January 31st is International Zebra Day! First up, images of the first known zebras imported into Great Britain.
Bonus: Exhibit A, spotted on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2020: This three-quarter view of John Bee Holmes (1760-1827) against a curtain backdrop was painted when the sitter was about six years old. He is shown looking at the viewer with a slight smile, his body turned…
Haori with Penguins and Icebreaker ShipsJapan, mid-Shōwa period, 1957-58silk plain weave, stencil-printed warp and weft[photos by author] Penguins (Spheniscidae) are found almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with only the Galápagos penguin (Spheniscus mendiculus) skirting the other side of the equator. They definitely aren’t native to anywhere near Japan! I saw…
January 14th is Feast of the Ass day! Yes, that’s a real thing — it originated as a niche Christian medieval feast day celebrated primarily in France as part of the Feast of Fools. I suppose that feast’s name should’ve prepared me for my encounter with this donkey dish at…
Alfred Russel Wallace was born #OTD 200 years ago (8 Jan. 1823). Here’s his original sketch & published drawing of a frog previously unknown to science & now named in his honor, Wallace’s Flying Frog:
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is set to open a pair of new animal-themed exhibitions, both running from 30 September 2022 – 15 January 2023: 1 CLARA THE RHINOCEROS –Clara was unfamiliar, impressively large, and strange to behold – in short, she was different from any other animal. Clara the Rhinoceros tells…
Tingatinga September 25, 2022–January 8, 2023 Free Admission Fowler Museum at UCLA This exhibition showcases a series of animal paintings made by members of the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society in the 1990s. The Tingatinga style began with Tanzanian painter Edward Saidi (E.S.) Tingatinga (b. Dar es Salaam, 1939; d. 1972)….
A 1,300-year-old sculpture of a dancing horse — a precious relic of China’s Tang dynasty — captured an ancient tradition of trained horses performing for emperors.But curators at the Cincinnati Art Museum weren’t charmed with one of the lively 8th-century statue’s features: a forehead tassel they suspected wasn’t original.How to investigate without…
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Happy International Red Panda Day, celebrated annually on the 3rd Saturday of September! The Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens, which roughly translates to “shining cat”), is a small mammal native to the eastern Himalayas and southwestern China. It is the only extant species of the Ailuridae family, nestled within the “weasel…
To mark the quincentenary of the birth of the famed Italian natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), the Edward Worth Library and the Zoologial Museum of Trinity College Dublin have co-curated a web exhibition called “Reading the Book of Nature,” which juxtaposes images from the Worth Library’s set of Aldrovandi’s natural…
