The Sea Between Image and Imagination - The Investigation of the Underwater World from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment.

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The oldest herpetological collection in the world : the surviving amphibian and reptile specimens of the Museum of Ulisse Aldrovandi

The natural history collection of the Bolognese polymath, encyclopedist, and natural philosopher Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is regarded as the first museum in the modern sense of the term. It was intended as a resource for scholarship and a microcosm of the natural world, not simply a cabinet of curiosities. In addition to physical specimens, Aldrovandi's zoological material included a large series of paintings of animals (Tavole di Animali) that were integral to the collection. Following Aldrovandi's death, his collection was maintained by the terms of his will, but by the 19th century relatively little remained. We examined surviving herpetological components of the collection, comprising 19 specimens of ten species, as well as the corresponding paintings and associated archival material in the Museum of Palazzo Poggi, Museo di Zoologia, and Biblioteca Universitaria Bolognese in Bologna, Italy. Although the antiquity of some of these dried preparations is in question, many are documented in the Tavole di Animali and/or are mentioned in 17th century lists of the museum, verifying them as the oldest museum specimens of amphibians and reptiles in the world. Exotic species are best represented, including two specimens of Uromastyx aegyptia and several boid snakes - the first New World reptiles to be displayed in Europe. However, the Tavole di Animali suggest that the original collection was dominated by Italian taxa and that greater effort may have been made to conserve the more spectacular specimens. The Aldrovandi collection provides a tangible link to the dawn of modern herpetology in Renaissance Italy

A Molecular Phylogeny of Bivalve Mollusks: Ancient Radiations and Divergences as Revealed by Mitochondrial Genes

Background: Bivalves are very ancient and successful conchiferan mollusks (both in terms of species number and geographical distribution). Despite their importance in marine biota, their deep phylogenetic relationships were scarcely investigated from a molecular perspective, whereas much valuable work has been done on taxonomy, as well as phylogeny, of lower taxa. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we present a class-level bivalve phylogeny with a broad sample of 122 ingroup taxa, using four mitochondrial markers (MT-RNR1, MT-RNR2, MT-CO1, MT-CYB). Rigorous techniques have been exploited to set up the dataset, analyze phylogenetic signal, and infer a single final tree. In this study, we show the basal position of Opponobranchia to all Autobranchia, as well as of Palaeoheterodonta to the remaining Autobranchia, which we here propose to call Amarsipobranchia. Anomalodesmata were retrieved as monophyletic and basal to (Heterodonta + Pteriomorphia). Conclusions/Significance: Bivalve morphological characters were traced onto the phylogenetic trees obtained from the molecular analysis; our analysis suggests that eulamellibranch gills and heterodont hinge are ancestral characters for all Autobranchia. This conclusion would entail a re-evaluation of bivalve symplesiomorphies

3D Digitization and Web Publishing of an ISMAR Cartographic Heritage: Historical Maps of Venice Lagoon

Recently a collection of ancient maps was found in the Institute of Marine Sciences of CNR in Venice. The collection includes maps, perspective views, pilot books and ancient manuscripts: this work took into account a selection of maps and documents representing the Venice Lagoon and the Adriatic coast. The first part of this research focused on the application of a scientific method for digital acquisition of historical cartography; thanks to the Geomatic tools and especially to digital photogrammetry it is possible to acquire metric, semantic and symbolic information and also the three-dimensional shape of the geometrical support to correct the deformations occurred over time. In order to allow historical and morphological analysis of the Venice Lagoon, one of the main goals of this research will be the creation of a digital catalogue on a web-gis platform with all the ancient maps acquired. In this way it will be possible to query and to overlap the maps in an interactive way, allowing studies and comparisons with the more recent cartography. The applied procedure of recovery and valorization of historical cartography is divided into three different phases: acquisition, georeferencing and data elaboration of maps in a digital environment. This research underlines the application of a scientific procedure for the conservation and valorization of the historical Cartographic Heritage

ROV-SCUBA integrated survey of the Montecristo Island Nature Reserve (Tuscan Archipelago National Park, Mediterranean Sea)

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Algarium Veneticum: a new institutional herbarium for the study of marine algal biodiversity. XXV Congresso Associazione Nazionale Musei Scientifici, Torino, 11-13 Novembre 2015.

