Hairy Museum of Natural History

In which we introduce a new feature of the HMNH: the hairball, a collection of strands found across the web, consolidated and regurgitated for your review:

It’s Darwin Day! When all celebrate the 197th birthday of that esteemed naturalist who took a good long look at life, from the grand to the humble, and developed an elegant theory to explain it all. His insights gave us a new way to interpret the world, and paved the way to a deeper understanding of natural history. Last year, Ray Troll and I worked up an Evolutionist’s Prayer as one way to celebrate the holiday—other events are advertised here.

Speaking of Ray, his Troll Art site has new artwork and photos from a new traveling exhibit from the Miami Museum of Science—Amazon Voyage: Vicious Fishes and Other Riches.

And Darwin Day seems an appropriate time to direct visitors to Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology blog. A thoroughly enjoyable take on the biology, taxonomy, and miscellany of all manner of fossil and living animals.

Finally, the excellent repository of arcane book illustrations BibliOdyssey has two current posts showing little-seen work from one of the first masters of restoring extinct animals—Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Miscellany.