Victorians Used Flowers to Send Secret Messages
Victorians elevated floriography to an art form and created bouquets to say things that could not be said aloud in polite society.
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Courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Archives
Victorians elevated floriography to an art form and created bouquets to say things that could not be said aloud in polite society.
When people get a bouquet of flowers today, the first thing they generally reach for is a vase to put them in. In Victorian times, people reached for their floral dictionary to decipher what secret message the flowers were saying.
From the simple daisy to the complex dahlia, flowers of every type have captivated for thousands of years, and the symbolic language of flowers has been recognized for centuries in many countries throughout Europe and Asia. Mythologies, folklore, sonnets, and plays of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese are peppered with flower and plant symbolism, and nearly every sentiment can be express
Thanatotheristes degrootorum is a fascinating find for
Canada: the first new tyrannosaur species to be discovered in the country in over 50 years. Paleoartist
Julius Csotonyi, who was the first to ever illustrate the fearsome prehistoric animal, sketched the reverse design of this new 99.99% pure silver coin forever preserving this unique addition to the
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology’s world-renowned dinosaur fossil collection. Csotonyi meticulously replicated the formation in which the fossil fragments were found.
The discovery of the
Thanatotheristes degrootorum enhances the understanding of paleontologists into Canada’s prehistoric past. Estimated to be at the top of the food chain, this tyrannosaur species pre-dates the