Recent Acquisitions

The rare offprint announcing “the most perfect sauropod skeleton ever discovered” (Ashworth, Paper Dinosaurs 40).

This superb, nearly complete specimen of a juvenile Camarasaurus was discovered at the Carnegie quarry shortly after it became Dinosaur National Monument. “In 1925 Gilmore described the specimen in this fully illustrated memoir” which includes a photo of the fossil as it was found and later as it was displayed as a panel mount (Ashworth). “The articulation of the bones allowed Gilmore to conclude that Camarasaurus did not have its highest elevation at the shoulders, as Osborn and Mook had reconstructed it, but rather stood highest at the hips, like Apatosaurus and Diplodocus” (Ashworth).

An elegant and substantial 114-page “schatkamer” educational manuscript produced by a student of navigation in Georgian England.

As historian Margarette E. Schotte explains in Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill 1550-1800 (2019), between the 16th and 18th centuries northern European navigation developed from a craft learned by practice aboard ship to a profession taught in specialised schools. Central to this pedagogy was the creation of “manuscript ‘treasure chests’ (schatkamers) – in which members of the maritime community puzzled through lessons related to their profession” (Schotte, p. 9).

As is typical for schatkamers, the present manuscript comprises both notes and practice problems, and combines traditional nautical knowledge with trigonometry. It opens with the compass rose, “perhaps the most fundamental of all navigational devices. One early seventeenth-century English maritime writer likened the ability to recite the thirty-two points to mastering the rudiments of alphabet... Mariners used this framework not only to orient themselves geographically – with the help of a simple magnetic compass and the stars – but also as a type of notional clock, to keep track of tides in various ports” (Schotte, p. 31). Another set of traditional skills was determining tides. The required pieces of information were the Golden Number, the epact, the Sunday letter, and the Moon’s age in the current month, which could be determined by calculations on the knuckles and then combined with times from local tide tables for the final result. Explanations of the method and calculations for determining all these numbers, as well as the Moon’s “southing” or angle above the horizon, are recorded here.

Much of the manuscript addresses different techniques for reckoning, including notes, practice problems, and diagrams. Eleven pages are on plane sailing, a simplified form of trigonometric reckoning used over small ranges of latitude and longitude; fourteen cover middle latitude sailing, a method of determining departure by assuming that a course is steered at the middle latitude; and eleven are on Mercator sailing, which utilises a Mercator projection to solve navigational problems. Oblique sailing, in which a course oblique to the meridian is charted, and current sailing, the technique of predicting the current’s effect on a vessel’s course, also make appearances.

Of particular interest are the five pages on traverse sailing, including two completed traverse course diagrams with charming illustrations of ships. As Schotte explains, these diagrams were not generally used aboard ship, but in the classroom they helped students develop the skill of precisely tracking a ship’s location. “Once a day, at least, the navigator added up the numerous legs from the preceding twenty-four hours to determine a vessel’s current position. Navigators were accustomed to tracking their progress on traverse boards, but these pegboards could document only the barest essentials of the course. As expectations increased about the accuracy of the day’s records, sailors were taught how to record their motion in geometric terms and then to analyze the resultant shapes with trigonometry. Textbook authors devoted whole chapters to the ‘traverse course’, explaining the fairly straightforward process of converting a day’s travel into a form compatible with a tabular logbook. Instructors walked students through the construction of a right-angled triangle that represented the ‘difference of latitude’ and ‘course’ for a single trajectory and then demonstrated how to add together multiple triangles’... Teachers believed in the pedagogical value of drawing such courses and included set examples in their teaching. Although publishers chose to conserve paper rather than print these sprawling diagrams, students frequently produced them in class” and “regularly pushed beyond the printed text. When it came to traverse courses, teachers took opportunities to make exercises more interesting and memorable” by using both real and fanciful place names and designing courses in “witty shapes” like hearts, anchors, spirals, and fortifications (Schotte, pp. 127-129). In this manuscript, one of the traverse charts includes a delightful drawing of a three-masted sailing ship, remarkably detailed for its diminutive size.

As important as these mathematical techniques was the navigator’s ability to keep accurate records and to correct dead reckoning while at sea, to which twenty pages of the manuscript are devoted. These lessons culminate in a remarkable 17-page exercise charting in detail a ship’s progress from London to Madeira, based on a sailing of the Nancy, commanded by “A. B.” with the log kept by the mate T. Weir. The exercise includes elaborate calculations as well as notes on the weather and astronomical information. A second exercise, based on the sailing of the Frances of London, commanded by William Johnson, from London to Madeira and Tenerife was begun but seems to have been left incomplete. There are also sixteen pages on surveying coast and harbours, including two carefully drawn charts of fictional coasts. Finally, the manuscript ends with a short chapter on the curvature of the earth and its effect on one’s view of objects at a distance.

