Beautiful Cephalopod Illustrations from the 1890s

Science is beautiful. (Biodiversity Heritage Library/ BibliOdyssey)

I have no idea how your Monday’s going, but I’m willing to bet that it can benefit from some awesome scientific squid and octopi illustrations from the turn of the century. Skip on over to the BibliOdyssey blog for this post full of images from the 1898 German Deep-Sea Expedition.

The crew of the steamship Valdivia hit the Atlantic, Indian and Great Southern oceans with a hull full of laboratory equipment and scientific tomes. Upon his return, Leipzig University zoologist Carl Chun published an illustrated multivolume work on their deep-sea findings titled “From the Depths of the World Sea.”

BibliOdyssey has 14 frame-worthy images from the work, as well as links to Chun’s complete work, archived at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. If you, like me, find cephalopods beautiful and amazing, then you’ll likely leave with some new desktop wallpaper fodder.

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