When I gave a talk on fossils last year at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, my Dutch friends told me to be sure to include a mention of the Maastricht mosasaur, the most famous fossil Maastricht mosasaurus. Wikimedia in the Netherlands, even though I was actually talking about much more recent fossils such as mammoths. …
Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2019 Among the many delights for a historian of medicine like me at the University Museum in Utrecht is a reconstructed anatomy cabinet from the late eighteenth century. It contains objects from the collection of Jan Bleuland (1756-1838), professor of medicine and "rector magnificus" of the University. Domenico Bertoloni Meli discussed Bleuland …
For the past week, I've been at the International Congress for the History of Science and Technology, held at the Praia Vermelha ("red beach") campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There are a lot of cats on the campus. I don't know their background; they seem to be strays, but are well …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2017 I am sitting in the sun on the roof of my hotel in Rio, looking at the heavily forested hills to the east, the high rise hotels lining the Copacabana to the south, the elaborate rooftop garden across the Avenida de Princesa Isabel, and beyond, the rickety tin shacks …
An occasional blog, beginning with this lion from Versailles. Lions were a favorite symbol for Louis XIV, and, it turns out, there are lions and other animals to be seen all over Paris. Mar… Source: Hidden Animals of Paris/Les animaux cachés à Paris
A long excerpt from The Courtiers' Anatomists has just appeared on the excellent blog The Learned Pig -- see it at: http://www.thelearnedpig.org/the-courtiers-anatomists/3067
This is the first post in a occasional series on animals in (mostly) early modern Paris. 29 April 2015 Last week, a US judge apparently ruled that two research chimpanzees are “legal persons” and have standing to pursue a court case against their captivity. As the work of historian Alan Ross is revealing, non-human primates …
To appear from the University of Chicago Press on May 20. See the Chicago website or Amazon. Book launch party at OSU on May 21. More soon!
19 November 2014, Berlin When I was in France last weekend the big news was the sighting of a tiger outside Paris. A blurry picture of the beast itself circulated widely, and pictures of its footprints seemed to indicate, at the least, some kind of big wild feline. Some 200 police and a helicopter were …
21 September 2014, Berlin Louis XIV, who saw himself as the new Alexander the Great, adopted the lion as one of his symbols. Although he didn’t wear a lion skin on his head like Alexander, real and imaginary lions surrounded him. The lion long pre-dated Alexander as a symbol of power and majesty. On visits …
Anita Guerrini 