<p>Algae started to be collected at least from the Renaissance: one of the earlier known herbaria still preserved including algae, is the Ulysses Aldrovandi’s Hortus Siccus, collected from about 1551 until Aldrovandi’s death in 1605.</p> <p>The <i>Agardh herbarium</i> contains one of the world’s most important collections of algae, with 50.000 samples and 6000 type specimens, while the <i>Algarium Zanardini</i>, at the Natural History Museum of Venice, is undoubtedly the most valuable collection of species mostly from the Adriatic Sea<i>.</i></p> <p>Recently, a forgotten algal herbarium collected from Aristocle Vatova between 1942 and 1950 in Venice Lagoon has been found at the Biblioteca Storica di Studi Adriatici of the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR CNR) headquarters in Venice. It was decided to formally establish the first herbarium of the Institute. The new herbarium was recorded by the New York Botanical Garden under the name <i>Algarium Veneticum</i> and the acronym as Index Herbariorum was assigned. Currently, the <i>Algarium Veneticum</i> includes the Vatova collection entitled “<i>Distribuzione e polimorfismo di </i>Gracilaria confervoides<i> nella Laguna di Venezia</i>”, consisting of 19 folders containing more than a thousand samples of <i>Gracilaria</i> and a miscellaneous section with specimens of different algal taxa.</p> This project aims: i) to digitize the Vatova collection and to publish the metadata on the platforms <i>Atlante della Laguna</i> (www.atlantedellalaguna.it), <i>CIGNo</i> (http://cigno.ve.ismar.cnr.it/) and on the Biblioteca Storica di Studi Adriatici website (http://bsa.ve.ismar.cnr.it); ii) to revise the collection by an integrated approach of both classic taxonomic methods and DNA barcoding techniques; iii) to expand the algarium with modern algal collections from Venice Lagoon and Adriatic Sea

Chemosynthetic bivalves of the family Solemyidae (Bivalvia, Protobranchia) in the neogene of the Mediterranean basin

The Mediterranean area is the locus of a variety of deep-sea chemosynthetic environments that have been exploited by bivalves of the family Solemyidae during Cenozoic to present time. Large solemyids represented by the Solemya doderleini group were widely distributed in Neogene deep-sea reducing habitats, including cold vent hydrocarbon sites. Based upon the diagnostic structure of the ligament, Solemya doderleini (Mayer), 1861 and S. subquadrata (Foresti), 1879 are moved to the genus Acharax Dall, 1908. After the Messinian Salinity Crisis Acharax doderleini re-colonized deep-sea sulphide environments up to the Pliocene at least. At present, Acharax occurs in similar settings in the adjacent eastern Atlantic Ocean. Thus far, large solemyids are not documented from the present deep Mediterranean Sea in spite of a vast number of seep and reducing habitats with chemosynthetic biota, especially concentrated in its Eastern basin. Promisingly, however, a single live juvenile specimen of Solemyidae has been recently found at bathyal depth associated with a pockmark in the Nile Deep Sea Fan

Anatomy of a compound delta from the post-glacial transgressive record in the Adriatic Sea

On the Mediterranean continental shelves the post-glacial transgressive succession is a complex picture composed by seaward progradations, related to sea level stillstands and/or increased sediment supply to the coasts, and minor flooding surfaces, associated to phases of enhanced rates of sea level rise. Among Late Pleistocene examples, major mid-shelf progradations have been related to the short-term climatic reversal of the Younger Dryas event, a period during which the combination of increased sediment supply from rivers and reduced rates of sea level rise promoted the formation of progradations up to tens-meter thick. While the documentation of coastal and subaqueous progradations recording the Younger Dryas interval are widely reported in the literature, the model of compound progradation within transgressive deposits is not proposed so far. Here we present the documentation of a deltaic system where both delta front sands and related fine-grained subaqueous progradations (prodeltaic to shallow marine) have been preserved. The Paleo Gargano Compound Delta (PGCD) formed offshore the modern Gargano Promontory (southern Adriatic Sea), and is composed by a coastal coarse-grained delta of reduced thickness and a muddy subaqueous clinoform, up to 30 meters thick. The PGCD, probably the first worldwide documentation of a compound delta within the transgressive record, provides the opportunity to investigate the processes controlling the formation of a compound delta system during an overall sea level rise and the factors that allowed its preservation. The finding of the PGCD provides the opportunity of a comparison with modern worldwide compound systems