Download or read book Dry Storeroom No 1 written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable behind-the-scenes look at the extraordinary people, meticulous research, and driving passions that make London’s Natural History Museum one of the world’s greatest institutions. In an elegant and illuminating narrative, Richard Fortey takes his readers to a place where only a few privileged scientists, curators, and research specialists have been—the hallowed halls that hold the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum. Replete with fossils, jewels, rare plants, and exotic species, Fortey’s walk through offers an intimate view of many of the premiere scientific accomplishments of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Like looking into the mind of mankind and all the fascinating discoveries, ideas, and accomplishments that reside there, Fortey’s tour is utterly entertaining from first to last.
Download or read book Dry Store Room No 1 written by Richard A. Fortey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Dry Store Room No. 1' is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination. 'This book is a kind of museum of the mind. It is my own collection, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum. The lustre of a museum does not depend only on the artefacts or objects it contains - the people who work out of sight are what keeps a museum alive...I want to bring those invisible people into the sunlight.' Behind the public façade of any great museum there lies a secret domain: one of unseen galleries, locked doors, priceless specimens and hidden lives. Through the stories of the numerous eccentric individuals whose long careers have left their mark on the study of evolutionary science, Richard Fortey, former senior paleaontologist at London's Natural History Museum, celebrates the pioneering work of the Museum from its inception to the present day. He delves into the feuds, affairs, scandals and skulduggery that have punctuated its long history, and formed a backdrop to extraordinary scientific endeavour. He explores the staying power and adaptability of the Museum as it responds to changes wrought by advances in technology and molecular biology - 'spare' bones from an extinct giant bird suddenly become cutting-edge science with the new knowledge that DNA can be extracted from them, and ancient fish are tested with the latest equipment that is able to measure rises in pollution. 'Dry Store Room No. 1' is a fascinating and affectionate account of a hidden world of untold treasures, where every fragment tells a story about time past, by a scientist who combines rigorous professional learning with a gift for prose that sparkles with wit and literary sensibility.
Download or read book Dry Store Room No 1 The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum Text Only written by Richard Fortey and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition does not include illustrations. ‘Dry Store Room No. 1’ is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination.
Download or read book Curators written by Lance Grande and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public. Grande offers a portrait of curators and their research, conveying the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. He uses the personal story of his own career-- most of it spent at Chicago's Field Museum-- to explore the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology.
Download or read book Survivors The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind Text Only written by Richard Fortey and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ebook edition does not include illustrations. An awe-inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe, in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures which have survived from earlier times and whose stories speak to us of seminal events in the history of life.
Download or read book Life written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-09-07 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings on the still-forming planet to the recent emergence of "Homo sapiens, " one of the world's leading paleontologists narrates how and why life on Earth developed as it did. 110 illustrations.
Download or read book The Wood for the Trees written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Earth: An Intimate History, an exuberant "biography" of four acres of woodland, evoking a cosmos of living and inanimate things and imagining its millennia of existence A few years ago, award-winning scientist Richard Fortey purchased four acres of woodland in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England. The Wood for the Trees is the joyful, lyrical portrait of what he found there. With one chapter for each month, we move through the seasons: tree felling in January, moth hunting in June, finding golden mushrooms in September. Fortey, along with the occasional expert friend, investigates the forest top to bottom, discovering a new species and explaining the myriad connections that tie us to nature and nature to itself. His textured, evocative prose and gentle humor illuminate the epic story of a small forest. But he doesn't stop at mere observation. The Wood for the Trees uses the forest as a springboard back through time, full of rich and unexpected tales of the people, plants, and animals that once called the land home. With Fortey's help, we come to see a universe in miniature.
Download or read book Life written by Richard A. Fortey and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book guides the reader through space, through the earliest signs of life on the rims of volcanoes, the creation of an atmosphere and the myriad forms of planets and animals which could then evolve and be sustained
Download or read book Trilobite written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures. Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as the beetle is today, they survived in the arctic or the tropics, were spiky or smooth, were large as lobsters or small as fleas. And because they flourished for three hundred million years, they can be used to glimpse a less evolved world of ancient continents and vanished oceans. Erudite and entertaining, this book is a uniquely exuberant homage to a fabulously singular species.
Download or read book Fossils written by Richard A. Fortey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction offers an explanation of how fossils are a product of our evolving habitat. The emphasis is on what paleontology is really about, how the paleontologist tries to find out the ways in which fossil animals lived and how geological processes have interacted with the history of life.
Download or read book The Heartless Stone written by Tom Zoellner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American Library Association Notable Book When he proposed to his girlfriend, Tom Zoellner gave what is expected of every American man--a diamond engagement ring. But when the relationship broke apart, he was left with a used diamond that began to haunt him. His obsession carried him around the globe; from the "blood diamond" rings of Africa; to the sweltering polishing factories of India; to mines above the Arctic Circle; to illegal diggings in Brazil; to the London headquarters of De Beers, the secretive global colossus that has dominated the industry for more than a century and permanently carved the phrase "A diamond is forever" on the psyche. An adventure story in the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, The Heartless Stone is a voyage into the cold heart of the world's most unyielding gem.