Schatkamers like this one could have a long life, and might be returned to for reference, or plumbed for practice questions when the mariner needed to take tests to advance in their career. Today they are an important and under-utilised historical source on the ways that individuals learned their craft, as well as how the teaching and practice of navigation adapted to the new realities of long-distance voyages (Schotte). This is a superb example, comprehensive, complete, and neatly written, with great care taken in preparing the charts and drawings.

First edition, the uncommon offprint issue, of an important paper developing the theory of ideals in commutative ring theory, utilising ascending chain conditions, part of the author’s development of what is now known as modern abstract algebra.

Described by Albert Einstein as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began” (letter to the editor, the New York Times, May 4th, 1935), Emmy Noether (1882-1935) was born into a family of distinguished German-Jewish mathematicians and scientists. She studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen and was awarded her doctorate in 1907 for her dissertation on algebraic invariants. Unable to obtain a paid position, Noether worked without compensation at Erlangen and then Göttingen before receiving the title “unofficial associate professor” and a small salary in 1922. When the Nazis came to power she accepted a position at Bryn Mawr, “partly because of its tradition of eminent female mathematicians”, and remained there until her death in 1935 (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 949).

Mathematician Hermann Weyl divided Noether’s career into three distinct periods: relative dependancy (1908-1919), the theory of ideals (1920-1926) and noncommunicative algebras (1927-1935) “Noether saw the creation of general abstract algebra as her life’s work. Instead of classical algebra with real numbers, or complex numbers, and polynomials using them, she would study any system satisfying abstract rules such as the ring axioms or the group axioms. Concrete examples include the ring of all algebraic functions defined on a space (such as a sphere), and the group of all symmetries of a given space. She largely created the now-standard style of abstract algebra” (McLarty, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, VI.76, pp 800-801). “Her work in abstract algebra, in which she concentrated on formal properties such as associativity, commutativity, and distributivity, has inspired so many successors that mathematicians speak of the ‘Noether school’ of mathematics” (Ogilvie).

First edition of the rare offprint of this important paper on electrolysis, presentation copy inscribed by Davy on the title, “from the Author”. Only one copy of the offprint appears in recent auction records, sold at Christies in 2008.

Davy’s belief that “electricity was a force or power, not a substance” (ODNB) led to a remarkable series of experiments that laid the groundwork for his electrical theory of chemical affinity and raised British physical science to the same level as that being done in France.

“In 1806 Davy was able to return to electrochemistry, and in November of that year it formed the subject of the Bakerian Lecture, which he delivered before the Royal Society. The first part of the lecture was concerned with the decomposition of water on electrolysis... Davy established that when pure water, redistilled in silver apparatus, was electrolyzed in gold or agate vessels in an atmosphere of hydrogen (so that nitrogen could not combine with the nascent hydrogen or oxygen), it was decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen only... Nobody had reasoned and experimented with a clarity approaching this. Davy then proceeded to discuss the use of electrolysis as a method of chemical analysis and the transport of substances during electrolysis, and to propose an electrical theory of chemical affinity... Davy found that the electrical condition of a substance can modify its chemical properties; negatively electrified zinc is inert, and positively electrified silver is reactive. This, and that an electric current decomposed compounds, led Davy to propose that chemical affinity is electrical” (DSB).

This lecture was read on November 20, 1806, and the experiments described here led Davy to discover sodium and potassium the following year, and in 1808 barium, calcium and boron. “Davy's papers describing these researches were chosen as the Bakerian lectures of the Royal Society and marked him as one of the greatest men of science of the day. British science was provincial compared to that in Paris, but now patriots and upholders of freedom could rejoice that a Briton had given chemistry a new direction, making it seem the fundamental science” (ODNB).

References: Source Book in Chemistry p. 243; Sparrow 52; Wheeler Gift 2511.

First edition, first printing, presentation copy inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Inscribed for Dr. G. A. C. Colston, from his long-time associate, Justine Hill, Baltimore, Mar 26, 1940”.

This work on disease-causing microbes was described as “the best popular presentation that had yet appeared” on the subject by psychiatrist Karl Menninger (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 601). Author Justina Hill (1893-?) attended Smith College and the University of Michigan, then served as a Red Cross worker, running a bacteriological laboratory in Spartanburg, South Carolina during the final two years of the First World War. She was then transferred with a Smith College unit to the Near East, where she ran a laboratory for five thousand refugees. “Upon returning to the United States, Hill was made an associate in bacteriology at the Brady Urological Institute and two years later an instructor in urology... She published numerous technical articles in medical journals as well as popular books on bacteriology” (Ogilvie). In 1942 she published Silent Enemies, on the communicable diseases of war, and in 1944 she contributed a piece in the Atlantic: “How Bad is the Flu? The possibility of recurrent epidemics, perhaps of increasing virulence, even of another pandemic, must be faced”.

ON RESERVE. The first edition of the first English book devoted to marine plants. A handsome copy, recently rebound and with all five of the delicate, hand-coloured plates. Only one other copy appears in auction records after the 1970s, at Bloomsbury in 2008.

