The first books of natural history I can recall reading were David Quammen’s “Natural Acts” and Bernd Heinrich’s “Ravens in Winter.” While I know I had read others before, these two stick in my mind due to the power each of them had to demand that I look more deeply at the world around me and ask not just “what” but “why?”
Although the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum officially opened its doors to the public for the first time on 28 April 2015, the full history of this extraordinary new museum in fact goes back in time for more than a century and a half.
It was with no small amount of wholly unintentional irony that I began reading Mark Essig’s Lesser Beasts; A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig while eating a ham sandwich. Such is the ubiquity of pigs. Yet for all the many ways the lives of modern humans have and to this day continue to intersect […]
Long before John James Audubon began to chronicle the wildlife of North America in his paintings, Mark Catesby had already undertaken such a project and as a result produced The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.