Book Description
The second edition of Man's Place in Evolution explores how human beings are related to other animals and to the various fossil humans that have been discovered. The book begins with living animals and shows why chimpanzees and gorillas are thought to be our closest living relatives. Later chapters investigate the fossil evidence used to discover who were the first human beings, when people used fire, when they began to farm and many other fascinating aspects of human evolution. Several chapters have been redesigned and new illustrations have been added to clarify this lively book. Man's Place in Evolution has been prepared by the staff of the Natural History Museum in London. ... Read more

Book Description
Curators of the re-installation of the Hall of Dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History, the authors document the collection of dinosaur skeletons and recount the experiences of the paleontologists who have scoured remote lands in search of evidence of these animals. Contains 167 illustrations, charts and maps in color and b&w. National author media. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Go to the AMNH without setting foot outside your home!
Even if you think you have no interest whatsoever in dinosaurs, you can still enjoy Discovering Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Reading this book rivals taking an actual trip to the museum's splendid dinosaur halls. Norell, Gaffney, and Dingus present the first half of the book in question-answer format and dedicate the second half to AMNH specimens and expeditions. Questions range from the simple (What are dinosaurs?) to the complicated (How did nonavian dinosaurs become extinct?) to the unusual (How did dinosaurs mate?). You can poke in a coprolite (fossilized dung) to find what dinosaurs ate or see how workers mount colossal skeletons. Along with answers and information, you get a bonus prize: the incredible illustrations of Erwin Christman. Few contemporary artists can compete with the beauty and accuracy of Christman's nearly century-old work. A drawing or photograph graces nearly every page of Discovering Dinosaurs. Photographs depict paleontology's past, specimens of dinosaurs and of animals that lived at the same time as them, trackways, and current assignments. The book includes the stunning results of the AMNH Gobi expeditions of 1991-1995: beautifully preserved skeletons of oviraptors. Whether you want to examine the texture of dinosaur skin or peer into a tyrannosaur's mouth, Discovering Dinosaurs gets two claws up--20 feet up! ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1889 edition by the British Museum, London. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1888 edition by the British Museum, London. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1891 edition by the British Museum, London. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. Scholar Stephen T. Asma turned his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators.Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty, and it occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir, as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the U.S. and Europe. This informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonizing specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:

I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine.... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.

To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out fest than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob LightnerBook Description
The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun.Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations.We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology. Asma also points out that these museums actively shape our perception of nature, and that these efforts are swayed as much by politics as by science. In countless exhibits, for instance, the idea of the traditional nuclear family is evident in displays of everything from extinct animals to grizzly bears (in nature, alas, the male bear is more likely to devour its young than to nurture them).Where else but at a natural history museum could you find a T. rex, a high-tech planetarium, a Native American totem pole, and flesh-eating beetles--all under one roof. And in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, Stephen Asma reveals that what we don't see--the scientific research that is going on backstage--is just as fascinating as the exhibits on display. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Bizarre and Brilliant!
This is an excellent and provocative book. Asma ranges widely, but also deeply, over the relatively uncharted territory of museum practices and theories --some mainstream and others quirky and idiosyncratic. One of the great virtues of the book is that it consciously avoids the typical postmodern cultural studies lingo that most of the other recent museum books invoke. This is clear and thoughtful analysis of the tradition of natural history collecting --analysis that brings us face to face with oddball curators like Peale and Hunter. But it also connects the older forms of edutainment (early taxidermy, etc.) with the more contemporary and controversial forms (Hollywood-type displays of dinosaurs, etc.). Two other important aspects of the book are scarcely mentioned in the promo blurbs, but they make for fascinating reading. One, is a fresh, if ocassionally dense, tour of European scientific classification theory --a philosophically important and often ignored area. And two, a powerful argument for evolution theory as against creationism and the increasingly popular "intelligent design" theory. Great writing and very intelligent!

The evolution of natural history museums around the world
Stephen Asthma's Stuffed Animals And Pickled Heads surveys the presence and evolution of natural history museums around the world, interviewing curators, scientists and exhibit designers and providing many observations of the history of these museums and how their contents and approaches have evolved. The result is an excellent and intriguing story of the evolution of natural history collections.

Mummies, Museums, and Metaphysics
If you do not want to know the nuts and bolts (or rather, the knives and molds) of the craft of taxidermy, but you want to know about why people might be interested in such an activity, what happens to their exhibits in museums, how museums express cultural and scientific philosophy, and how we come to categorize the biology that fills our world, then Stephen T. Asma's _Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums_ (Oxford University Press) will do nicely.It is an amusing ramble through museums, but since Asma is a professor of philosophy, it veers through much larger ideas.

Asma obviously likes museums, and he has gained entrance to the back rooms denied to other mortals.He is delighted to report his findings, such as the dermestid beetle room at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.These beetles, held in a stinky sealed room that has a door like a submarine hatch, swarm over the skinned bodies of specimens, literally gnawing them to the bone in a couple of days.He has interviewed curators and exhibition designers, and has them explain what they are trying to accomplish in their exhibits.But they may not know; how a display is arranged depends on scientific and social philosophy which varies from time to time and from nation to nation, and may be covert.Louis Agassiz displayed human racial artifacts at Harvard to emphasize that races were different, having been separately and specially created, rather than showing the continuity of human descent.The natural history museum in England have exhibits that emphasize Darwin, but the French hardly mention him.The Americans will have the most modern philosophy of taxonomy.

Comfortable with including Plato, James, Wittgenstein and others from his own field, Asma gives a wide-ranging discussion of epistemological issues that is academic but is never stuffy and never loses its sense of fun. ... Read more

Book Description
200 Full Color Illustrations; Color & B&W Photos ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Awesome Scientific Information
Tim Gardom with Angela Milner as Scientific Adviser have included comprehensive data that is known about dinosaurs.The pictures of real fossil skeletons, drawings, and even escavation sites are very interesting and informative.I like how he has arranged the book into categories(8 in all) and then followed up with an appendix, glossary, further reading, and a complete index of this book.He gives an in-depth history of fossil discoveries, while giving explanations from different cultural viewpoints about the bones and what kind of animals they might be.I can see how the Chinese came up with the dragon idea!Our grandchildren love all books about dinosaurs, but they really like this one.I found in my research that it is recommended by a paleontologist as a definite library selection for middle to high school budding paleontologists.If a person in the career of paleontologist likes the book, I think it is a must have!Thanks for this opportunity to review the awesome book! ... Read more