Intricate 18th-century illustrations of stunning flora and fauna

These remarkable and intricate illustrations are the work of Mark Catesby, who made numerous visits to North America in the early 18th century, recording the flora and fauna he saw on his travels.

His work is collected in a new book, Catesby’s Natural History By Stephen A. Harris, an exploration of the naturalist’s landmark treatise, Natural History of the Carolinas, Florida, and Bahama Islands. “Catesby presented his readers with illustrations of the vast diversity of plants and animals that Europeans were encountering in North America and the Caribbean,” says Harris. “Many of these were illustrated for the first time – Catesby was the de facto authority on them.”

With more than 400 species, some of which are now extinct, several plaques depict a plant and an animal in one image, such as the rough green snake (Opheodrys summer), shown above, curling around an American beauty bush (American Calicarpa). Along the same lines, a giant hermit crab (Petrochirus diogenes) Harris writes sitting on what is “probably” an angular sea-whip (Pterogorgia anceps), shown above.

The photo above shows a colorful sheep (Lutjanus the analyst), and the deciduous plant Spanish jasmine (Plumeria rubra) is depicted below.

Catesby “hoped to arouse curiosity in natural history beyond the confines of the library,” says Harris. “His work talks about landscape and modern issues habitat changechanging the distribution and extinction of species and the value of indigenous traditional knowledge”.