Scientific illustration: What's the point? Reflections on the craft's ongoing value

By Nora Sherwood

More than 400 years ago, European explorers were traveling to distant corners of the globe and discovering unfamiliar landscapes, people, animals and plants. In a time when travel was prohibitively expensive for all but the most wealthy and too difficult for all but the most adventurous or desperate, scientific illustrators created images of these far-off places to show the people at home what those explorers found. A mostly European audience with an appetite for learning about all things exotic eagerly beheld images of South American flowers and bugs, African large mammals and birds of the Far East. Scientific illustration brought the distant world nearer, providing visuals to further trigger the imagination.

“Sable (Martes zibellina)” from The Cruise of the Marchesa with maps and woodcuts drawn by J. Keulemans, C. Whymper and others, Second edition, 1889, The British Library

Studying bursts of diversification in tropical bats

Sharlene Santana holds a Lophostoma silvicolum bat.

Sharlene Santana is an evolutionary biologist and the new curator of mammals here at the Burke Museum. She studies how behavior, diet, anatomy and function result in bursts of diversification in tropical bats – mostly from Panama, Costa Rica and Venezuela.

Sharlene was born and spent most of her life in Venezuela. Growing up in the tropics fostered her love for animals and interest in their diversity.

Some of the tropical forests where Sharlene has worked no longer exist because they have been cut down. While Sharlene releases most of the bats she studies in the field, she collects some specimens to help preserve the biodiversity of these increasingly threatened habitats. In her research today and other studies in the future, these specimens in collections will help answer questions that haven’t even been asked.

I recently sat down with Sharlene to ask her why and how she studies bats.