔːk/ or Yorks Shire, York comes from the Viking name for the city, Jórvík. Shire is from Old English, scir meaning care or official charge, the shire suffix is locally pronounced /-ʃə/ shuh, or occasionally /-ʃiə/, a homophone of sheer. Early inhabitants of Yorkshire were Celts, who formed two tribes, the Brigantes and the Parisi. The Brigantes controlled territory which later became all of the North Riding of Yorkshire, the tribe controlled most of Northern England and more territory than any other Celtic tribe in England. That they had the Yorkshire area as their heartland is evident in that Isurium Brigantum was the town of their civitas under Roman rule. Six of the nine Brigantian poleis described by Claudius Ptolemaeus in the Geographia fall within the historic county, the Parisi, who controlled the area that would become the East Riding of Yorkshire, might have been related to the Parisii of Lutetia Parisiorum, Gaul. Their capital was at Petuaria, close to the Humber estuary, initially, this situation suited both the Romans and the Brigantes, who were known as the most militant tribe in Britain. Queen Cartimandua left her husband Venutius for his bearer, Vellocatus. Cartimandua, due to her relationship with the Romans, was able to keep control of the kingdom. At the second attempt, Venutius seized the kingdom, but the Romans, under general Petillius Cerialis, the fortified city of Eboracum was named as capital of Britannia Inferior and joint-capital of all Roman Britain. During the two years before the death of Emperor Septimius Severus, the Roman Empire was run from Eboracum by him, another emperor, Constantius Chlorus, died in Yorkshire during a visit in 306 AD. This saw his son Constantine the Great proclaimed emperor in the city, in the early 5th century, the Roman rule ceased with the withdrawal of the last active Roman troops
19.
Taxidermy
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Taxidermy is the preserving of an animals body via stuffing or mounting for the purpose of display or study. Animals are often, but not always, portrayed in a life-like state, the word taxidermy refers to the process of preserving the animal, but the word is also used to describe the end product, which are often called mounts. The word taxidermy is derived from the Greek words taxis and derma, taxis means to to move, and derma means skin. The word taxidermy translates to arrangement of skin, Taxidermy is practiced primarily on vertebrates but can also be done to larger insects and arachnids under some circumstances. Taxidermy takes on a number of forms and purposes, including natural history displays, hunting trophies, study skins. A person who practices taxidermy is called a taxidermist and they may practice professionally for museums or as businesses catering to hunters and fishermen, or as amateurs, such as hobbyists, hunters, and fishermen. A taxidermist is aided by familiarity with anatomy, sculpture, painting, preserving animal skins has been practiced for a long time. Embalmed animals have been found with Egyptian mummies, although embalming incorporates the use of lifelike poses, it is not considered taxidermy. In the Middle Ages, crude examples of taxidermy were displayed by astrologers, the earliest methods of preservation of birds for natural history cabinets were published in 1748 by Reaumur in France. Techniques for mounting were described in 1752 by M. B, there were several pioneers of taxidermy in France, Germany, Denmark and England around this time. For a while, clay was used to some of the soft parts. By the 18th century, almost every town had a tannery business, in the 19th century, hunters began bringing their trophies to upholstery shops, where the upholsterers would actually sew up the animal skins and stuff them with rags and cotton. The term stuffing or a stuffed animal evolved from this form of taxidermy. Professional taxidermists prefer the term mounting to stuffing, more sophisticated cotton-wrapped wire bodies supporting sewn-on cured skins soon followed. In France, Louis Dufresne, taxidermist at the Muséum national dHistoire naturelle from 1793 and this technique enabled the museum to build the greatest collection of birds in the world. Ward established one of the earliest taxidermy firms, Rowland Ward Ltd. of Picadilly, however, the art of taxidermy remained relatively undeveloped, and the specimens that were created remained stiff and unconvincing. The golden age of taxidermy was during the Victorian era, when mounted animals became a part of interior design. The father of modern taxidermy is considered to be John Hancock, an avid collector of birds, which he would shoot himself, he began modelling them with clay and casting in plaster
20.
Zoological Society of London
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The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. Between 1816 and 1826 discussions between Stamford Raffles, Humphry Davy, Joseph Banks and others led to the idea that London should have an establishment similar to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and it would house a zoological collection which should interest and amuse the public. Raffles was the first chairman and president, but died only a few months in office. It received a Royal Charter from George IV on 27 March 1829, the purpose of the society was to create a collection of animals for study at leisure, an associated museum and library. In April 1828 the Zoological Gardens were opened to members, in 1831 William IV presented the Royal Menagerie to the Zoological Society, and in 1847 the public were admitted to aid funding, and Londoners soon christened the Zoological Gardens the Zoo. London Zoo soon had the most extensive collection of animals in the world, a History of the ZSL, written by Henry Scherren, was published in 1905. The History was criticised as inadequately researched by Peter Chalmers Mitchell in 1929, as the twentieth century began, the need to maintain and research large animals in a more natural environment became clear. Peter Chalmers Mitchell conceived the vision of a new park no more than 70 miles away from London and thus accessible to the public, and at least 200 acres in extent. In 1926, profiting from the depression, the ideal place was found, Hall Farm, near Whipsnade village, was derelict. ZSL bought the farm in December 1926 for £13,480 12s 10d, in 1928 the first animals arrived at the new Whipsnade Park – two Amherst pheasants, a golden pheasant and five red jungle fowl. Others soon followed, including deer, llamas, wombats. In 1931 Whipsnade Park was opened to the public as the worlds first open zoological park, in June 2015 ZSL rebranded, taking on a new tagline - Lets Work for Wildlife. The new brand will be used to boost awareness in the UK and beyond of ZSL’s global conservation programmes, scientific research, fundraising, the Institute of Zoology is the scientific research division of the ZSL. It is a research institute, which specialises in scientific issues relevant to the conservation of species. The Institute of Zoology focuses its research on five areas, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, reproductive biology, the Institute of Zoology was graded 4 in the 1997–2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise, and publishes reports annually. From the late 1980s the Institute of Zoology had been affiliated to the University of London, however, in 2000 this was replaced with a partnership with the University of Cambridge. ZSL runs ZSL London Zoo, ZSL Whipsnade Zoo and had planned to open an aquarium, the society published the Zoological Record from 1864 to 1980, when the ZR was transferred to BIOSIS. The Society has published the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, now called the Journal of Zoology, since 1998 it has also published Animal Conservation
21.
Himalayas
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The Himalayas, or Himalaya, form a mountain range in Asia separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The Himalayan range has the Earths highest peaks, including the highest, the Himalayas include over a hundred mountains exceeding 7,200 metres in elevation. By contrast, the highest peak outside Asia – Aconcagua, in the Andes – is 6,961 metres tall. The Himalayas are spread across five countries, Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, the Himalayan range is bordered on the northwest by the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, on the north by the Tibetan Plateau, and on the south by the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Some of the major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, rise in the Himalayas. The Himalayas have profoundly shaped the cultures of South Asia, many Himalayan peaks are sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism. Lifted by the subduction of the Indian tectonic plate under the Eurasian Plate and its western anchor, Nanga Parbat, lies just south of the northernmost bend of Indus river. Its eastern anchor, Namcha Barwa, is just west of the bend of the Tsangpo river. The range varies in width from 400 kilometres in the west to 150 kilometres in the east, the name of the range derives from the Sanskrit Himā-laya, from himá and ā-laya. They are now known as the Himalaya Mountains, usually shortened to the Himalayas, formerly, they were described in the singular as the Himalaya. This was also previously transcribed Himmaleh, as in Emily Dickinsons poetry and Henry David Thoreaus essays. The mountains are known as the Himālaya in Nepali and Hindi, the Himalaya or The Land of Snow in Tibetan, the Hamaleh Mountain Range in Urdu, the flora and fauna of the Himalayas vary with climate, rainfall, altitude, and soils. The climate ranges from tropical at the base of the mountains to permanent ice, the amount of yearly rainfall increases from west to east along the southern front of the range. This diversity of altitude, rainfall and soil conditions combined with the high snow line supports a variety of distinct plant. The extremes of high altitude combined with extreme cold favor extremophile organisms, the unique floral and faunal wealth of the Himalayas is undergoing structural and compositional changes due to climate change. The increase in temperature is shifting various species to higher elevations, the oak forest is being invaded by pine forests in the Garhwal Himalayan region. There are reports of early flowering and fruiting in some species, especially rhododendron, apple. The highest known tree species in the Himalayas is Juniperus tibetica located at 4,900 metres in Southeastern Tibet, the Himalayan range is one of the youngest mountain ranges on the planet and consists mostly of uplifted sedimentary and metamorphic rock
22.
