[Commentary] Rooted in art and science, “natural history” carries a legacy of evolution

Observing and documenting organisms and the way they live in natural areas is an ancient art that can be traced to tens of thousands of years before the present. The Stone Age cave paintings left behind by the prehistoric human ancestors bear testimony to this assertion. The millennia-old art that eventually came to be known as “natural history” paved the way for now-trending life sciences such as taxonomy, wildlife biology and ecology. Natural history the cornerstone of taxonomy Taxonomy is the science of classifying and naming organisms. That taxonomy has had its roots in natural history is quite evident in traditional systems of classifying plants and animals. The symbiotic relationship set roots and blossomed in dedicated natural history museums such as the Museum of Natural History (London), American Museum of Natural History (New York), and others such as the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) that houses the oldest repository of natural history in India. Even today, these museums hold the best natural history repositories in the form of well-preserved collections of biological specimens, drawings, paintings, photographs, audio recordings, and field notes. BNHS stands out as the most important contributor to India’s knowledge of its birds, butterflies, and mammals. BNHS and India’s ‘Bird Man’ Salim Ali are synonymous. When the first edition of his Book of Indian Birds was published in 1941, it revolutionised birdwatching and field ornithology in the country. At that time, no user-friendly illustrated book was available for the field study of any class of organisms in India.…This article was originally published on Mongabay