The Birds of America
The Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio differs in a number of ways -- besides its dimensions -- from earlier editions of The Birds of America and from John James Audubon's original, massive Double-Elephant Folio, the heaviest volume of which weighs 56 pounds. These plates are organized not in the order that Audubon produced them for his subscribers but phylogenetically; that is, in a modern scientific classification sequence that somewhat parallels the evolutionary history of a genetically related group of organisms -- from the most primitive living examples to the most recently evolved -- in this case going from loons to sparrows and buntings. The numbering of our plates follows the taxonomical sequence of orders, families, and species in the Check-List of North American Birds prepared by the American Ornithologists' Union, as adapted and up-dated by the American Birding Association.
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What Hacker News says
- This reminds me of John James Audubon and his seminal work, "The Birds of America."
Audubon dedicated much of his life trying to paint every American bird. He basically crowdfunded the work by getting people to pay in advance for bird prints.
"The Birds of America" is a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life, with original copies being incredibly valuable collectors' items.
If you want to go down a rabbithole read up on his biography.
- >”John James Audubon, a prominent 19th-century artist, naturalist and slave owner whose detailed, colourful paintings in the book The Birds of America set the gold standard for generations of ornithologists.”
I had no idea, and truth be told “Audubon” simply existed as a term in my mind. I never gave a second thought as to what it actually stood for. For me, “Audubon” just means birds, and nothing more. And it still does after this because the organization never showed any hints of the ideology they want to distance themselves from.
Additionally, this article mentions chapters of the Audubon society dropping the name. The organization as a whole has not dropped the name, yet, at least.
- One could write an analogous article about birds. In painting the 435 images in The Birds of America, John James Audubon probably shot at least a few of each species. And then stuffed and mounted them.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon#/media/File...
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