Nicholas Aylward Vigors
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Nicholas Aylward Vigors was an Irish zoologist and politician. He popularized the classification of birds on the basis of the quinarian system, Vigors was born at Old Leighlin, County Carlow. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford and he served in the army during the Peninsular War from 1809 to 1811. He then returned to Oxford, graduating in 1815 and he practiced as a barrister and became a Doctor of Civil Law in 1832. Vigors was a co-founder of the Zoological Society of London in 1826, in that year, he founded what became the Royal Entomological Society of London. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society and the Royal Society and he was the author of 40 papers, mostly on ornithology. He described 110 species of birds, enough to him among the top 30 bird authors historically. He provided the text for John Goulds A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, one bird that he described was Sabines snipe. This was treated as a common snipe by Barrett-Hamilton in 1895 and by Meinertzhagen in 1926, Vigors lent a skin for later editions of Thomas Bewicks History of British Birds. Vigors succeeded to his fathers estate in 1828 and he was MP for the borough of Carlow from 1832 until 1835. He briefly represented the constituency of County Carlow in 1835, Vigors had been elected in a by-election in June after the Conservative MPs originally returned at the United Kingdom general election,1835 were unseated on petition and a new writ issued. On 19 August 1835 Vigors and his mate, in the two member county constituency, were unseated on petition. The same two Conservatives who had previously been unseated were awarded the seats, on the death of one of them, Vigors won the subsequent by-election in 1837 and retained the seat until his own death. Dublin, M. H. Gill & son, wikisource Kavanagh, P. J. Nicholas Aylward Vigors, MP, 1786-1840. Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922, edited by B. M, walker Hansard 1803–2005, contributions in Parliament by Nicholas Aylward Vigors BBC Your Paintings, Toucan by Vigors
23.
Lithography
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Lithography is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a method of publishing theatrical works. Lithography can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or other suitable material, Lithography originally used an image drawn with oil, fat, or wax onto the surface of a smooth, level lithographic limestone plate. The stone was treated with a mixture of acid and gum arabic, when the stone was subsequently moistened, these etched areas retained water, an oil-based ink could then be applied and would be repelled by the water, sticking only to the original drawing. The ink would finally be transferred to a paper sheet. This traditional technique is used in some fine art printmaking applications. In modern lithography, the image is made of a coating applied to a flexible aluminum plate. The image can be printed directly from the plate, or it can be offset, by transferring the image onto a sheet for printing. In fact, photolithography is used synonymously with offset printing, the technique as well as the term were introduced in Europe in the 1850s. Beginning in the 1960s, photolithography has played an important role in the fabrication, Lithography uses simple chemical processes to create an image. For instance, the part of an image is a water-repelling substance. Thus, when the plate is introduced to a printing ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive image. This allows a flat print plate to be used, enabling much longer, Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1796. In the early days of lithography, a piece of limestone was used. After the oil-based image was put on the surface, a solution of gum arabic in water was applied, during printing, water adhered to the gum arabic surfaces and was repelled by the oily parts, while the oily ink used for printing did the opposite. Lithography works because of the repulsion of oil and water. The image is drawn on the surface of the print plate with a fat or oil-based medium such as a wax crayon, which may be pigmented to make the drawing visible
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Second voyage of HMS Beagle
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FitzRoy had already thought of the advantages of having an expert in geology on board, and sought a gentleman naturalist to accompany them as a supernumerary. The young graduate Charles Darwin had hoped to see the tropics before becoming a parson and he was greatly influenced by reading Charles Lyells Principles of Geology during the voyage. While the expedition was planned to last two years, it lasted almost five. Darwin spent most of time exploring on land, three years and three months on land,18 months at sea. Early in the voyage he decided that he could write a book about geology, at Punta Alta he made a major find of gigantic fossils of extinct mammals, then known from only a very few specimens. The main purpose of the expedition was to conduct a survey of the coasts of the southern part of South America. This was a continuation and correction of the work of previous surveys, in order to produce nautical charts showing navigational and sea depth information for the navy. An Admiralty memorandum set out the detailed instructions, the first requirement was to resolve disagreements in the earlier surveys about the longitude of Rio de Janeiro, which was essential as the base point for meridian distances. The accurate marine chronometers needed to determine longitude had only become affordable since 1800 and it was important to survey the extent of the Abrolhos Archipelago reefs, shown incorrectly in Roussins survey, then proceed to Rio de Janeiro to decide the exact longitude of Villegagnon Island. The west coast was then to be surveyed as far north as time, the commander would then determine his own route west, season permitting, he could survey the Galápagos Islands. Then the Beagle was to proceed to Point Venus, Tahiti and on to Port Jackson, No time was to be wasted on elaborate drawings, charts and plans should have notes and simple views of the land as seen from the sea showing measured heights of hills. Continued records of tides and meteorological conditions were also required, an additional suggestion was for a geological survey of a circular coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean including its profile and of tidal flows, to investigate the formation of such coral reefs. The previous survey expedition to South America involved HMS Adventure and HMS Beagle under the command of the Australian Commander Phillip Parker King. During the survey Beagles captain, Pringle Stokes, committed suicide and command of the ship was given to the young aristocrat Robert FitzRoy, when a ships boat was taken by native Fuegians, FitzRoy took some of them hostage. After their return to Devonport dockyard on 14 October 1830 Captain King retired and he made an agreement with the owner of a small merchant-vessel to take himself and five others back to South America, but a kind uncle heard of this and contacted the Admiralty. Soon afterwards FitzRoy heard that he was to be appointed commander of HMS Chanticleer to go to Tierra del Fuego, on 27 June 1831 FitzRoy was commissioned as commander of the voyage, and Lieutenants John Clements Wickham and Bartholomew James Sulivan were appointed. The Beagle was commissioned on 4 July 1831 under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, the Beagle was immediately taken into dock for extensive rebuilding and refitting. As she required a new deck, FitzRoy had the upper deck raised considerably, the Cherokee class brig-sloops had the reputation of being coffin brigs, which handled badly and were prone to sinking
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Finch
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The true finches are small to medium-sized passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. Finches have stout conical bills adapted for eating seeds and often have colourful plumage and they occupy a great range of habitats where they are usually resident and do not migrate. They have a worldwide distribution except for Australia and the polar regions, the scientific name Fringillidae comes from the Latin word fringilla for the common chaffinch, a member of the family which is common in Europe. The name was coined by the English zoologist William Elford Leach in 1820, the taxonomy of the finch family, in particular the cardueline finches, has a long and complicated history. The study of the relationship between the taxa has been confounded by the recurrence of similar morphologies due to the convergence of species occupying similar niches, in 1968 the American ornithologist Raymond Andrew Paynter Jr. Beginning in around 1990 a series of studies based on mitochondrial. Several groups of birds that had previously assigned to other families were found to be related to the finches. They are now placed in a separate subfamily Euphoniinae within the Fringillidae, the three largest genera, Carpodacus, Carduelis and Serinus were found to be polyphyletic. Each was split into monophyletic genera, the American rosefinches were moved from Carpodacus to Haemorhous. Carduelis was split by moving the greenfinches to Chloris and a large clade into Spinus leaving just three species in the original genus, thirty seven species were moved from Serinus to Crithagra leaving eight species in the original genus. Although Przewalskis rosefinch has ten primary flight feathers rather than the nine primaries of other finches and it is now assigned to a distinct family, Urocynchramidae, monotypic as to genus and species, and with no particularly close relatives among the Passeroidea. Fossil remains of true finches are rare, and those that are known can mostly be assigned to extant genera at least, like the other Passeroidea families, the true finches seem to be of roughly Middle Miocene origin, around 20 to 10 million years ago. An unidentifable finch fossil from the Messinian age, around 12 to 7.3 million years ago during the Late Miocene subepoch, has found at Polgárdi in Hungary. The smallest classical true finches are the Andean siskin at as little as 9.5 cm, all true finches have 9 primary remiges and 12 rectrices. The basic plumage colour is brownish, sometimes greenish, many have considerable amounts of black, bright yellow and red carotenoid pigments are commonplace in this family, and thus blue structural colours are rather rare, as the yellow pigments turn the blue color into green. Many, but by no means all true finches have strong sexual dichromatism, finches are typically inhabitants of well-wooded areas, but some can be found on mountains or even in deserts. The diet of Fringillidae nestlings includes an amount of small arthropods. True finches have a flight like most small passerines, alternating bouts of flapping with gliding on closed wings
26.
