NEW YORK, NY.- Featuring scientific illustrations spanning five centuries, the new exhibition Natural Histories: 400 Years of Scientific Illustration from the Museum’s Library explores the integral role illustration has played in scientific discovery through 50 striking, large-format reproductions from seminal holdings in the Museum Library’s Rare Book collection.

The exhibition, which opened on Saturday, October 19, was inspired by the 2012 book, Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library, edited by Tom Baione, the Museum Library’s Director. It showcases images that were created in pursuit of scientific knowledge and to accompany important scientific works in disciplines ranging from astronomy to zoology, including illustrations by celebrated artists Albrecht Dürer, Joseph Wolf, Moses Harris, and John Woodhouse Audubon.

Illustration has been essential both to scientific research and to disseminating findings about the natural world among scientists and the public on an unprecedented scale beginning in the 1500s. In the process of observing specimens and describing their structures, and working closely with illustrators or creating detailed illustrations themselves, naturalists including Charles Darwin, Marcus Elieser Bloch, and Maria Sibylla Merian cataloged new species, found similarities between species and began to place them on the evolutionary tree.

Different printing techniques, ranging from woodcuts to engraving to lithography, proved highly effective in spreading new knowledge about nature and human culture to a growing audience. Illustrated books allowed the lay public to share in the excitement of discoveries, from Antarctica to the Amazon, from the largest life forms to the microscopic.

“In the days before photography and printing, original art was the only way to capture the likeness of organisms, people, and places, and therefore the only way to share this information with others,” said Tom Baione, curator of Natural Histories and the Harold Boeschenstein Director of the Department of Library Services at the Museum. “Printed reproductions of art about natural history enabled many who’d never seen an octopus, for example, to try to begin to understand what an octopus looked like and how its unusual features might function.”

Today, Museum scientists use many imaging technologies to conduct research: infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, computed tomography (CT) scanners and more. But there is still a role for illustration. How else to depict animals that can’t be seen live, such as a fleshed-out dinosaur? Illustration is also used to clearly represent complex structures, color graduations, and other essential details.

Examples of reproductions on display in Natural Histories include:

· A woodcut of an ornately armored rhinoceros by German artist Albrecht Dürer from Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium (Histories of the animals), published between 1551 and 1558, and considered the beginning of modern zoology.

· An image of a Rhea pennata, a flightless bird native to South America, drawn by John Gould and reproduced as a lithograph for The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1839-1843), a five-volume work edited by Charles Darwin. The specimens Darwin collected during his travels on H.M.S. Beagle became a foundation for Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

· Illustrations of marine invertebrates by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who described and illustrated such specimens in the thousands. Many of those images were used to create Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature) published between 1899 and 1904. Haeckel used a microscope to capture the intricate structures of creatures like siphonophores—colonies of highly specialized organisms—that look like sea jellies.

· An engraving from Uranometria (1603)—the first star atlas to map both the northern and southern skies, published by Johannes Bayer—depicting two constellations: Serpentarius, the snake holder, and Serpens, the snake.

· Robert Hooke’s meticulous illustration of a flea from his book Micrographia (1667) which foretold a new chapter in natural history; in which organisms could be classified according to detailed descriptions of their anatomy.

· Two views of the young hippo Obayasch in Egypt, provided by Joseph Wolf (1820–1899), the principal artist for the Zoological Society of London, for one of the Society’s publications before he was transported to the London Zoo.

Natural Histories is on view through October 12, 2014 in the IMAX corridor on the Museum’s first floor. During the course of the exhibition, various rare books—including works with images featured in Natural Histories and many never before seen by the public—are displayed on a rotating basis outside the entrance of the Museum’s Research Library on the fourth floor.

Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library, edited by Tom Baione, was the first in a series of books published by Sterling Signature. Natural Histories: Extraordinary Birds, by Paul Sweet, collections manager in the Museum’s Department of Ornithology, is the next compendium in this well-received series that marries art and thought-provoking science. Sweet takes readers on a migratory journey across the globe, introducing them to unique and exquisite birds, as well as to groundbreaking avian studies from the past 500 years. Featuring 40 frameable prints and an equal number of fascinating, in-depth essays, this stunning collection gives bird lovers a precious look at illustrated ornithological monographs from the Museum's Rare Book Collection, which includes more than 14,000 volumes dating back to the 15th century.