#natural-history

#natural-history

The first giraffes to arrive in London were not live, but stuffed. The first, a young specimen, came in the 1770s and from the 1810s it was dramatically displayed with two others at the top of the stairs of Montagu House, where the museum was then based. The British Museum then also covered natural history, which was later hived off to a separate institution in South Kensington, which opened in 1881.

The first person to identify harvest mice ( Micromys minutus), Gilbert White was an eighteenth-century English curate and naturalist who has been called the 'father of ecology'. Yet records from his student days show that he was not so much a quiet country gentleman as a lad about town, losing money at cards and buying fancy waistcoats. In her grandly illustrated book A Year with Gilbert White, historian Jenny Uglow looks between these extremes to investigate who White really was.

We know much more about plants than nature in general, but like all other areas, there are so many more unknowns than knowns.

Joris Hoefnagel created The Four Elements, a multi-volume collection with over 300 watercolor renderings showcasing insects and other natural specimens with remarkable detail and accuracy.

The sale features a six-foot-tall Ceratosaurus fossil, one of only four known specimens, expected to sell for between 4 and 6 million dollars.