Author Thomas Velley (baptised 1748-1806) was educated in the law at Oxford but devoted much of his time to botany, “especially to the study of algae. He collected in Essex, the Isle of Wight, and along the south coast. He was the friend and correspondent of Sir James Edward Smith, Dawson Turner, John Stackhouse, Sir Thomas Gery Cullum, Sir William Watson, and Richard Relhan, and became a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1792” (ODNB). Coloured Figures of Marine Plants was his only book, but he also published three scientific papers. At his death, his extensive herbarium was purchased for the Liverpool Botanic Garden.

Bibliography: Freeman, British Natural History Books 3820

First edition, first printing and a lovely copy in the dust jacket. The Field Book of Animals in Winter is much less common than Morgan’s book on ponds and streams, and is rarely found in such nice condition.

As a child, Ann Haven Morgan (1882-1966) developed a love of nature by exploring the areas around her home in Connecticut. She earned her bachelor’s degree and doctorate at Cornell, the latter under James G. Needham at the Limnological Laboratory.

Returning to Cornell, “she advanced steadily up the academic ladder, becoming a full professor in 1918. During the summer she conducted research and taught courses on echinoderms at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole... Although limnology (the study of inland waters) was her special subject – on which she wrote a useful book, Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930) – Morgan was also interested in many other facets of zoology, particularly hibernating animals. Her Field Book of Animals in Winter (1939) reflected this interest. In 1949 the Encyclopaedia Britannica made it into an educational film” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science p. 913).

Among her other scientific interests were conservation and ecology and educational reform. Morgan was a member of numerous professional societies, including the American Entomological Society, American Society of Naturalists, American Society of Zoologists, and the New York Herpetological Society. She was prominent enough to be one of only three women included in the 1933 edition of American Men of Science.

First edition, first printing of this rare work by a pioneer of modern ecology, Vasser professor Edith A. Roberts (1881-1977). Presentation copy inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To a very interesting student, Edith Terry, Edith A. Roberts”.

Roberts attended Smith College and earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1915, then worked as an associate professor at Mount Holyoke. During the First World War she travelled throughout the US as a field representative of the US Department of Agriculture, “advising women who were managing farms while their men were away in the service. But Roberts once told an interviewer that she thought ‘all women [who are] going to run a family should have plant science. It is basic to living’” (Ringel, “Edith Roberts: A Haven for Native Plants”, The Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly, fall 2012).

After the war Roberts was appointed professor botany at Vassar, where she created the Duchess County Outdoor Ecological Laboratory, “one of the first of its kind in the world”, a plot on which more than 2,000 species of native plants were studied (Ringel). She conducted research on seed germination, propagation of native plants, the development of starch in potatoes grown under different environmental conditions, and, together with colleague Mildred Southwick, made the important discovery that the original source of vitamin A is young green and yellow plants.

Roberts worked closely with Vassar landscape architect Elsa Rehmann, who interpreted her ecological work for garden design purposes. Together they became advocates of natural landscaping and wrote a series of articles on plant ecology for House Beautiful magazine that were collected and published as the present work in 1929 (Wayne, American Women of Science Since 1900). Each of the eleven chapters discusses a different North American ecological zone, including open fields, birch forests, oak woods, stream-sides, ponds, bogs, and the seaside.

Bibliography: Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1107

First English language edition, first impression of this vibrantly illustrated work, originally published in Prague under the title Tiere der Urzeit in the same year. Rare in the dust jacket in such nice condition.

Between the 1930s and 1960s “the foremost painter of dinosaur restorations was Zdeněk Burian (1905-1981). His canvasses were used to illustrate a number of popular books on prehistoric life by Joseph Augusta, and in the late 1950s and 1960s these were translated into English and widely circulated. So the Burian illustrations offered an alternative to those of Zallinger [responsible for the Peabody Museum mural], or of the late Charles Knight. But there was not much of a difference. Apatosaurus and Diplodocus stand quietly by their respective swamps, accompanied by partially submerged relatives. A T. rex besets a pair of Trachodon, but none of the three lifts a leg off the ground, or even seems to be moving at all” (Ashworth, Paper Dinosaurs 48). Though his dinosaurs are no longer considered anatomically accurate, Burian was highly respected in his time and his paintings were widely reproduced and copied, often without acknowledgement. In 2017 the first dinosaur discovered in the Czech Republic was named in his and Augusta’s honour, Burianosaurus augustai.

The author of the text, Joseph Augusta (1903-1968) was a palaeontologist at Charles University in Prague between 1933 and 1968, and is best known for his role as a science populariser. He published around twenty books on science for the general public and served as an advisor to the hit 1955 film Journey to the Beginning of Time (Cesta do Pravěku), which combined human actors with stop-motion special effects.

The translator of the book, Greta Hort (1903-1967), was born in Copenhagen, the daughter of Vilhelm Hjort, astronomer royal. She earned her PhD at Newnham College, Cambridge and then became a research fellow at Girton College, publishing on mysticism and religious thought. In 1938 Hort was appointed principal of University Women's College (later University College) at the University of Melbourne. She was later made chair of English literature at Aarhus University, Denmark (Australian Dictionary of Biography).

