Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Ellie Gregory
It is regarded as one of the most baffling scientific hoaxes of the past few hundred years. The mystery of the Piltdown Man, a skull believed to be an ancient ‘missing link’ in human evolution, blindsided the expert eyes of some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.
By Naonobu Noda and Yoshikazu Tanaka
Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium) are the second best-selling flowers after roses in worldwide. In Japan they are by far the most popular and the 16 petal chrysanthemum with sixteen tips is the imperial crest. Cultivated chrysanthemums have been generated by hybridization breeding of many wild species for hundreds or possibly thousands of years.
By Anne Secord
White’s classic text can be read as a shrewd exercise to encourage readers to follow a startlingly novel approach to studying the natural world. Most naturalists at that time based their natural systems and classifications of all living beings on the study of dead specimens in collections.
By John van Wyhe
The year 2013 is the centenary of the death of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, best-known as the man who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.
On Sunday 29 July 2013, we headed off to Wallacea for three weeks to assist comedian Bill Bailey with a documentary he is presenting about Alfred Russel Wallace. George, the Natural History Museum’s Curator of Orthopteroid Insects, acted as the Historical Consultant.
By Tim M. Berra
Charles married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and together they had ten children, three died in childhood and seven lived long lives.
By George Beccaloni
Two of my greatest passions in life are cockroaches and Alfred Russel Wallace, so I am fortunate to not only be the curator of the London Natural History Museum’s collection of orthopteroid insects, but also the director of the Wallace Correspondence Project.
By David C. Catling
Over 2,300 years ago, in his book De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle asked if other Earth-like worlds exist and dismissed the idea. But now, remarkably, the question is on the verge of being answered scientifically. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, has collected data on the statistical occurrence of small planets that orbit stars at a distance where it’s the right temperature for liquid water and conceivably life.
By Ali Sparkes
You might think this is just Children’s Book Week but it’s also another significant week on the calendar. It’s National Spiders Come In Week.
According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, ‘habitat’ means the place or type of site where an organism or population naturally occurs. Tomorrow is World Habitat Day. The obvious question is, why do we need a day devoted just to habitat? The short answer is that loss of habitat is now the foremost conservation concern of the 21st century.
By Justin Gregg
Being an enormous, hulking beast has long been an effective defense mechanism. The plains and forests of North America were once teeming with colossal creatures like giant ground sloths and woolly mammoths, behemoths that plodded along safe in the knowledge that few predators would dare challenge them.
On the 7th of September each year, Australia observes National Threatened Species Day, so we thought this would be a good time to look at a species we couldn’t save. The following is an extract from the Encyclopedia of Mammals on the extinct thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger).
From global climate change to “fracking,” energy-related issues have comprised a source of heated debate for American policymakers. Needless to say, assessing the economic and environmental consequences of certain developmental shifts is often fraught with difficulty, particularly when considering existing national and international frameworks.
By Sónia Cruz
“Crawling leaves” or “solar-powered sea slugs” are common terms used to name some species of sacoglossan sea slugs capable of performing photosynthesis, a process usually associated with plants. These sea slugs ingest macroalgal tissue and retain undigested functional chloroplasts in special cells of their gut (kleptoplasty). The “stolen” chloroplasts (kleptoplasts) continue to photosynthesize, in some cases up to one year.
By Bill McGuire
I know that if I ask someone to name a single volcano, the chances are that they will hit upon Krakatoa; such is the degree to which the cataclysmic 1883 blast of the volcano has etched itself into the public consciousness. Remotely located in the Sunda Strait, between the Indonesia islands of Sumatra and Java, the islands that made up the long-dormant volcano were pretty much unheard of prior to August, 130 years ago, when all hell broke loose.
Philip Mladenov
Russia has recently blocked the creation of two of the world’s largest marine protected areas at a special meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in Bremerhaven. These marine reserves would have been massive – covering more than 3.5 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean off the coast of Antarctica.