The geology of the south-east of England.
Mantell, (Gideon Algernon)
First edition, lithographed frontispiece, five lithographed plates (one of which folding), all lightly foxed (due to paper stock used), hand-coloured folding engraved map, engraved vignette to title, text-figs., original boards, upper joint just beginning 1833
Paginates: 16pp. pub's ads., xix (xx), 415 (416).
"Gideon discovered his fourth [dinosaur], Hylaeosaurus, in 1832 when the quarrymen at Whiteman's Green saved for him a four-and-a-half by two-and-a-half foot slab including twelve vertebrae, together with ribs and other bones. Some evidently dermal spines were unprecedented and therefore especially puzzling. Yet Mantell's paper on his new creature, given before the Geological Society in December, identified it correctly. As the first armored dinosaur ever discovered, Hylaeosaurus not only established a third major family of prehistoric saurians but also provided indisputable evidence that it, at least, had been a land dweller, In 1824 and 1825 both Megalosaurus and Iguanodonhad been interpreted as primarily aquatic, like the modern crocodile. Gideon's paper on Hylaeosaurus, withheld by him on Charles Lyell's advice, surfaced not in a learned journal but as one chapter [chap. X] in a third book , The Geology of the South-East of England, which was largely a synthesis of his first two, though in modern format and without the expensive plates. Appearing the year after Cuvier had died, it is somewhat more uniformitarian in outlook than either of Gideon's earlier works, clearly reflecting the influence of Lyell. Also notable is its attempt, the first of a series, to reconstruct the environment in which theIguanodon had lived" (Dean 1998, p.22). Dean 1998 97.
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