First edition, first printing of this key reference work described by reviewers as “monumental” and an “instant classic” (Padian, K. “The Dinosauria”, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, volume 11, number 2, June 1991). Though later printings are commonly available online, it is difficult to find first printings in nice condition.

The Dinosauria was “a comprehensive, authoritative review of current knowledge and theory about the dinosaurs” that reflected the dramatic shifts in palaeontology during the previous two decades (Wilford, review in The New York Times, January 27, 1991). The first edition contains twenty-nine chapters on dinosaur anatomy, physiology, behaviour, and evolution by twenty-three contributors including leading palaeontologists J. H. Ostrom, Jack Horner, Teresa Maryańska, Halszka Osmólska, Michael Benton and Jacques Gauthier. It was so successful that a revised and expanded second edition published in 2004 and remains in print today.

First edition, first printing of this important popular history of particle physics by “the preeminent public intellectual of fundamental physics”, Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) (Arkani-Hamad, “How Steven Weinberg Transformed Physics and Physicists, Quanta magazine, August 11, 2021). Uncommon in nice condition in the dust jacket.

Weinberg was one of the most important physicists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for the electroweak theory, which unified two of the fundamental forces: electromagnetism and the nuclear weak force. “Working separately, Dr. Abdus Salam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist, came to the same conclusions as Dr. Weinberg. Their model became known as the Weinberg-Salam Theory. It was revolutionary, not only for proposing the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, but also for creating a classification system of masses and charges for all fundamental particles, thereby forming the basis of the Standard Model, which includes all the forces except gravity” (New York Times obituary, July 29, 2021).

“Though he had the respect, almost awe, of his colleagues for his scientific abilities and insights, he also possessed a rare ability among scientists to communicate and explain abstruse scientific ideas to the public. He was a sought-after speaker, and he wrote several popular books about science, notably The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977) (NYT). As Weinberg explains in the introduction, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, “grew out of a course that I gave at Harvard in the spring of 1980... to engage students who were not assumed to have any prior training in mathematics or physics in learning about the great achievements of twentieth-century physics”. It “covers the discovery of the fundamental particles that make up all ordinary atoms: the electron, the proton, and the neutron” and was written “for readers who may not be familiar with classical physics, but are willing to pick up enough of it as they go along to be able to understand the rich tangle of ideas and experiments that make up the history of twentieth century physics”.

First edition, first impression. A rare copy of this charming, illustrated booklet on dinosaurs published by Warsaw’s Museum of the Earth. WorldCat only locates one copy, at the National Library of Poland. The detailed edition statement records that this book was submitted for typesetting in October 1969 and approved for printing in March 1970, with the order number dated 1969, for a total of 5,200 copies. Though the date 1979 appears above the statement, this is a typo, likely for 1970 (many thanks to Philip Penka of Bernett Penka Rare Books for the translation).

Author Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019)) was a leading dinosaur palaeontologist associated with the Museum of the Earth at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where she as vice-director between 1976 and 2006. “Her research was initially on invertebrate palaeontology. Her thesis concerned the Bryozoa, but she was always interested in vertebrates and looked for an opportunity to study them. Eventually, she was invited to participate in the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions to the Gobi desert, and became an active, highly appreciated participant of all four expeditions” (Borsuk-Białynicka & Jakubowski, “In Memoriam: Teresa Maryańska”, Acta Palaeontologica, volume 64, number 4, 2019).

Maryańska’s first dinosaur research was on the ankylosaurs, and her magnum opus on their anatomy and taxonomy was published in 1977. She then worked on specimens of the pacycephalosaurs, protoceratopsians, and hadrosaurs, and oviraptors, and many of her discoveries were made while working closely with her colleague and friend Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008). She was also a co-author of several chapters of The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990 and “unparalleled for its comprehensiveness at the time” (Borsuk-Białynicka).

First edition, first impression of Dinosaur, one of the earliest titles in the best-selling Eyewitness Books series, together with the first printing of the American edition, published in the same year. Copies of the first printings of the 1980s Eyewitness books are scarce, particularly in such beautiful condition.

The publisher Dorling Kindersley was founded in London 1974, and in the 1980s began taking advantage of new design technologies to radically revise the traditional page layouts of children’s books. As they described to Children’s Software Review in 1997, the goal was to “slow down the pictures and speed up the text”, allowing children to “experience information from their own particular point of view” (cited by Stringham, “The Efficacy of Small Multiples in the Visual Language of Instructional Designs”, Brigham Young University thesis, 2012). "What DK did—with almost revolutionary panache—was essentially to reinvent nonfiction books by breaking up the solid pages of gray type that had previously been their hallmark, reducing the text to bite-size, nonlinear nuggets that were then surrounded by pictures that did more than adorn—they also conveyed information. Usually full color, they were so crisply reproduced they seemed to leap off the page” (Cart, “Eyewitness Books: Putting the Graphic in Lexographic”, Booklist, October 15, 2002). There are now more than 100 Eyewitness Books, and more than 50 million copies have been sold in thirty-six languages.