Mockingbird
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Mockingbirds are a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family. They are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds, there are about 17 species in three genera. These do not appear to form a lineage, Mimus and Nesomimus are quite closely related, their closest living relatives appear to be killers and thrashers. Melanotis is more distinct, it seems to represent a very ancient basal lineage of Mimidae, some types of mockingbirds are known to lay alien eggs, or eggs that are laid in another birds nest. Similar to the cowbird, the offspring will force the other nest inhabitants from the nest, taking all the food from the parents and forcing the foster-parents to rear. The only mockingbird commonly found in North America is the northern mockingbird, the Greek word polyglottos means multiple languages. This was his first recorded expression of his doubts about species being immutable, mockingbird videos, photographs and sound recordings on the Internet Bird Collection
27.
Rhea (bird)
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The rheas /ˈriː. ə/ are large ratites in the order Rheiformes, native to South America, related to the ostrich and emu. There were formerly two, but now three recognized extant species, the greater or American rhea, the lesser or Darwins rhea, the genus name was given in 1752 by Paul Möhring and adopted as the English common name. Möhring named the rhea based on the Greek Titan Rhea, whose name is derived from the Greek Rhea from έρα ground and this was fitting, the rhea being a flightless ground bird. Depending on the South American region, the rhea is known locally as ñandú guazu, ema, suri, nandu is the common name in many European languages. R. a. intermedia Rothschild & Chubb 1914, intermediate rhea of southeastern Brazil in Rio Grande do Sul, R. a. nobilis Brodkorb 1939, eastern Paraguay, east of Rio Paraguay. R. a. araneipes Brodkorb 1938, chaco of Paraguay to Bolivia, R. a. albescens Lynch & Holmberg 1878, plains of Argentina south of Rio Negro. Darwins rhea or lesser rhea Rhea pennata dOrbigny 1834 R. p. garleppi, puna/Garlepps rhea of southeastern Peru, southwestern Bolivia and it is lumped into R. tarapacensis by the IUCN. R. p. tarapacensis, Tarapacá Rhea of northern Chile from Atacama to Tarapacá, regarded as a separate third species by the IUCN. R. p. pennata dOrbigny 1834, Darwins lesser rhea of Patagonian steppes in southern Argentina, Rhea pennata was not always in the genus Rhea. In 2008, the SACC, the last holdout, approved the merging of the genera, Rhea and this merging of genera leaves only the genus Rhea. A former third species of rhea, Rhea nana, was described by Lydekker in 1894 based on an egg found in Patagonia. Rheas are large, flightless birds with grey-brown plumage, long legs and long necks, similar to an ostrich. Large males of R. americana can reach 170 cm tall at the head,100 cm at the back and can weigh up to 40 kg and their wings are large for a flightless bird and are spread while running, to act like sails. Unlike most birds, rheas have only three toes and their tarsus has 18 to 22 horizontal plates on the front of it. They also store urine separately in an expansion of the cloaca, rheas are from South America only and are limited within the continent to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. They are grassland birds and both species prefer open land, the greater rheas live in open grasslands, pampas, and chaco woodlands. They prefer to breed near water and prefer lowlands, seldom going above 1,500 metres, on the other hand, the lesser rhea will inhabit most shrubland, grassland, even desert salt puna up to 4,500 metres. A small population of rheas has emerged in northeastern Germany, after several couples escaped from an exotic meat farm near Lübeck in the late 1990s, contrary to expectations, the large birds have adapted well to the conditions in the German countryside
28.
Robert FitzRoy
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Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy RN was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwins famous voyage, FitzRoys second expedition to Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy was a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention, forecasts. In 1854 he established what would later be called the Met Office and he was an able surveyor and hydrographer. As Governor of New Zealand, serving from 1843 to 1845, Robert FitzRoy was born at Ampton Hall, Ampton, Suffolk, England, into the upper echelons of the British aristocracy and a tradition of public service. Through his father, General Lord Charles FitzRoy, Robert was a fourth great-grandson of Charles II of England, his grandfather was Augustus Henry FitzRoy. His mother, Lady Frances Stewart, was the daughter of the first Marquess of Londonderry and the half-sister of Viscount Castlereagh, from the age of four, Robert FitzRoy lived with his family at Wakefield Lodge, their Palladian mansion in Northamptonshire. Roberts half-brother Sir Charles FitzRoy later served as Governor of New South Wales, Governor of Prince Edward Island, in February 1818 at the age of 12, FitzRoy entered the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, and in the following year he entered the Royal Navy. At the age of 14, he embarked as a voluntary student aboard the frigate HMS Owen Glendower, which sailed to South America in the middle of 1820 and he was promoted to midshipman while on the vessel. FitzRoy served on HMS Hind as a midshipman and he completed his course with distinction and was promoted lieutenant on 7 September 1824, having passed the examination with full numbers, the first to achieve this result. After serving on HMS Thetis, in 1828 he was appointed lieutenant to Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Waller Otway, commander-in-chief of the South American station. At that time Beagle, under Captain Pringle Stokes, was carrying out a survey of Tierra del Fuego. Pringle Stokes became severely depressed and fatally shot himself, under Lieutenant Skyring, the ship sailed to Rio de Janeiro, where Otway appointed FitzRoy as captain of the Beagle on 15 December 1828. By the ships return to England on 14 October 1830, FitzRoy had established his reputation as a surveyor, during the survey, some of his men were camping onshore when a group of Fuegian natives made off with their boat. His ship gave chase and, after a scuffle, the families were brought on board as hostages. Eventually FitzRoy held two boys, a girl and two men As it was not possible to put them ashore conveniently, he decided to civilise the savages, and the use of common tools before returning them as missionaries. The sailors gave them names, the girl was called Fuegia Basket, the boy Jemmy Button, the second boy was called Boat Memory. FitzRoy brought the four back with the ship to England, Boat Memory died following a smallpox vaccination. In early May 1831 FitzRoy stood as Tory candidate for Ipswich in the General Election and his hopes of obtaining a new posting and organising a missionary project to Tierra del Fuego appeared to be failing
29.
Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
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The Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R. N. during the Years 1832 to 1836 is a 5-part book published unbound in nineteen numbers as they were ready, between February 1838 and October 1843. It was written by authors, and edited and superintended by Charles Darwin. Fossil Mammalia, by Richard Owen Part 2, the authors of these parts were as follows, Part 3. Birds, by John Gould Part 4, fish, by Leonard Jenyns Part 5. An example of this arrangement can be seen in the entry for the copies held at the State Library of New South Wales. The copies published by Elder Smith, 1840-1843 has the five volumes bound into three with some plates folded, media related to Category, The Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle at Wikimedia Commons The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, Beagle – bibliography by Freeman, R. B. and links to online texts and images of each of the nineteen numbers. Zoology of the Beagle, Part I 1839-43, from Rare Book Room, eight selected plates from The Zoology of the voyage of H. M. S. Beagle under the command of Captain Fitzroy, R. N. during the years 1832 to 1836 held by the State Library of New South Wales
30.
Platypus
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The platypus, sometimes referred to as the duck-billed platypus, is a semiaquatic egg-laying mammal endemic to eastern Australia, including Tasmania. Together with the four species of echidna, it is one of the five extant species of monotremes, the animal is the sole living representative of its family and genus, though a number of related species have been found in the fossil record. The first preserved platypus body was thought to have been a fake, made of several animals sewn together, the unusual appearance of this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, with some considering it an elaborate hoax. It is one of the few species of mammals, the male platypus having a spur on the hind foot that delivers a venom capable of causing severe pain to humans. The platypus is the emblem of the state of New South Wales. Until the early 20th century, it was hunted for its fur, although captive breeding programs have had only limited success and the platypus is vulnerable to the effects of pollution, it is not under any immediate threat. When the platypus was first encountered by Europeans in 1798, a pelt and sketch were sent back to Great Britain by Captain John Hunter, British scientists initial hunch was that the attributes were a hoax. It was thought that somebody had sewn a ducks beak onto the body of a beaver-like animal, shaw even took a pair of scissors to the dried skin to check for stitches. The common name platypus is the latinisation of the Greek word πλατύπους, flat-footed, from πλατύς, broad, wide, flat and πούς, foot. The scientific name Ornithorhynchus anatinus is derived from ορνιθόρυγχος, which means bird snout in Greek, and anatinus. There is no universally agreed plural of platypus in the English language, scientists generally use platypuses or simply platypus. Colloquially, the term platypi is also used for the plural, although this is incorrect and a form of pseudo-Latin. Early British settlers called it by names, such as watermole, duckbill. The name platypus is occasionally prefixed with the adjective duck-billed to form duck-billed platypus, in David Collinss account of the new colony 1788 –1801, he describes coming across an amphibious, mole like animal. His account includes a drawing of the animal, the body and the broad, flat tail of the platypus are covered with dense, brown fur that traps a layer of insulating air to keep the animal warm. The fur is waterproof, and the texture is akin to that of a mole, the platypus uses its tail for storage of fat reserves. It has webbed feet and a large, rubbery duck-like snout, the webbing is more significant on the front feet and is folded back when walking on land. Unlike a birds beak, the snout of the platypus is an organ with the mouth on the underside
31.
John Gilbert (naturalist)
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John Gilbert was an English naturalist and explorer. John Gilbert was born on 14 March 1812 in Newington Butts, south London, England and was christened on 25 October 1812 at Spa Fields Lady Huntingdons, Clerkenwell and his father was William and his mother Ann, who were from nearby villages in Kent. Gilbert was a taxidermist for the Zoological Society of London, where he met John Gould, Gould had recruited Gilbert, four years his junior, to work there. But 18 months later, Gilbert was sacked for being absent without leave, Gilbert travelled to Australia in 1838 with the Goulds and their young nephew Henry William Coxen. Gilbert was paid 100 pounds per annum plus expenses, but he was expected to account meticulously for every penny, Gould and Gilbert reached Hobart on the Parsee on 19 September 1838. Both worked in Tasmania for a few months, the party landed in Hobart, Tasmania in September, and in January, Gilbert and Gould traveled overland together to Launceston. Gilbert was instructed to collect as many specimens as possible, then meet up again in Sydney and he worked mostly in the vicinity of Perth, gathering specimens for Gould for 11 months. Meanwhile, Gould returned to Hobart, where his wife Elizabeth awaited him and they lived in style with their servants in Government House. Taking one servant with him, Gould visited New South Wales and was welcome by his wifes family. He returned to Hobart just in time for the birth of his seventh child, almost immediately, Gould set off again, this time for South Australia, where he met the Governor and accompanied Charles Sturt on his expedition to the Murray Scrubs. When he returned to Hobart, the Goulds travelled together to New South Wales, Gould collected many birds and mammals, some of which were new to science. The Goulds left for England on 9 April, when Gilbert arrived in Sydney on 30 April, he found his employer gone. To rub salt in his wound, his trunk had been ransacked and he had provided Gould with over 60 new species of birds, including the extinct paradise parrot which he first discovered in the Darling Downs in June 1844. Gilbert traveled by boat to Port Essington, north of where Darwin is today, there, he collected, among many other things, a beautiful, newly discovered finch and returned with it to Gould in England. There he found his employer mourning his wife, Elizabeth, who had died after the birth of their eighth child. Gould named the finch after his wife, so Elizabeth is remembered today in this gorgeous little bird, called not Elizabeths finch, but more cryptically, the Gouldian finch. As Elizabeth was the illustrator of all the works, not her husband, Gilbert soon returned to Australia to collect again for Gould. He discovered the paradise parrot and thought it without exception the most beautiful of the whole tribe I have ever yet seen in Australia
32.
Tasmania
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Tasmania is an island state of the Commonwealth of Australia. It is located 240 km to the south of the Australian mainland, the state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of around 519,100, just over forty percent of which resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, Tasmanias area is 68,401 km2, of which the main island covers 64,519 km2. Though an island state, due to an error the state shares a land border with Victoria at its northernmost terrestrial point, Boundary Islet. The Bishop and Clerk Islets, about 37 km south of Macquarie Island, are the southernmost terrestrial point of the state of Tasmania, the island is believed to have been occupied by Aboriginals for 40,000 years before British colonisation. It is thought Tasmanian Aboriginals were separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups about 10,000 years ago when the sea rose to form Bass Strait. The conflict, which peaked between 1825 and 1831 and led to more than three years of law, cost the lives of almost 1100 Aboriginals and settlers. The near-destruction of Tasmanias Aboriginal population has been described by historians as an act of genocide by the British. The island was part of the Colony of New South Wales. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed and the year the state received permission to change its name to Tasmania. In 1901 it became a state through the process of the Federation of Australia, the state is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642. Tasman named the island Anthony van Diemens Land after his sponsor Anthony van Diemen, the name was later shortened to Van Diemens Land by the British. It was officially renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer on 1 January 1856, Tasmania was sometimes referred to as Dervon, as mentioned in the Jerilderie Letter written by the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in 1879. The colloquial expression for the state is Tassie, Tasmania is also colloquially shortened to Tas, especially when used in business names and website addresses. TAS is also the Australia Post abbreviation for the state, the reconstructed Palawa kani language name for Tasmania is Lutriwita. The island was adjoined to the mainland of Australia until the end of the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago, much of the island is composed of Jurassic dolerite intrusions through other rock types, sometimes forming large columnar joints. Tasmania has the worlds largest areas of dolerite, with many distinctive mountains, the central plateau and the southeast portions of the island are mostly dolerite. Mount Wellington above Hobart is an example, showing distinct columns known as the Organ Pipes
33.
