Cheese Mites and Boxing Kangaroos and Sea Waves, Oh My! — Early Natural History Filmmaking

Film itself could be said to have been born out of the study of natural history. A series of stills, considered by most film historians to be the origins of the moving picture, were taken by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1877 of the racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop to answer a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during a gallop. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoopraxiscope, proving that all four hooves did indeed leave the ground at one time, and...