Looking for the best sea illustrations for your next nautical projects? Amazing marine life abounds and is competing for our attention. With a selection of antiquated, wonderfully sea-illustrated books devoted to the study of those species, the Rare Book Room at the American Museum of Natural History is giving them the attention they merit. In Opulent Oceans, the third installment of a series on rare books discovered in the museum’s library, the visuals from the books—as well as the historical research that goes with them—are highlighted.
According to author and curator of Ichthyology Melanie Stiassny, “I wanted to cover as many groups of ocean animals and plants as possible for Opulent Oceans.” “The very first thing I did was make a list of all the major categories of marine life. From small copepods to enormous whales, from algae to sea urchins, it was a lengthy list, but once I got it, I started hunting for stunning pictures of as many of those categories as I could find in the Rare Book collection.
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Charles Darwin and David Starr Jordan are only a couple of the well-known scientists that Stiassny mentioned, but she claims that she met many more during her time in the library. She calls the museum’s collection of rare books “a genuine hidden jewel of the area” and calls it magnificent. Even though I’ve been working here for a very long time, I’ve never been able to walk the stacks for as long. Finding the works of so many marine pioneers was truly an amazing treat.
The most exciting discovery Stiassny made while conducting research for Opulent Oceans, in her words, “was the understanding that although much has changed since those pioneering years of marine biology, most of those changes are just the technological accouterments of modern science” (GPS, deep-sea submersibles, computers, and cameras). The pure delight of discovery and the excitement of exploring never changes.
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- VAMPIRE SQUID
This depiction of the vampire squid from hell, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, can be found in the 1920 publication Resultats des Campagnes Scientifiques accomplies sur son yacht par Albert 1er Prince Souverain de Monaco by French professor Louis Joubin. The greatest eye-to-body ratio of any animal in the world, these inhabitants of the deep water grow to be approximately 11 inches long and have reddish-brown skin. Their huge blue eyes can even reach 0.9 inches in diameter.
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- DARWIN’S BARNACLES
Charles Darwin produced a four-volume study on his second obsession, barnacles, five years before he published On the Origin of Species. These gigantic acorn barnacles (Megabalanus tintinnabulum), which are thought to be native to the tropics but have subsequently spread all over the world by attaching themselves to the hulls of ships, were featured in a monograph on the sub-class Cirripedia with illustrations of each species.
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- DOLPHIN
A somewhat inaccurate member of the Delphinidae family of dolphins is depicted in this woodcut from French explorer and naturalist Pierre Belon’s 1555 book La nature & diversité des poisons, Avec leurs pourtraicts, represented au plus près du naturel. Stiassny was unable to identify the dolphin’s species because of how fantastical it appeared. The names of many of the organisms shown in earlier works have frequently changed over time, so it took some detective work to determine what species they might genuinely represent, according to the author. In some instances, such as Belon’s beautiful dolphin, it was simply impossible, but most of the time the paintings were so precise that I was able to determine what species they actually belonged to.
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