John Franklin
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Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin KCH FRGS RN was an English Royal Navy officer and explorer of the Arctic. Franklin also served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemens Land from 1837 to 1843 and he disappeared on his last expedition, attempting to chart and navigate a section of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The icebound ships were abandoned and the crew perished from starvation, hypothermia, tuberculosis, lead poisoning. Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in 1786 and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School and he was the ninth of twelve children born to Hannah Weekes and Willingham Franklin, the descendant of a long line of country gentlemen. One of Johns sisters, Sarah, was the mother of Emily Tennyson and his father initially opposed Franklins interest in a career at sea and reluctantly allowed him to go on a trial voyage with a merchant ship. This confirmed his decision, so when he was 14, his father secured him a Royal Navy appointment on HMS Polyphemus. He also accompanied Captain Dance on the East India Companys ship the Earl Camden, in 1819, Franklin was chosen to lead an expedition overland from Hudson Bay to chart the north coast of Canada eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River. On his 1819 expedition, Franklin fell into the Hayes River at Robinson Falls and was rescued by a member of his expedition about 90 metres downstream, between 1819 and 1822, he lost 11 of the 20 men in his party. Most died of starvation, but there were also at least one murder, the survivors were forced to eat lichen and even attempted to eat their own leather boots. This gained Franklin the nickname of the man who ate his boots, in 1823, after returning to England, Sir John Franklin married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden. Their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year, Eleanor died of tuberculosis in 1825. In 1825 he left for his second Canadian and third Arctic expedition, with him was John Richardson who would follow the coast east from the Mackenzie to the mouth of the Coppermine River. At the same time, William Edward Parry would try to sail west from the Atlantic, supplies were better organized this time, in part because they were managed by Peter Warren Dease of the Hudsons Bay Company. He erected a flagpole with buried letters for Parry and he returned to winter at Fort Franklin on the Great Bear Lake. Next summer he went downriver and found the ocean frozen and he worked his way west for several hundred miles and gave up on 16 August 1826 at Return Reef when he was about 150 miles east of Beecheys Point Barrow. He reached safety at Fort Franklin on 21 September and he left Fort Franklin on 20 February 1827 and spent the rest of the winter and spring at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. He reached Liverpool on the first of September 1827, richardsons eastward journey was more successful. On 5 November 1828, he married Jane Griffin, a friend of his first wife, on 29 April 1829, he was knighted by George IV and the same year awarded the first Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France
34.
Jane Franklin
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Jane Franklin, known as Lady Franklin after her husbands knighthood, was the second wife of the English explorer Sir John Franklin. During her husbands period as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemens Land, she became known for her philanthropic work, after John Franklins disappearance, she sponsored or otherwise supported several expeditions to determine his fate. Jane was the daughter of John Griffin, a liveryman and later governor of the Goldsmiths Company. There was Huguenot ancestry on both sides of her family and she was born in London, where she was raised with her sisters Frances and Mary at the family house,21 Bedford Place, just off Bedford Square. She was well educated, and her father being well-to-do had her education completed by much travel on the continent and her portrait was chalked when she was 24 by Amelie Romilly at Geneva. As a young woman, Jane was strongly attracted to a London physician and scientist, Dr. Peter Mark Roget and she once said he was the only man who made her swoon, but nothing ever came of the relationship. Jane had been a friend of John Franklins first wife, the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, in 1828, he and Jane Griffin became engaged. They married on 5 November 1828, and in 1829 he was knighted, during the next three years she spent lengthy periods apart from her husband while he served in the Mediterranean. In 1836 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Van Diemens Land, disembarking from the immigrant ship Fairlie on 6 January 1837, Lady Franklin at once began to take an interest in the colony and did a good deal of exploring along the southern and western coast. In 1839, she became the first European woman to travel overland between Port Phillip and Sydney, with her husband, she encouraged the founding of secondary schools for both boys and girls, including Christs College. In 1841, she visited South Australia and persuaded the governor, Colonel George Gawler and this was set up later in the year. In 1842, she was the first European woman to travel overland from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour and she had much correspondence with Elizabeth Fry about the female convicts, and did what she could to ameliorate their lot. She was accused of using undue influence with her husband in his official acts, when Franklin was recalled at the end of 1843, they went first to Melbourne by the schooner Flying Fish and then to England by way of New Zealand on board the barque Rajah. In 1842 she commissioned a temple, and named it Ancanthe. She intended the building to serve as a museum for Hobart, a century of apathy followed, with the museum used as an apple shed among other functions, but in 1949 it was made the home of the Art Society of Tasmania, who rescued the building. It is now known as the Lady Franklin Gallery and her husband started on his last voyage in May 1845, and when it was realized that he must have come to disaster, Lady Franklin devoted herself for many years to trying to ascertain his fate. Until shortly before her own death, Lady Franklin travelled extensively, generally accompanied by her husbands niece Sophia Cracroft, who remained her secretary and companion until her death. Lady Franklin travelled to Out Stack in the Shetland Islands of Scotland, by means of sponsorship, use of influence and by offering sizeable rewards for information about him, she instigated or supported many other searches
35.
Bowerbird
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Bowerbirds /ˈbaʊərbɜːrd/ make up the bird family Ptilonorhynchidae. They are renowned for their unique courtship behaviour, where males build a structure and decorate it with sticks, the family has 20 species in eight genera. These are medium to large-sized passerines, ranging from the golden bowerbird at 22 centimetres and 70 grams to the great bowerbird at 40 centimetres and 230 grams and their diet consists mainly of fruit but may also include insects, flowers, nectar and leaves in some species. The bowerbirds have an Austro-Papuan distribution, with ten species endemic to New Guinea, eight endemic to Australia, although their distribution is centered on the tropical regions of New Guinea and northern Australia, some species extend into central, western, and southeastern Australia. They occupy a range of different habitats, including rainforest, eucalyptus and acacia forest, the Ailuroedus catbirds are monogamous, with males raising chicks with their partner, but all other bowerbirds are polygynous, with the female building the nest and raising the young alone. These latter species are dimorphic, with the female being more drab in color. Female bowerbirds build a nest by laying soft materials, such as leaves, ferns, in courtship the male bowerbird will dance to the female in an attempt to attract her. All Papuan bowerbirds lay one egg, while Australian species lay one to three with laying intervals of two days, in accordance with their lengthy incubation periods, bowerbirds that lay more than one egg have asynchronous hatching, but siblicide has never been observed. Bowerbirds as a group have the longest life expectancy of any family with significant banding studies. The two most studied species, the catbird and satin bowerbird, have life expectancies of around eight to ten years. For comparison, the raven, the heaviest passerine species with significant banding records, has not been known to live longer than 21 years. The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, there are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers, which are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling, in some species, the other major bowerbuilding clade builds an avenue type-bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower, the places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. The males spend hours arranging this collection, several studies of different species have shown that colors of decorations males use on their bowers match the preferences of females. Many females end up selecting the same male, and many under-performing males are left without copulations, females mated with top-mating males tend to return to the male the next year and search less. Ernest Thomas Gilliard suggested the effect, in which he claimed that there is an inverse relationship between bower complexity and the brightness of plumage. This hypothesis is not well supported because species with vastly different bower types have similar plumage, in toothbilled bowerbirds that have no bowers, males may capture females out of the air and forcibly copulate with them
36.