The first Eyewitness Books were published in 1988, and Dinosaur appeared the following year, one of the first sixteen in the series and still in print today. Its authors are both prominent palaeontologists. Angela Milner, of the Natural History Museum in London, has done important work on archaeopteryx, providing evidence in the debate over whether it was a bird or dinosaur. David Norman is curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Museum. In 2017 he and two other paleontologists made the case for a complete revaluation of early dinosaur evolution and taxonomy, arguing that the two main dinosaur clades were more closely related than previously understood.

An uncommon offprint announcing results from the important Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions.

These expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971, resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. They “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). The authors of this piece, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019) and Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), were two of these specialists, who worked as a team for many years and became leaders in their field.

Osmólska has been described as “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson). She graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica. Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003” (Dodson). Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990 and “unparalleled for its comprehensiveness at the time” (Borsuk-Białynicka & Jakubowski, “In Memoriam: Teresa Maryańska”, Acta Palaeontologica, volume 64, number 4, 2019).

Teresa Maryańska was associated with the Museum of the Earth at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, serving as vice-director between 1976 and 2006. “Her research was initially on invertebrate palaeontology. Her thesis concerned the Bryozoa, but she was always interested in vertebrates and looked for an opportunity to study them. Eventually, she was invited to participate in the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions to the Gobi desert, and became an active, highly appreciated participant of all four expeditions” (Borsuk-Białynicka). Maryańska’s first dinosaur research was on the ankylosaurs, and her magnum opus on their anatomy and taxonomy was published in 1977. She then worked on specimens of the pacycephalosaurs, protoceratopsians, and hadrosaurs, and oviraptors. She was also a co-author of several chapters of The Dinosauria.

A rare, inscribed offprint by Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). Inscribed by the author on the upper cover using an abbreviated form of her signature, “from HOsm...”. This article reports on the authors’ observations of hadrosaur cranial structures, based on fossils collected from the Upper Cretaceous Nemegt Formation by the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions as well as examination of the hadrosaurs in the collections of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Osmólska graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica.

Osmólska was a member of the important Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971 and resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. These excavations “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson). Osmólska was one of these specialists, and much of her work on the Mongolian fossils was carried out in partnership with another prominent palaeontologist, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019), the lead author of this piece.

Osmólska and Maryańska’s first major publication resulting from the Gobi expeditions was the discovery of Deinocheirus mirificus (’unusual horrible hand’), “a fossil collected during the 1965 field season at Altan Ula III in the Nemegt Basin. The find consisted of two nearly complete articulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. The forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. The claws on the three-fingered hand measured 323 mm in length (nearly 13 inches). A possible ornithomimosaur, the animal remains enigmatic decades later, pending further discoveries” (Dodson).

Over the course of her career, Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003” (Dodson). Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990.

A rare, inscribed offprint by Halszka Osmólska (1930-2008), “one of the most productive dinosaur paleontologists of her generation” and “a giant” in the field (Dodson, ”Polish Women in the Gobi – In Loving Memory of Halszka Osmólska”, American Paleontologist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2008). Possibly inscribed by the author on the upper cover, “with compliments of H. Osmólska". This paper discusses the purpose of nasal glands in dinosaurs, and whether they were used to excrete salt, as in some bird species.

Osmólska graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1955, and spent most of her career at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she served as director between 1984 and 1989 and also as editor of the Institute’s journal, Acta Palaeontologica.

Osmólska was a member of the important Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi, which were led by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska between 1965 and 1971 and resulted in the excavation of thirty-five tons of fossils. These excavations “added greatly to our understanding of the diversity of dinosaurs. The material collected in those few years provided material for major portions of the careers of five or six Polish scientists” and “the scientific descriptions of dinosaurs that soon began to flow from the expeditions were almost exclusively written by Polish women, women who up to then had published on Paleozoic invertebrates” (Dodson). Osmólska was one of these specialists, and much of her work on the Mongolian fossils was carried out in partnership with another prominent palaeontologist, Teresa Maryańska (1937-2019).

Osmólska and Maryańska’s first major publication resulting from the Gobi expeditions was the discovery of Deinocheirus mirificus (’unusual horrible hand’), “a fossil collected during the 1965 field season at Altan Ula III in the Nemegt Basin. The find consisted of two nearly complete articulated forelimbs of a theropod of unprecedented size. The forelimbs were 2.4 meters (almost 8 feet) long. The claws on the three-fingered hand measured 323 mm in length (nearly 13 inches). A possible ornithomimosaur, the animal remains enigmatic decades later, pending further discoveries” (Dodson).

