Free Illustrations of the Natural World

Jump straight to the wonderful images https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/sets/

Also mentioned on DataHorder (https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/extitr/150000_...), whole set is more than 200TB

There's an entire community project waiting to happen here with annotation of each of these images with an NCBI taxonomy ID. I would certainly love to see these illustrations come back in to vogue in various databases.

There is value in the drawing process, as it is in part itself an annotation exercise, wherein the illustrator decides which anatomical features to draw (or not draw) on the organism. If done well, this can reveal a lot of information relatively quickly.

Am I the only one who can smell these pages as I look at them?

Are they all public domain? If I follow individual images, the ones I've clicked on in flickr say 'public domain'.

What a wonderful collection but unfortunately heavily compresed, showing some heavy compression artifacts.

Free as in...? Free to watch?