Liverpool Range
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The Liverpool Range is a mountain range and a lava-field province in New South Wales, Australia. The eastern peaks of the range were the traditional territory of the Wonnarua people, the Liverpool Range starts from the volcanic plateau known as the Barrington Tops and runs for about 100 kilometres westwards, forming the northern boundary of the Hunter Region. Parts of the Liverpool Range form the watershed between the coastal and inland drainage of New South Wales and thus form a component of the Great Dividing Range, the western end of the Liverpool Range merges into the Warrumbungle Range. The Liverpool Range has a reputation as a ground for severe summer thunderstorms. The peaks of the range generally experience several snowfalls each winter, the Liverpool Range was named after Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time of its exploration by Europeans. The first route across the range was Pandoras Pass discovered by Allan Cunningham and this is located near the western end of the range, north from the town of Coolah and within Coolah Tops National Park. The crossing used by the New England Highway is Nowlands Gap, the railway from Newcastle to Werris Creek crosses under this pass via Ardglen Tunnel. The southern slopes of the Liverpool Range are drained by the headwaters of the Hunter River and its tributaries, such as the Pages River, the northern slopes are drained by the headwaters of the Peel River and the Mooki River. The Talbragar River and the Coolaburragundy River also rise on the range and flow south-west, List of mountains in Australia List of volcanoes in Australia
37.
Adelaide
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Adelaide is the capital city of the state of South Australia, and the fifth-most populous city of Australia. In June 2016, Adelaide had a resident population of 1,326,354 million. South Australia, with a total of 1, the demonym Adelaidean is used in reference to the city and its residents. Adelaide is north of the Fleurieu Peninsula, on the Adelaide Plains between the Gulf St Vincent and the low-lying Mount Lofty Ranges which surround the city. Adelaide stretches 20 km from the coast to the foothills, and 94 to 104 km from Gawler at its northern extent to Sellicks Beach in the south. Named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV, Colonel William Light, one of Adelaides founding fathers, designed the city and chose its location close to the River Torrens, in the area originally inhabited by the Kaurna people. Lights design set out Adelaide in a layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares. Early Adelaide was shaped by prosperity and wealth—until the Second World War, it was Australias third-largest city and it has been noted for early examples of religious freedom, a commitment to political progressivism and civil liberties. It has been known as the City of Churches since the mid-19th century, as South Australias seat of government and commercial centre, Adelaide is the site of many governmental and financial institutions. Most of these are concentrated in the city centre along the boulevard of North Terrace, King William Street. Today, Adelaide is noted for its festivals and sporting events, its food and wine, its long beachfronts. It ranks highly in terms of liveability, being listed in the Top 10 of The Economist Intelligence Units Worlds Most Liveable Cities index in 2010,2011,2012 and 2015. It was also ranked the most liveable city in Australia by the Property Council of Australia in 2011,2012 and 2013, prior to its proclamation as a British settlement in 1836, the area around Adelaide was inhabited by the indigenous Kaurna Aboriginal nation. Kaurna culture and language was almost completely destroyed within a few decades of the European settlement of South Australia in 1836, however, extensive documentation by early missionaries and other researchers has enabled a modern revival of both language and culture. South Australia was officially proclaimed as a new British colony on 28 December 1836, the event is commemorated in South Australia as Proclamation Day. The site of the capital was surveyed and laid out by Colonel William Light. Adelaide was established as a colony of free immigrants, promising civil liberties and freedom from religious persecution. Wakefields idea was for the Government to survey and sell the land at a rate that would maintain land values high enough to be unaffordable for labourers and journeymen
38.
Charles Sturt
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Captain Charles Napier Sturt was a British explorer of Australia, and part of the European exploration of Australia. He led several expeditions into the interior of the continent, starting from both Sydney and later from Adelaide and his expeditions traced several of the westward-flowing rivers, establishing that they all merged into the Murray River. He was searching to determine if there was an inland sea, Charles Sturt was born in Bengal, British India, the eldest son of Thomas Lenox Napier Sturt, a judge under the British East India Company. At the age of five, Charles was sent to relations in England to be educated, an aunt made an appeal to the Prince Regent and, on 9 September 1813, Sturt was gazetted as an ensign with the 39th Regiment of Foot in the British Army. Sturt saw action with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War and against the Americans in Canada, Sturt was gazetted lieutenant on 7 April 1823 and promoted captain on 15 December 1825. With a detachment from his regiment, Sturt escorted convicts aboard the Mariner to New South Wales, Sturt found the conditions and climate in New South Wales much better than he expected and he developed a great interest in the country. The Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, formed an opinion of Sturt and appointed him major of brigade. Sturt became friendly with John Oxley, Allan Cunningham, Hamilton Hume, Sturt was keen to explore the Australian interior, especially its rivers. Sturt received approval from Governor Darling on 4 November 1828 to explore the area of the Macquarie River in western New South Wales and it was not, however, until 10 November that the party started out. It consisted of Sturt, his servant Joseph Harris, three soldiers and eight convicts, on 27 November Sturt was joined by Hamilton Hume as his first assistant, humes experience proved to be very useful. A week was spent at Wellington Valley breaking in oxen and horses, 1828–29 was a period of drought and there was difficulty in getting sufficient water. The courses of the Macquarie, Bogan and Castlereagh rivers had been followed, and though its importance was scarcely sufficiently realized, the party returned to Wellington Valley on 21 April 1829. The expedition proved that northern New South Wales was not an inland sea, in 1829 Governor Darling approved an expedition to solve this mystery. Sturt proposed to travel down the Murrumbidgee River, whose upper reaches had been seen by the Hume, in place of Hume, who was unable to join the party, George Macleay went as a companion rather than as an assistant. A whaleboat built in sections was carried with them which was assembled, in January 1830 Sturts party reached the confluence of the Murrumbidgee and a much larger river, which Sturt named the Murray River. It was in fact the river which Hume and Hovell had crossed further upstream. Several times the party was in danger from the Aborigines but Sturt always succeeded in appeasing them, Sturt then proceeded down the Murray, until he reached the rivers confluence with the Darling. Sturt had now proved that all the western-flowing rivers eventually flowed into the Murray, in February 1830, the party reached a large lake which Sturt called Lake Alexandrina
39.
Murray River
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The Murray River is Australias longest river, at 2,508 kilometres in length. It turns south at Morgan for its final 315 kilometres, reaching the ocean at Lake Alexandrina, despite discharging considerable volumes of water at times, particularly before the advent of largescale river regulation, the mouth has always been comparatively small and shallow. As of 2010, the Murray River system receives 58 percent of its natural flow and it is perhaps Australias most important irrigated region, and it is widely known as the food bowl of the nation. The Murray River forms part of the 3,750 km long combined Murray–Darling river system drains most of inland Victoria, New South Wales. Overall the catchment area is one seventh of Australias total land mass, the Murray carries only a small fraction of the water of comparably-sized rivers in other parts of the world, and with a great annual variability of its flow. The Murray River makes up most of the border between the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, where it does, the border is the top of the bank of the southern side of the river. This boundary definition can be ambiguous, since the river changes its course over time and this was due to a miscalculation during the 1840s, when the border was originally surveyed. Past this point, the Murray River is entirely within the state of South Australia, the Murray River also supports fringing corridors and forests of the river red gum. Recent extreme droughts have put significant stress on river red gum forests, the Murray has also flooded on occasion, the most significant of which was the flood of 1956, which inundated many towns on the lower Murray and which lasted for up to six months. In some segments of the Murray River, carp have become the species found. Between 2.5 and 0.5 million years ago the Murray River terminated in a vast freshwater lake called Lake Bungunnia, Lake Bungunnia was formed by earth movements that blocked the Murray River near Swan Reach during this period of time. At its maximum extent Lake Bungunnia covered 33,000 km2, extending to near the Menindee Lakes in the north, the draining of Lake Bungunnia occurred approximately 600,000 years ago. Deep clays deposited by the lake are evident in cliffs around Chowilla in South Australia, a species of Neoceratodus lungfish existed in Lake Bungunnia, today Neoceratodus lungfish are only found in several Queensland rivers. The noted Barmah Red Gum Forests owe their existence to the Cadell Fault, about 25,000 years ago, displacement occurred along the Cadell fault, raising the eastern edge of the fault, which runs north-south,8 to 12 m above the floodplain. This created a series of events. A section of the original Murray River channel immediately behind the fault was abandoned, the Goulburn River was dammed by the southern end of the fault to create a natural lake. The Murray River flowed to the north around the Cadell Fault, creating the channel of the Edward River which exists today and these conditions are perfect for River Red Gums, which rapidly formed forests in the area. Thus the displacement of the Cadell Fault 25,000 BP led directly to the formation of the famous Barmah River Red Gum Forests, the Barmah Choke and The Narrows mean the amount of water that can travel down this part of the Murray River is restricted
40.