Over the course of her career, Osmólska “was responsible for the description of 15 genera of dinosaurs. She was solo author of four of these, and first author of two more. The remarkable team of Maryańska and Osmólska was responsible for naming eight genera. She was honored in the names of a basal archosaur, Osmolskina czatkowicensis (Borsuk-Białynicka & Evans, 2003) and two dinosaurs: the oviraptorosaur Citipati osmolskae (Clark et al., 2001), and most recently (June 2008) Velociraptor osmolskae (Godefroit et al., 2008). She was elected to honorary life membership in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2003”. Osmólska was also an editor of the The Dinosauria, one of the most important scholarly reference works on dinosaurs, first published in 1990.

The rare offprint of the first published paper by palaeontologist Elizaabeth L. Nicholls (1946-2004).

Plesiosaurs were long-necked, marine reptiles that evolved during the Triassic period. They survived the mass extinction that led to the Jurassic, and flourished alongside the dinosaurs during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The partially articulated plesiosaur skeleton described in this paper was discovered in 1970, in the foothills of southwestern Alberta. Collected by a team from the University of Calgary in 1974, it was notable for being the earliest specimen yet recorded in North America, where plesiosaur fossils are more commonly found in later sediments of the Cretaceous. This paper describes the preparation of the fossil up to October, 1975, describing the specimen as appearing to be complete except for the skull, though further work was needed to confirm this.

This paper was published while its author, Elizabeth Nicholls, was a graduate student in palaeontology at the University of Calgary, where she would complete her PhD in 1989. Nicholls became an expert on marine reptiles, working at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta and co-editing the book Ancient Marine Reptiles, published in 1997. She is best known for excavating, from a remote region of Canada, the largest marine reptile ever discovered, a 220-million-year-old ichthyosaur which she named Shonisaurus sikanniensis. Nichollas received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for the excavation in 2000, and in 2017 the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre established the Dr. Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Nicholls Award for Excellence in Palaeontology. She was also honoured by having a genus of extinct sea turtle, Nichollsemy, and a mosasaur, Latoplatecarpus nichollsae, named after her. 

First editions of three key works in the Archaeoraptor controversy, “one of the strangest episodes in modern paleontology” and “the dinosaur version of Piltdown Man” (Borger, ”Is it a bird? Is it a dinosaur? No, it’s a fake”, The Guardian, February 7, 2000). Included are the initial publication of the discovery of the “missing link” Archaeoraptor in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic, the correction by palaeontologist Xu Xing in the March 2000 issue, and the first edition of the follow-up book Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origins of Flight by the fossil’s original purchasers.

China’s Liaoning province, home to fossil-rich siltstone deposits dating back 130 million years, has been a centre for paleontological activity since 1996, when the first known feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropyteryx, was discovered there. At the time, the origin of birds was hotly contested, with the scientific consensus being that they had evolved separately alongside the dinosaurs. But the feathered specimens being revealed in China complicated the picture. So when Stephen Czerkas was offered a fossil with the features of both a dinosaur and a bird by a Chinese dealer at the Tucson mineral show he believed that it was a significant scientific discovery, a “missing link” between the two.

Czerkas and his wife Sylvia owned a small, private museum in Blanding, Utah, and he had a patron buy the fossil for $80,000, then hired palaeontologist Phil Currie to prepare a research report on it. Currie alerted National Geographic editor Chris Sloan, who offered to publish an article on the fossil if two conditions were met: the piece needed to run concurrently with an article in a reputable scientific journal, and the Czerkas’ would then return the obviously smuggled fossil to China rather than display it in the museum. At this point Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing and Timothy Rowe, a specialist in CT scanning at the University of Texas, were brought in to analyze the specimen. It quickly became clear that, like many fossils taken illegally from Liaoning, this one was a composite of multiple individuals, and potentially multiple species. Most notably, the tail did not seem to belong to the body.

At this point “Currie agreed he had some concerns, but the Czerkases refused to believe there was a serious problem and pushed on for publication. Ultimately, both Nature and Science declined to publish a paper announcing a new species. This left National Geographic in the awkward position of officially doing so, as their print cycle and media machine were already too far ahead to pull the story” (Pickrell, “The Great Dinosaur Fossil Hoax”, Cosmos, July 27, 2015). Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, as it was dubbed, was revealed at a National Geographic press conference in October 1999 and described as a missing link between dinosaurs and birds in the article “Feathered Dinosaurs” in the November 1999 issue. The publication of a new species in a popular magazine before it was peer reviewed was immediately criticised, with Storrs Olson, curator of Birds at the National Museum of Natural History, calling it “a nightmare” (Dalton, “Feathers fly over Chinese fossil bird's legality and authenticity”, Nature, vol. 403, February 2000).

Then, in early 2000, “Xu proved Archaeoraptor was a fake. He found a counter slab bearing the tail – a mirror image created when a fossil has been split down the middle into two flat slabs of rock – in an institute in China in early 2000. But it was attached to the legs of a tiny undescribed dinosaur. This proved that the tail belonged to another specimen entirely and had been arranged in a false position in the Archaeoraptor fossil” (Pickrell). National Geographic was forced to issue a correction in the March 2000 issue, publishing a letter from Xu stating that there was no question the fossil was a composite.

