Book Feature: Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale

Are you feeling a little crabby today? Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny included plenty of scientific illustrations of crabs from his 1826-1833 travels to South America. We’re sure that you can find just the right one to fit your mood!

The opening image is Libidoclaea granaria, a deep sea crab found at 200-300 meters in the South Pacific Ocean. Like many deep sea creatures, not much is known about this Antarctic invertebrate. SciArt by Jean-Gabriel Prêtre.

Chilean Stone Crab (Homalaspis plana). SciArt by Vaillant.

Paraxanthus barbiger. According to a recent study, these crabs exhibit “different color morphotypes... as a means of protection against visual predators.” Unknown artist.

Book Feature: Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale

This week’s BHL Book Feature is Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale (1835-47), by Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny. This extensive work, published in 90 fascicles, chronicles d'Orbigny's travels to South America for the Paris Museum from 1826-1833. During this expedition, d'Orbigny collected more than 10,000 natural history specimens! Charles Darwin remarked that this series was "one of the great monuments of science in the 19th century."

The top illustration is Geoffroy's Cat (Leopardus geoffroyi), a species of wild cat about the size of the domestic cat and ranges from southern to central South America.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Paris was a busy place for science. In 1794 the Reign of Terror ended with the establishment of a new government that was more supportive of the scie...

This guy! He basically produced all the fundamental stuff to do with the foraminifera (including giving them that name!) along with the first categorisation and identifcations of them (and some gorgeous illustrations). I have a whole module on these critters thanks to this guy (and others later on).

Top: Common Opossum - Didelphis marsupialis Bottom: Virginia Opossum - Didelphis virginiana

Stay in the pouch, kids! We can't stop here; this is bat country!

Even though several marsupial families lived in the Americas before the last ice age, opossums are the only ones still remaining. Thanks to their opportunistic omnivorous diet and high rate of reproduction, opossums have survived in their current form for millenia, even despite their extremely low encephalization quotient. While rote brain volume does not in and of itself determine intelligence of an animal, mammals with smaller encephalization quotients tend to be more specialized and quickly speciated when hardships are encountered (such as ice ages). Opossums in the Americas generally have an EQ around 1/5 that of the raccoons.

Didelphidae (Western hemisphere opossums) have very short lifespans, generally living less than two years in the wild, which is very unusual for a mammal of their size (up to the size of a large housecat). However, they can generally produce two successful litters of up to 13 young each in their short lives.

Australian opossums, while distantly related to those in the Americas, have furry tails, larger brains, and are much less urbanized. They also bear fewer young, live at least twice as long, and are less than half the size of the largest North American opossums.