Mount Lofty
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Mount Lofty is the highest point in the southern Mount Lofty Ranges. It is located about 15 km east of the Adelaide city centre in South Australia, and has views of the city and the Adelaide plains to the west. The summit can be accessed by road from the South Eastern Freeway at Crafers, and from the eastern suburbs via Greenhill Road, the more enthusiastic can walk up the gully from Waterfall Gully, through the Cleland Conservation Park and from Chambers Gully. The track from Waterfall Gully to the summit is a 4 km uphill trek, the summit provides panoramic views across Adelaide, and a cafe-restaurant and gift shop. These are relatively new due to protracted disputes over appropriate development following the destruction of the old cafe in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, on the ridge near the summit are three television transmission towers, and the Mount Lofty Fire Tower operated by the Country Fire Service. Mount Lofty was named by Matthew Flinders on 23 March 1802 during his circumnavigation of the Australian continent and it was first climbed by a European when the explorer Collet Barker climbed it in April 1831, almost six years before Adelaide was settled. A stone cairn at the summit was used to mark the trig point. In 1902 the obelisk was rededicated and renamed as the Flinders Column, the Summit was closed to the public during the Second World War, when the obelisk was considered an indispensable navigation aid. A flashing strobe was fitted to the top to improve visibility at night and this strobe was removed after the war, but then re-installed in the 1990s, when the obelisk was repainted and restored during construction of the new kiosk. Summit Road, Mt Lofty, was one of the most well-known addresses in South Australia. These were all destroyed or severely damaged by the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983, part of this property was excised for the ABC-TV transmitter building and mast. Mount Lofty is the coldest location in the Adelaide area, during winter months the temperature may not exceed 3-4 °C on some days. The summit is the most common location for snow in South Australia, rare snowfalls sometimes occur in parts of the Mount Lofty Ranges. List of mountains in Australia Official Cleland Conservation Park webpage
41.
Kangaroo Island
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Kangaroo Island is Australias third-largest island, after Tasmania and Melville Island. It lies in the state of South Australia 112 km southwest of Adelaide and its closest point to the mainland is Snapper Point in Backstairs Passage which is 13.5 km from the Fleurieu Peninsula. Once occupied by Australian Aborigines, the population disappeared after the land became an island following rising sea levels several thousand years ago. It was subsequently resettled from the early 19th century onwards, at first casually by sealers and whalers, since then the islands economy has been principally agricultural, with a southern rock lobster fishery and with tourism growing in importance. The largest town, and the centre, is Kingscote. The island has several nature reserves to protect the remnants of its vegetation and native animals, with the largest. The island is 150 km long and between 90 km and 57 km wide, its area covering 4,405 km2 and its coastline is 540 kilometres long and highest point is Mount McDonnell at 299 m above sea level. It is separated from Yorke Peninsula to the northwest by Investigator Strait, a group of islets, the Pages, lie off the eastern end of the island. Kangaroo Island separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago, known as Karta by the mainland Aboriginal tribes, the existence of stone tools and shell middens show that Aboriginal people once lived on Kangaroo Island. It is thought that they occupied it as long ago as 16,000 years before the present, a mainland Aboriginal dreaming story tells of the Backstairs Passage flooding, Long ago, Ngurunderis two wives ran away from him, and he was forced to follow them. He pursued them and as he did so he crossed Lake Albert, when he arrived there he saw his wives wading half-way across the shallow channel which divided Naroongowie from the mainland. He was determined to punish his wives, and angrily ordered the water to rise up, with a terrific rush the waters roared and the women were carried back towards the mainland. Although they tried frantically to swim against the wave they were powerless to do so and were drowned. He was closely followed by the French explorer Commander Nicolas Baudin, who was the first European to circumnavigate the Island, although the French and the British were at war at the time, the men met peacefully. They both used the water seeping at what is now known as Hog Bay near Frenchmans Rock. Baudin named the Island Île Borda, in honour of Jean-Charles de Borda, a community of sealers and others existed on Kangaroo Island from 1802 to the time of South Australias colonisation in 1836. The sealers were rough men and several kidnapped Aboriginal women from Tasmania, the women were kept prisoner as wives and virtual slaves. Three Aboriginal women tried to escape and swim back to the mainland, in 1803 sealers from the American brig Union built the schooner Independence, the first ship constructed in South Australia, at what is now American River
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Hobart
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Hobart is the capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. It is the least populated state capital in Australia, founded in 1803 as a penal colony, Hobart is Australias second oldest capital city after Sydney, New South Wales. The modern history of Hobart dates to its foundation as a British colony in 1803, prior to British settlement, the area had been occupied for possibly as long as 35,000 years, by the semi-nomadic Mouheneener tribe, a sub-group of the Nuennone, or South-East tribe. The descendants of the indigenous Tasmanians now refer to themselves as Palawa, Hobart has experienced both booms and busts over its history. In the later years of the 20th century, migrants arrived to settle in Hobart from Asia. In June 2015, the city had an area population of approximately 221,000. The city is located in the states south-east on the estuary of the Derwent River and its harbour forms the second-deepest natural port in the world. Its skyline is dominated by the 1, 271-metre kunanyi/Mount Wellington, the metropolitan area is often referred to as Greater Hobart, to differentiate it from the City of Hobart, one of the five local government areas that cover the city. The first European settlement began in 1803 as a colony at Risdon Cove on the eastern shores of the Derwent River. In 1804 it was moved to a location at the present site of Hobart at Sullivans Cove. The city, initially known as Hobart Town or Hobarton, was named after Lord Hobart, the British secretary of state for war, the areas indigenous inhabitants were members of the semi-nomadic Mouheneener tribe. Charles Darwin visited Hobart Town in February 1836 as part of the Beagle expedition, I was chiefly struck with the comparative fewness of the large houses, either built or building. Hobart Town, from the census of 1835, contained 13,826 inhabitants, the Derwent River was one of Australias finest deepwater ports and was the centre of the Southern Ocean whaling and sealing trades. The settlement rapidly grew into a port, with allied industries such as shipbuilding. Hobart Town became a city on 21 August 1842, and was renamed Hobart from the beginning of 1881, Hobart is located on the estuary of the Derwent River in the states south-east. Geologically Hobart is built predominantly on Jurassic dolerite around the foothills interspersed with areas of Triassic siltstone. Both of these areas rest on the younger Jurassic dolerite deposits, before stretching into the areas such as the beaches of Sandy Bay in the south. South of the Derwent estuary lies Storm Bay and the Tasman Peninsula, the Eastern Shore also extends from the Derwent valley area in a southerly direction hugging the Meehan Range in the east before sprawling into flatter land in suburbs such as Bellerive
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The Birds of Australia (Gould)
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The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia, Gould and his wife Elizabeth travelled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book, John travelled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name,250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed. Complete sets of original volumes recently sold at auction for more than A$350,000, in 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia. The Birds of Australia, in seven volumes / John Gould - National Library of Australia collection copy of the 1848 edition - digitised
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The Mammals of Australia