“Subsequent detailed CT scans by Rowe revealed that Archaeoraptor was glued together from 88 pieces of different individuals fossils. Mostly they came from two species unknown to science, making the specimens important in their own right. The tail was from Microraptor, then the smallest dinosaur ever discovered, while the front half was a primitive bird subsequently named Yanornis in a 2002 Nature paper entitled ‘Archaeoraptor’s better half’” (Pickrell).

The third volume in the present set, Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight, was published by the Czerkas’s in 2002 and contains papers describing six new species of feathered dinosaurs, of which five are contested. The paper “A New Toothed Bird from China” by Stephen Czerkas and Xu Xing describes Archaeoraptor as a legitimate new species (rather than a combination of Yanornis and Microraptor), with only the Microraptor tail portion being from a separate fossil.

The forgery’s effects were widespread. It highlighted the problem of smuggled and faked fossils from Liaoning and helped scientists develop new ways to detect them. It dealt a significant reputational blow to National Geographic, and the scandal was weaponised by opponents of evolutionary theory to delegitimise all transitional fossils. The most lasting result, however, was to delegitimise the then-emerging (and now widely accepted) theory that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. As Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, told the Guardian in early 2000, “The outfall has been extremely unfortunate. Of course, Piltdown man rears its ugly head. And it provides ammunition to a small and very vocal group of people who who are now starting to talk about collusion and conspiracy” (Borger).

First edition, first printing of this groundbreaking biography of palaeontologist Annie Montague Alexander (1867-1950). Presentation copy inscribed by the author to filmmaker Ken Burns on the title page, “To Ken Burns – with best wishes, Barbara R. Stein”.

Alexander was the independently wealthy daughter of a Hawaiian sugar plantation owner. When poor eyesight scuttled her hopes of a career in the arts she became interested in fossils and started financing her own paleontological expeditions, hiring women as well as men to assist her. She soon gained “the reputation for choosing the right places to dig for fossils. During an expedition to the black limestone region of Shasta county [California], she discovered a new reptile species, named Thalattosaurus alexandrae in her honor” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 20). Between 1901 and 1905 Alexander financed and led four major expeditions into Shasta county and the West Humboldt range in Nevada. Her 1905 Nevada expedition, known as the “Saurian expedition” resulted in the discovery of some of the finest ichthyosaur specimens known.

Next Alexander began collecting living mammalian specimens, learning to make study skins in the field. It was while preparing for a collecting trip to Alaska in 1906 that she met Louise Kellog, who became her life-long partner. The two women lived and worked together until Alexander’s death in 1950, and they jointly ”contributed more than 34,000 specimens of fossils, plants, and animals to museums of the University of California” (Ogilvie).

Alexander was also extremely influential as a financier, providing the funds to establish the Department of Palaeontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and working to develop them into leading research centres. She maintained control of the Museum until 1950, hiring and supporting palaeontologists, such as Joseph Grinnell, Alden H. Miller, and Charles L. Camp, who would make major contributions to the field.

Several species, both living and extinct, have been named in Alexander’s honor, including “Hydrotherosaurus alexandrae, a Cretaceous plesiosaur from Fresno County; Swollenia alexandrae, a rare grass species from Inyo County; Shastasaurus alexandrae, a Triassic ichthyosaur; Alticamelus alexandrae, and a Miocene camel from near Barstow, California” (UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology biography). 

First edition, first printing of this important work by applied mathematician and engineer Irmgard Flügge-Lotz (1903-1974).

Flügge-Lotz studied mathematics at the University of Hanover with the intention of applying it to engineering problems, and was the only woman out of a class of one thousand students. After earning her doctorate in engineering in 1927 she first worked at the Aerodynamisch Versuchsanstalt, a research institute in Göttingen, where “she solved the integro-differential equation that had been formulated by Ludwig Prandtl for the spanwise lift distribution of an airplane wing” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 456). After the war she and her husband joined the French National Office for Aeronautical Research, where she served as chief of a research group in theoretical aerodynamics. In 1948 the couple relocated to Stanford, and though Flügge-Lotz taught, conducted research, and advised graduate students, she was not appointed full professor until 1960, when she became the first woman to hold that title in Stanford’s engineering department.

“Flügge-Lotz’s international reputation was based on her mathematical contributions to aerodynamics and automatic control theory. her first publication with the AVA in Göttingen, on the method fro the calculation of the spanwise lift distribution on wings, was important enough to be called the ‘Lotz method’”. She continued to contribute to aerodynamic theory. However, her contributions from 1948, when she arrived at Stanford, to her retirement in 1968, were very important. She worked in fluid mechanics and developed numerical methods for solving problems in compressible boundary-layer theory” (Ogilvie). Flügge-Lotz wrote two books, published over fifty papers, and served on the advisory boards of several journals. She was the first woman elected to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the first to give that organisation’s prestigious Kármán lecture, in 1971.

