Animal A Day!

Aldo Leopold Today's Naturalist is a little more contemporary, at least when compared to those people who have been featured previously. His name is Aldo Leopold, and he is best known for his contributions to Ecology, Environmental Science, and Conservation. He also wrote the influential Environmental book, The Sand County Almanac . Rand Aldo Leopold was born in Iowa in 1887, and he spent a great deal of his childhood outdoors. He did a great deal of hiking, climbing, and hunting, and would spend hours observing, drawing, and writing about the nature around him. It was then only natural that he attended the Yale Forest School, which he graduated from in 1909. After completing his education, Leopold entered the United States Forest Service in New Mexico and Arizona. In 1922 he created the Forest Service's very first fish and game handbook, and established Gila National Forest as the first designated Wilderness Area in 1924. It was during his time in the Southwest tha...

Portrait of Mary Anning, c. 1842 So far all of our Naturalists have dealt with the living animals that they saw during their studies and travels. Today we'll mix that up a bit and learn all about a woman who made some pretty awesome contributions to Paleontology... some of which she did when she was only twelve years old! Mary Anning was born in Dorset, England in 1799. Her parents had ten children, but only Mary and her brother Joseph lived to adulthood (Mary herself was actually named after an older sister of hers that died before she was born). From a young age Mary's father would take her and Joseph on fossil hunting trips to the nearby cliffs. They had the great luck to live near the Blue Lias, a geological formation in the cliffs that dated back to the Jurassic Period. Anning's father died in 1810, leaving his family with next to nothing. Mary and Joseph continued to hunt for fossils, so that they could sell them for profit and support their family. Fossil hun...

If you are a frequent reader of Animal a Day, you'll recognize today's featured naturalist. That is because, in the past, we've featured several of the different animals species that were named after him! Hmm... just doing a quick search we have: Steller's Eider Steller's Sea Cow Steller's Sea Eagle Steller's Sea Lion So if those animal names didn't give it away already, Georg Wilhelm Steller was a naturalist and explorer who that did his work while on Ocean Expeditions. No images of Steller exist. So let's look at a drawing he did of Sea Otters! Steller was born near Nuremburg Germany in 1709, and was later educated at the University of Wittenburg. Though he was German by birth, he moved to Russia in 1734, and it is with Russian expeditions that he did his major studies. After finding work at Saint Petersburg's Academy of Sciences, Steller joined Vitus Bering's expedition to the ocean east of Siberia in 1740. Bering hims...

Portrait c. 1700 Today's featured person is one you may have never heard of- 17th century German illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian. She is known for the numerous paintings and engravings that she did of plants and insects, as well as the accurate observations that she made while creating these images. Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1647. She came from a family that was already very established in the art world. Her father, Matthaus Merian , was a prominent engraver and publisher, and her stepfather was still like painter Jacob Marrel . Marrel taught his stepdaughter to draw and paint from a very young age, and she studied under him along with his male pupils. Insects fascinated Merian, and by the age of 13 she was already producing works of art based on specimens that she had captured and observed. At 18 she married one of her stepfather's pupils, and soon moved to Nuremburg. While there she began to take on students of her own, and h...

Let's kick off this theme week by going really, really old school. Our first naturalist is noted Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. And by Rome, I don't just mean the city, I mean the Empire! Pliny lived nearly 2,000 years ago! A 17th century depiction. No images from his lifetime survive. Gaius Plinius Secondus was born around 23AD in Como Italy and had quite the interesting life. His father was a member of the Equestrian class, which meant young Pliny was able to be educated, and he spent his late childhood and teenage years in Rome. Around 45AD he entered the army, and traveled to what are now the Low Countries and Germany. His time in Germany inspired his first literary work, a short treatise on how to throw spears from horseback (a military technique that he observed there). He also later wrote a 20 volume work titled History of the Germanic Wars . At the age of 36 Pliny returned to Rome, but the political situation was not exactly favorable towards ser...

Happy Birthday to Me! Well... blog me, not real me... though to confuse things today is my brother's actual birthday. Anyway. Today is the 2 year anniversary of Animal a Day! That means we have learned about 732 different animals! So to celebrate the start of another great year full of animals, we've got another theme week! And I'm really, really excited about this one, because it's pretty outside the box. Even more so than the Mythical Creatures week. We're gonna learn all about Famous Naturalists! That's right, people! Hey ,  humans are  animals after all. So prepare to learn all about some interesting guys and gals who made important contributions to Zoology, Biology, Paleontology, and general animal awareness! And while we're in the middle of an announcement post, please check out the revamped Facebook page. It has extra pictures, interesting animal news stories, weird facts, and I'd like to get some contests and giveaways going in the future! ...

Tritonia diomedea My daily inspiration for animals comes from all kinds of sources.. and today it comes from a big cute pink slug monster that I saw hanging up at a graphic design exhibit. Convenient muse, huh? So let's talk about a real-life pink Slug, one that doesn't have anthropomorphic eyes! This is Tritonia diomedea , and it is a Nudibranch. Nudibranches are soft-bodies marine slugs all found within the clade Nudibranchia. There are around 3,000 species, many are stunningly beautiful, and they can be found in oceans worldwide. T. diomedea  lives off of the Northern Pacific Coast of North America. They inhabit relatively shallow waters, ranging at depths between 5 and 750m where there is a sandy or silty sea floor . Though the image I present is pink, the species can also be found in various shades of red and orange. The Sea Slugs feed on tiny little Cnidarians like Sea Pens and Corals, and they hunt them out using their tentac...