Life Sciences Commons^™

Artful Nature And The Legacy Of Maria Sibylla Merian, Emily N. Roush, Shannon R. Zeltmann, Felicia M. Else, Kay Etheridge, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The exhibition Artful Nature and the Legacy of Maria Sibylla Merian celebrates the skills and influences of a remarkable woman from seventeenth-century Europe. Curated by Emily Roush ’21 and Shannon Zeltmann ’21 with the guidance of Professors Kay Etheridge (Biology) and Felicia Else (Art History), Emily and Shannon selected the prints, organized them into categories, and carried out research on them, much of which was relatively obscure and would have been challenging even for graduate students.

Maria Sibylla Merian lived and worked in a time of vibrant intersections of art and science in Europe. Her images of insects and plants …

Advancing Natural History Research Using The Collections Of The Owu Brant Museum Of Zoology, Josh Pletcher, Kyle Davis

Student Symposium

Natural history collections are important repositories of biological and geological material. Biological collections provide raw data to interpret the ecology, anatomy, and evolution of living and fossil organisms. OWU’s zoological collections play an important role in undergraduate research and educating future preparators. Two projects are currently in progress: Kyle Davis’ work on size variation in house sparrows and Josh Pletcher’s work digitizing OWU’s collection of Ward’s fossil casts. We travelled to museums in New York and Connecticut to further pursue our research. Kyle Davis’ research focuses on Bergmann’s Rule, which states that as temperature decreases, body size increases, decreasing surface …

Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

In his Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences, Adrian Currie argues that historical scientists should be optimistic about success in reconstructing the past on the basis of future research. This optimism follows in part from examples of success in paleontology. I argue that paleontologists’ success in these cases is underwritten by the hierarchical nature of biological information: extinct organisms have extant analogues at various levels of taxonomic, ecological, and physiological hierarchies, and paleontologists are adept at exploiting analogies within one informational hierarchy to infer information in another. On this account, fossils serve the role …