Australopithecus afarensis is an extinct hominid that lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. A. afarensis was slenderly built, like the younger Australopithecus africanus. It is thought that A. afarensis was more closely related to th...

Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton discovered on November 30, 1974 by the International Afar Research Expedition (IARE; director: Maurice Taieb, co-directors: Donald Johanson and Yves C...

Neanderthals were archaic humans that became extinct about 40,000 years ago. They seem to have appeared in Europe and later expanded into Southwest, Central and Northern Asia. There, they left hundreds of stone tool assemblages. Almost all...

Thera, or the modern island of Santorini, located sixty-nine miles north of the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, was devastated by a volcanic eruption sometime in the 15th century BC. The eruption was one the the most powerful in the past...

Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, its sister city, Pompeii was destroyed, and completely buried,...

Guillaume Rondelet was professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier in southern France and Chancellor of the Medical Faculty from 1560. Famed as a teacher, Rondelet was also the author of a book Libri de Piscibus Marinis on the na...

Carolus Clusius, or Charles de l'Écluse, was a Flemish doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th century scientific horticulturists. In 1573 he was appointed prefect of the imperial medical garden in Vienna by...

In 1577 begint op de leeftijd van 63 jaar de Scheveninger Adriaen Coenensz aan zijn Visboek. In drie jaar tijd verzamelt hij daarin allerlei wetenswaardigheden over de zee, de kusten en kustwateren, de visgronden en de zeedieren. Hij schrij...

Tulip mania was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is ge...

Swammerdam was a seventeenth century Dutch microscopist and naturalist who is most famous for his microscopic observations and descriptions of insect development that were published posthumously as The Bible of Nature, but is more often ref...

Nicolaas or Nicolaes Witsen was mayor of Amsterdam thirteen times, between 1682-1706. In 1693 he became administrator of the VOC. In 1689 he was extraordinary-ambassador to the English court, and became Fellow of the Royal Society. In his f...

In the year 1598 AD, Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the island of Mauritius discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo. Having been isolated by its island location from contact with humanity, the dodo greeted the...

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman...

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathe...

Lancelot Brown (1716 – 6 February 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect. He is remembered as "the last of the great English eighteenth-century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's grea...