As promised, here are loads of pictures from The Violinist’s Thumb, pictures of major and minor characters, of flashy and stunning scenes, and of other wild moments.

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Chapter One:

Miescher and his castle

Here you can see the castle at Tubingen where Miescher discovered DNA.

Chapter Two:

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Here’s Thomas Hunt Morgan’s Nobel Prize mugshot , as well as a rather handsome picture of the scientist as a young man. And here’s the picture that Sturtevant took using a hidden camera and a string.

Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant

One picture of Alfred Sturtevant “with arms akimbo” and one that says “ Hot Dog!” And here’s Calvin Bridges playing horseshoes and staring into space in the fly room. This link contains multiple pictures of each.

Hermann Muller

A spooky picture of Muller, as well as a nicer one of him and his flies.

Fruit Fly Pictures

A close up of a bottle buzzing with flies, and a packed cabinet of milk bottles in the fly room.

Hugo de Vries

Hugo de Vries examining his supposed primrose sports. (Other pictures available if you scroll down.)

Chapter Three:

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double atomic bomb survivor

The various obituaries of Tsutomu Yamaguchi (here’s one of them and here’s another of them) all had good pictures of him, though always as an old man. For a picture of a young Yamaguchi, see Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not online, unfortunately).

RNA Tie Club membership (sort of)

A picture of the RNA Tie Club tie. Unfortunately, you can’t buy them anymore, just look.

Chapter Four:

The many sides of Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon with his amazing, maze-solving mouse, Theseus. Here are oodles of pictures of Shannon as well, including him juggling.

Chapter Five:

Lynn Margulis

Here’s one picture of Lynn Margulis, and here is another.

All about Barbara McClintock

Here’s a link to an archive (right here) with boatloads of pictures of Barbara McClintock, in a range of ages and poses.

Chapter Six:

Monster maps

Here’s a large picture of probably the most glorious monster-filled map around, the Carta Marina. And here’s a close-up of the dog-faced people, among other freaks.

Hans Spemann and his daughter’s hair

On page two of this pdf, you can see a picture of Spemann himself; a loop of his daughter’s hair appears on page three.

Photograph of Behouden Huys

A grainy photograph of the hut in which Barentsz’s crew endured a long winter in the 1590s, after its rediscovery in 1881.

Chapter Seven:

Peyton Rous (and chicken) pictures

Here’s Rous’s official Nobel laureate photograph. And here’s a side-by-side comparison of the scientist as a young man and an old man. And, best of all, here’s the chicken tumor that got everything rolling in 1909.

Cat Crossing

Here’s a YouTube video of Jack Wright’s home, still crawling with hundreds of cats.

Chapter Eight:

Human tails

Here’s a series of pictures of people with tails, including one adult, Chandre Oram, who’s made something of a career out of having one.

Pedi-nipple

Here’s a picture of a nipple that grew on some poor woman’s foot.

Chapter Nine:

Crazy hybrid animals

Here are two news stories (one and two) with pictures of zonkeys, ligers, wholphins, and other hybrid animals.

Chromosome spaghetti

In the 1920s Texas biologist Theophilus Painter mistakenly published a paper saying that human beings had 48 chromosomes, not 46. You’ll have some more sympathy for Painter after you look at the pictures he had to use to make the counts. I’m not sure I could have gotten with a dozen.

Chapter Ten:

William Buckland’s hyena cave

When William Buckland discovered an ancient hyena lair full of gnawed-on bones in England, it was big news. Here, a newspaper cartoonist imagines, a little anachronistically, Buckland entering the cave.

Tambora and Toba

Here’s the after picture of the Tambora volcano explosion from 1815. And here’s the after from the circa 70,000 B.C. Toba volcano explosion, the one that (quite possibly) threatened the human race’s very existence.

Chapter Eleven:

Stolen body parts

Three glorious slideshows full of famous stolen body parts: one right here, another right here, and the last right here.

Chapter Twelve:

Monkey art

Some surprisingly good paintings done by chimpanzees.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s idea of fun

Warning: this one’s a little scatological. But it sure is interesting to watch one of the world’s great artists drop his pants and go to the bathroom on a public beach.

That lovely Hapsburg lip

Here are all the pictures you’ll probably ever want to see of the famous inbred Hapsburg family’s notoriously ugly lips: here, here, and here.

Chapter Thirteen:

King Tut’s final view

Here are pictures of the brown microbial splotches on the wall of King Tut’s tomb.

The amorphous Akhenaten