Download or read book Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms written by Richard Fortey and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s history told not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize. Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone. Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.
Download or read book Drinking the Rain written by Alix Kates Shulman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-07-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast.
Download or read book The First Betrayal written by Patricia Bray and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes the magic inside us isn't meant to be discovered. . . . Orphan, exile, priest, Josan has been posted to a lighthouse on the farthest edge of the kingdom. As a member of the collegium, he once dreamed of making a real contribution to the Learned Brethren, but those dreams died after a mysterious fever shattered him, body and mind. At least that’s the story he’s been told to explain a past he can’t remember. But that past has returned . . . with a vengeance. When Lady Ysobel Flordelis is shipwrecked on Josan’s island, this sets in motion an explosive destiny. The Seddonian trade liaison is traveling to Ikaria on official business, but her secret purpose is to revive the revolution brutally crushed years before. Neither Ysobel nor Josan can foresee the significance of their brief meeting. But as Ysobel navigates the elaborate court intrigues in Ikaria, Josan will be forced to leave his island exile and embark on a treacherous journey to unlock the secrets that bind his past—an act that could lead him to glory . . . or doom.
Download or read book The Language of Butterflies written by Wendy Williams and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “deeply personal and lyrical book” (Publishers Weekly) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Horse, Wendy Williams explores the lives of one of the world’s most resilient creatures—the butterfly—shedding light on the role that they play in our ecosystem and in our human lives. “[A] glorious and exuberant celebration of these biological flying machines…Williams takes us on a humorous and beautifully crafted journey” (The Washington Post). From butterfly gardens to zoo exhibits, these “flying flowers” are one of the few insects we’ve encouraged to infiltrate our lives. Yet, what has drawn us to these creatures in the first place? And what are their lives really like? In this “entertaining look at ‘the world’s favorite insect’” (Booklist, starred review), New York Times bestselling author and science journalist Wendy Williams reveals the inner lives of these delicate creatures, who are far more intelligent and tougher than we give them credit for. Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles each year from Canada to Mexico. Other species have learned how to fool ants into taking care of them. Butterflies’ scales are inspiring researchers to create new life-saving medical technology. Williams takes readers to butterfly habitats across the globe and introduces us to not only various species, but “digs deeply into the lives of both butterflies and [the] scientists” (Science magazine) who have spent decades studying them. Coupled with years of research and knowledge gained from experts in the field, this accessible “butterfly biography” explores the ancient partnership between these special creatures and humans, and why they continue to fascinate us today. “Informative, thought-provoking,” (BookPage, starred review) and extremely profound, The Language of Butterflies is a “fascinating book [that] will be of interest to anyone who has ever admired a butterfly, and anyone who cares about preserving these stunning creatures” (Library Journal).
Download or read book Terra written by Hiro Sone and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just over a decade ago, Spago-trained chefs Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani opened their award-winning Napa Valley restaurant, Terra, in a century-old fieldstone foundry in St. Helena. Their dream of running a world-class restaurant became a reality as word quickly spread about the duo's extraordinary cooking and hospitality. Now, along with the French Laundry, the venerable Terra is a cornerstone of the Napa Valley food scene, and one of its quintessential dining experiences. In TERRA, over 100 recipes from the restaurant's standing and seasonal menus showcase the chefs' sophisticated, yet eminently playful and deeply personal cuisine. Sone and Doumani provide readers with a wealth of insight into the ingredients, preparations, and techniques that shape their cooking philosophy and menus, giving readers guidance—and inspiration—to execute these dishes at home.
Download or read book Hell to Pay written by Garry Disher and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern western set in an isolated Australian bush town with a soaring crime rate, where a local constable with a troubled past must investigate the death of a teenage girl whose murder threatens to set the dusty streets ablaze. Constable Paul Hirschhausen—”Hirsch”—is a recently demoted detective sent from Adelaide, Australia’s southernmost booming metropolis, to Tiverton, a one-road town in rustic, backwater “wool and wheat” country three hours north. Hirsch isn’t just a disgraced cop; the internal investigations bureau is still trying to convict him of something, even if it means planting evidence. When someone leaves a pistol cartridge in his mailbox, Hirsch suspects that his career isn't the only thing on the line. But the tiny town of Tiverton has more crime than one lone cop should have to handle. The stagnant economy, rural isolation, and entrenched racism and misogyny mean every case Hirsch investigates is a new basket of snakes. When the body of a 16-year-old local girl is found on the side of the highway, the situation in Tiverton gets even more sinister, and whether or not he finds her killer, there’s going to be hell to pay. Paperback edition found under the title Bitter Wash Road. From the Hardcover edition.
