Blogs

There was a day when if you lived in a country that didn't have a good library—a very good library, in fact—you were effectively cut off from information on your countries' biodiversity.  This literature was contained in old volumes of (mostly) European journals devoted to taxonomy. Type specimens—the ultimate reference for every species—were locked away in far-away museums. Good luck trying to figure out the species identity of an unusual plant, insect, or even fish without a plane ticket, or flying in an expert.