Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.

Britain's lynx are missing, and they have been for more than a thousand years. Why have they gone? And might they come back? Britain was a very different place 15,000 years ago – home to lions, lynx, bears, wolves, bison and many more megafauna. But as its climate changed and human populations expanded, most of early Britain's largest mammals disappeared. Will advances in science and technology mean that we can one day bring these mammals back? And should we? In The Missing Lynx, palaeontologist Ross Barnett uses case studies, new fossil discoveries and biomolecular evidence to paint a picture of these lost species and to explore the ecological significance of their disappearance. He discusses how the Britons these animals shared their lives with might have viewed them and investigates why some species survived while others vanished. Barnett also looks in detail at the realistic potential of reintroductions, rewilding and even of resurrection in Britain and overseas, from the successful return of beavers in Argyll to the revolutionary Pleistocene Park in Siberia, which has already seen progress in the revival of 'mammoth steppe' grassland. As widespread habitat destruction, climate change and an ever-growing human population lead us inexorably towards the sixth extinction, this timely book explores the spaces that extinction has left unfilled. And by helping us to understand why some of our most charismatic animals are gone, Ross Barnett encourages us to look to a brighter future, one that might see these missing beasts returned to the land on which they once lived and died.

Based on the latest phylogenetic studies, this book reveals the remarkable new history of how passerines diversified and dispersed across the entire world.

20-year-old Lexi Sobado is a woman with a psychic gift caught in the middle of a sinister web of crime and corruption. The victim of a stalker, Lexi finds herself romantically entangled with the special agent charged with protecting her. Thing is, Lexi herself has worked for the intelligence community in the past. What she hides, what she reveals and what she keeps trying to uncover become the juggling act our heroine deals with as she tries to save her own life and stop the killer.

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