Tag: Animals

A family album of evolutionary trees

Guest post by Theodore W. Pietsch When most people think of trees, they envision the leafy-green, growing, photosynthesizing kind, but there’s a vast forest out there made up of an entirely different kind of tree—branching diagrams and related iconography that attempt to reveal the relationships of plants and animals. For at least the past 500 years, …

Wild Thing: A little something about bats

Wild Thing is an occasional series where JHU Press authors write about the flora and fauna of the natural world—from the rarest flower to the most magnificent beast.  Guest post by Michael J. Harvey, J. Scott Altenbach, and Troy L. Best Most people know very little about bats. Misconceptions and superstitions about them abound. Bats…

Unsung heroes

Guest post by Bo Beolens The joy of researching our eponym dictionaries is coming across unsung heroes whose remarkable lives may end up commemorated in a critter’s name. Often the collective memory fades and it is left to later generations to rediscover these heroes. Such a fellow was Richard Lemon Lander (1804–1834)  (Lander's Horseshoe Bat…

In like a polar bear . . . out like James Franco

No roaring lions (only polar bears) heralded the end of our mild winter here in Baltimore. Read on to see what we've been up to, who we've been meeting (can anyone say James Franco?), and what's in the works at the JHU Press. Journals News In an effort to help raise awareness about health issues…

Happy International Polar Bear Day

Guest post by Andrew E. Derocher, Ph.D. February 27 is International Polar Bear Day but it’s a safe bet that polar bears throughout the Arctic aren't paying much attention. Nonetheless, any bear living at the northern reaches of land near Ellesmere Island or northern Greenland might be celebrating: celebrating the return of the sun. Given that the…