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The Mammals of Australia is a three volume work written and published by John Gould between 1845–63. It contains 182 illustrations by the author and its artist H. C and it was intended to be a complete survey of the novel species of mammals, such as the marsupials, discovered in the colonies of Australia. The author, John Gould, best known for The Birds of Australia and other works of ornithology. During his short stay he made observations on the natural history, the publication of this major work by Gould followed his A Monograph of the Macropodidae or Family of Kangaroos in 1841. This work was the first comprehensive survey of Australian mammals, Gould also included the indigenous names for the species from the lists he made while in Australia. He used these names to make requests of the local peoples for his specimens and this conserved a number of common names, such as dibbler, which were later recommended by authorities. The large lithographs reproduced the artwork of Richter, after the drawings and watercolours made in Australia by Gould and his wife and these were hand-coloured by a group of artists, led by Gabriel Bayfield, that required the completion of 26,572 plates. The illustrations produced during their visit to Australia were supplemented by the preserved specimens returned to England and these illustrations have become iconic images of the mammals of Australia. The government of Tasmania published a reproduction of the same image in 1934. The Mammals of Australia was published by subscription in the format Imperial Folio,13 parts in three volumes were issued from 1845 until 1863, to these the author added An Introduction to The Mammals of Australia in a separate work. This provided corrections and updates, a new preface, introduction, the first two volumes were complete surveys of orders Marsupiata, and, with Rodentia in the third, it formed the sum of known mammalian species of Australia. With the addition of those contained in the later Introduction the total of species described reached 166, the same work notes the exclusion of marine mammals such as whales from the volumes, but reprints a manuscript by Charles Coxen on the dugong. Beyond the scientific value of this survey, the document is cited in reference to its subjects conservation. Some of the species included in the work, such as Onychogalea lunata, have since succumbed to changes in use since European colonisation. The work was received with acclaim, but the high cost of production, especially of the coloured plates, the original listed price was £41 for the complete set of volumes. The public curiosity for the fauna of Australia was met by this handsomely illustrated and comprehensive survey. The curator of the Australian Museum, Gerard Krefft, produced the more affordable The Mammals of Australia, intended for educational purposes, gracius Broinowskis abandoned work, Birds and Mammals of Australia, so closely imitated the plates that an injunction was threatened by its publisher
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Planalto hermit
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The planalto hermit is a species of bird in the Trochilidae family, the hummingbirds. It is found in eastern and south-central Brazil, eastern Bolivia, Paraguay and this is essentially a non-forest hermit, being found in a wide range of open and semi-open habitats, including Caatinga, Cerrado, and the Pantanal. It is widespread and generally common, and therefore considered to be of Least Concern by BirdLife International, stamps Planalto Hermit photo gallery VIREO Photo-High Res Photo-High Resolution-, Article Friends of Ornithology
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Brooklyn Museum
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The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum is New York Citys third largest in physical size, the museum initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, only to be revitalized in the late 20th century, thanks to major renovations. Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is represented, starting at the Colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia OKeeffe, the museum also has a Memorial Sculpture Garden which features salvaged architectural elements from throughout New York City. The roots of the Brooklyn Museum extend back to the 1823 founding by Augustus Graham of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in Brooklyn Heights, in 1890, under its director Franklin Hooper, Institute leaders reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and began planning the Brooklyn Museum. The initial design for the Brooklyn Museum was four times as large as the actualized version, Daniel Chester French, the noted sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, was the principal designer of the pediment sculptures and the monolithic 12. 5-foot figures along the cornice. The figures were created by 11 sculptors and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers, by 1920, the New York City Subway reached the museum with a subway station, this greatly improved access to the once-isolated museum from Manhattan and other outer boroughs. The Brooklyn Institutes director Franklin Hooper was the museums first director and he was followed by Philip Newell Youtz, Laurance Page Roberts, Isabel Spaulding Roberts, Charles Nagel, Jr. and Edgar Craig Schenck. Thomas S. Buechner became the director in 1960, making him one of the youngest directors in the country. Buechner oversaw a major transformation in the way the museum displayed art and brought some one thousand works that had languished in the museums archives and put them on display. Buechner played a role in rescuing the Daniel Chester French sculptures from destruction due to an expansion project at the Manhattan Bridge in the 1960s. The Brooklyn Museum changed its name to Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1997, on March 12,2004, the museum announced that it would revert to its previous name. In April 2004, the museum opened the James Polshek-designed entrance pavilion on the Eastern Parkway façade, in September 2014, Lehman announced that he was planning to retire around June 2015. In May 2015, Creative Time president and artistic director Anne Pasternak was named the Museums next director, member institutions occupy land or buildings owned by the City of New York and derive part of their yearly funding from the City. The Brooklyn Museum also supplements its earned income with funding from Federal and State governments, as well as donations by individuals. Major benefactors include Frank Lusk Babbott, the museum is the site of the annual Brooklyn Artists Ball which has included celebrity hosts such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Liv Tyler. The Brooklyn Museum exhibits collections that seek to embody the rich heritage of world cultures
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Hummingbird
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Hummingbirds are birds from the Americas that constitute the family Trochilidae. They are among the smallest of birds, most species measuring 7. 5–13 cm, indeed, the smallest extant bird species is a hummingbird, the 5-cm bee hummingbird weighing less than 2.5 g. They are known as hummingbirds because of the sound created by their beating wings which flap at high frequencies audible to humans. They hover in mid-air at rapid wing-flapping rates, typically around 50 times per second, hummingbirds have the highest metabolism of any homeothermic animal. To conserve energy when food is scarce, and nightly when not foraging, they go into torpor, a map of the hummingbird family tree—reconstructed from analysis of 284 of the worlds 338 known species—shows rapid diversification from 22 million years ago. Due to this exceptional evolutionary pattern, as many as 140 hummingbird species can coexist in a specific region, the hummingbird evolutionary tree shows ancestral hummingbirds splitting from insectivorous swifts and treeswifts about 42 million years ago, probably in Eurasia. One key evolutionary factor appears to be an altered taste receptor that enabled hummingbirds to seek nectar, by 22 million years ago the ancestral species of current hummingbirds became established in South America, where environmental conditions stimulated further diversification. The Andes Mountains appear to be a rich environment for hummingbird evolution because diversification occurred simultaneously with mountain uplift over the past 10 million years. Hummingbirds remain in dynamic diversification inhabiting ecological regions across South America, North America, within the same geographic region, hummingbird clades co-evolved with nectar-bearing plant clades, affecting mechanisms of pollination. The same is true for the hummingbird, one of the morphologically most extreme species. Hummingbirds exhibit sexual size dimorphism according to Renschs rule, in males are smaller than females in small species. The extent of sexual size difference varies among clades of hummingbirds. For example, the Mellisugini clade exhibits a large size dimorphism, conversely, the Lophomithini clade displays very little size dimorphism, males and females are similar in size. For males and females of the size, females will tend to have larger beaks. Males tend to be smaller than females, allowing conservation of energy to forage competitively, thus, sexual selection will favor smaller male hummingbirds. Female hummingbirds tend to be larger, requiring energy, with longer beaks that allow for more effective reach into crevices of tall flowers for nectar. Thus females are better at foraging, acquiring flower nectar, directional selection will thus favor the larger hummingbirds in terms of acquiring food. Another evolutionary cause of this sexual dimorphism is that the selective forces from competition for nectar between the sexes of each species are what drive the sexual dimorphism
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Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney, eds. (1890). "Gould, John". Dictionary of National Biography. 22. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 287–8.
