#natural-history

#natural-history

Andrew Clements, who has died aged 75 after a period of ill health, was for more than three decades the Guardian's chief classical music critic. His style was a model of critical integrity authoritative and intelligent, sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes slightly grumpy, dry-humoured yet never showy. Music may say things that words cannot express, but he mastered the rare art of putting music into words, always using language with precision; reading him, you knew what a performance had sounded like.

For many of us humans, old trees - gnarled oaks or towering redwoods - are sources of psychological comfort. As elders who have weathered earlier times of crisis, they signify continuity and resilience. Their rings bridge present and past and remind us that our "now" is only one of many. But for longer-distance time travel, we must seek out even more ancient ancestors. The ones with the longest memories, full of insights germane to our Anthropocene anxieties, are right here in our midst:

Connect with nature at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, a place for learning, explorationand building community located in a beautiful building right on the beach in Santa Cruz. Permanent exhibits include wildlife and habitat displays, artifacts and cultural exhibits of the Ohlone, a garden learning center, plus exhibits on the geology of Santa Cruz, and Monterey Bay marine life.

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.