A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
History
A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
American journal of science; Science -- United States -- History
Rütimeyer of Bâle was one of the most famous European writers on
mammalian paleontology, and his researches were both comprehensive and
clothed in such form as to give them a high place in paleontological
literature. He studied comparatively the teeth of ungulates, discussed
the genealogy of mammals, and the relationships of those of the Old and
New Worlds. He was an exponent of the law of evolution as set forth by
Darwin, and his “genealogical trees of the Mammalia show a complete
knowledge of all the data concerning the different members in the
succession, and are amongst the finest results hitherto obtained by
means of strict scientific methods of investigation” (Zittel, History of
Geology and Palæontology, 1901). The mammals of the Swiss Eocene have
been studied in much detail by Stehlin.
For Great Britain, the most notable contributors were Buckland in his
Reliquiæ Diluvianæ; Falconer, co-author with Cautley on the Tertiary
mammals of India; Charles Murchison, who wrote on rhinoceroses and
proboscideans; and more recently Bush, Flower, Lydekker, Boyd Dawkins,
L. Adams, and C. W. Andrews. But by far the most commanding figure of
all was Sir Richard Owen, who for half a century stood without a peer as
the greatest of authorities on fossil mammals. It was the Natural
History of the British Fossil Mammals and Birds, published in 1846, that
established Sir Richard’s reputation.
Russia has produced much mammalian material, especially from the
Tertiary of Odessa and Bessarabia, and from the Quaternary of northern
Russia and Siberia. These have been described mainly by J. F. Brandt, A.
von Nordmann, but especially by Mme. M. Pavlow of Moscow.
Forsyth-Major discovered in 1887 a fauna contemporaneous with that of
Pikermi in the Island of Samos in the Mediterranean.
One of the most remarkable recent discoveries of fossil localities was
that announced in 1901 by Mr. Hugh J. L. Beadnell of the Geological
Survey of Egypt and Doctor C. W. Andrews of the British Museum of
London, of numerous land and sea mammals of Upper Eocene and Lower
Oligocene age in northern Egypt. The exposures lay about 80 miles
southwest of Cairo in the Fayûm district and are the sediments of an
ancient Tertiary lake, a relic of which, Birket-el-Qurun, yet remains.
These beds contained ancient Hyracoidea, Sirenia, and Zeuglodontia, but
above all, ancestral Proboscidea which, together with those known
elsewhere, enabled Andrews to demonstrate the origin and evolutionary
features of this most remarkable group of beasts. This discovery in the
Fayûm lends color to the belief that Africa may have been the ancestral
home of at least five of the mammalian orders, those mentioned above,
together with the Embrithopoda, a group unknown elsewhere. This theory
had been advanced independently by Tullberg, Stehlin, and Osborn, before
the discovery in Egypt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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