QUENSTEDT, Friedrich August.

Handbuch der Petrefaktenkunde ... Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage.WITH: Atlas zum Handbuche der Petrefaktenkunde ... Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage.Tübingen, H. Laupp'schen Buchhandlung, 1867. Large 8vo. 2 volumes. With 86 numbered lithographic plates showing thousands of figures in the Atlas volume, plus 185 wood-engraved figures in the text volume. Contemporary half sheepskin, textured paper sides.

viii, 982 pp.; (87) ll. + 86 plates. BMC NH, p. 1633; Nissen, ZBI 3262; DSB XI, pp. 235-236.A classic handbook of paleontology first published in 1852 and here in its expanded second edition (with 24 additional plates) still published only eight years after Darwin's Origin of Species. Quenstedt himself had made important discoveries concerning the Ichthyosaurus in the 1850s, and he also shows the even more recently discovered Archaeopteryx (1860). The illustrations of their skeletons must have raised many eyebrows at this date, but should anyone have wished to dismiss them as merely a fish and a bird, he also shows skeletons of a Plesiosaur and Pterodactyl, discovered a few decades earlier. "For years before publication of the Darwinian theory, Quenstedt taught that species were not sharply defined." (DSB). The book further illustrates a mastedon, numerous trilobites and many other creatures whose age had not yet been fathomed. As usual at this time, the book includes these extraordinary prehistoric fossils among bones of modern animals, shells, corals, etc. Facing each plate is a letterpress key to the numbered figures.Quenstedt (1809-1889) born five months after Darwin, became professor of minerology and geology at the University of Tübingen in 1837 and remained there to his death. He made his most important contributions to scholarship in his paleontology and stratigraphy of the Jurassic.With ink stamps of two owners on the first two pages. With the text leaves of the atlas volume browned and the text volume somewhat foxed, but still in very good condition, with only an occasional plate very slightly foxed. A pioneering work of paleontology, with thousands of illustrations.

• EUR 750.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: 88UG7L01U79O

• bookseller: Asher Rare Books (Since 1830) (NETHERLANDS)