Discontinuous automatic control systems were increasing in importance during the mid-century, particularly for applications such as guided missiles. As the jacket blurb for this volume explains, “Discontinuously working elements (on-off controls) are widely used in automatic control systems. From an engineering point of view they are attractive because they are nearly always simpler, more rugged, and cheaper to build than continuous controls. But prediction of their effects in the controlled system is sometimes so complicated. Owing to mathematical difficulties... engineers have frequently avoided discontinuous control in systems where it wold have been preferable... This book, with its 102 diagrams, will be welcome to engineers who prefer visual presentation to formal mathematical development".

First edition, first printing. A superb copy of the first book devoted solely to dinosaur bone histology.

Some of the earliest paleontological researchers, including Louis Agassiz and Gideon Mantell, studied the microscopic structure of fossilised bones, but it was not until the 1950s that “the systematic study of archosaur palaeohistology began in earnest with the pioneering studies of Enlow & Brown”, who showed that cellular structure was preserved intact in fossils and that it “contained a wealth of information regarding the evolution and function of skeletal tissues in extinct organisms”. This was followed in the 1970s by the work of Armand de Ricqlès, who posited that “palaeohistological features could be correlated with growth rates and thus could indirectly shed light on the thermal physiology of extinct organisms”, in other words, that the microstructures of bones could reveal whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded (Bailleul, et al. “Dinosaur Palaeohistology: Review, Trends, and New Avenues of Investigation”, PeerJ, September 2019, pp. 3-4).

Author Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan (1962 - ), of the University of Cape Town, was the first scientist to attempt reconstruction of a dinosaur growth curve based on the microstructure of its fossilised bones, and is today one of the world’s leading experts on dinosaur histology. She is the author of more than one hundred academic articles and four books, and has won numerous awards, including the Academy of Science of South Africa’s Gold Medal.

The Microstructure of Dinosaur Bones draws on Chinsamy-Turan’s extensive experience in this field. “In this well-written, well-edited volume, she concludes that bone microstructure does indicate how bone formed during growth, and it does provide information on how factors such as seasonality, ontogenetic age, and lifestyle adaptations affected its growth, but she also finds that speculations about physiology based on bone histology are just that: speculations... Chinsamy-Turan has done the scientific community a great service by pulling together the wealth of information about dinosaur bone microstructure, and interpreting that information clearly and logically. Starting with a clear explanation of the organization of bone tissue on a microstructural level and the changes in bone composition during fossilization, she moves on to a helpful overview of dinosaur phylogeny and an insightful explanation of modern approaches to the study of dinosaur bones. Detailed descriptions of bone biology and beautiful color plates of dinosaur bone histology make dinosaur osteology accessible to any biologist who is fascinated with the biology of dinosaurs, as well as to both professors and graduate students working in this field” (Spotila, “Bred in the Bone: Bone Microstructures Bring Dinosaurs to Life”, BioScience 56 (3), 2006).

First edition, first printing of "the only book that Fleming prepared regarding his discovery of the antibiotic properties of penicillin" (Norman Library of Science and Medicine 800).

Fleming made his discovery in 1928 and published his earliest paper on penicillin in 1929. But the substance was difficult to purify, and did not become available in large quantities until Howard Florey and Ernest Chain successfully mass-produced it at the beginning of the Second World War. It was during this conflict that penicillin proved its worth, successfully treating hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers.

The present volume was published shortly after the war. The expectation was that penicillin would soon be available commercially, but "there was not yet an authoritative British book for the guidance of the practitioner in its use" (preface). It contains an introduction by Fleming on his discovery of penicillin and twenty-six other essays on the history, manufacture, and clinical use of the drug by "experienced and eminent men" who were among the earliest to experiment with and prescribe it. A key work on one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, published while the therapy was still "very young and rapidly evolving" (preface).

Bibliography: Norman Library of Science & Medicine 800, Printing and the Mind of Man 420, Garrison-Morton medical bibliography 1933.

First edition, first impression of this key academic volume on the life and work of palaeontologist Johanna Gabrielle Otellie (Tilly) Edinger (1897-1967), whose study of fossil skulls helped establish the field of paleoneurology. The contents, by a variety of authors in both German and English, include a detailed biography and bibliography, analyses of her work in its scientific context, chapters on her experiences of being Jewish and deaf, and an homage by Stephen Jay Gould.

Edinger earned a doctorate in natural science at the University of Frankfurt in 1921, writing her dissertation on the Triassic marine reptiles called nothosaurs. She became curator of fossil vertebrates at Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Natural History Museum in 1928, remaining in her position even after the rise of Nazism thanks to the protection of the museum director, and telling friends that she would not be taken to a concentration camp as she always carried with her “a fatal dose of veronal” (p. 7). Edinger lost her position in 1938 and obtained a British visa in May 1939, escaping Germany just before the outbreak of war. In 1940 she left Britain for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she worked as a researcher at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and taught at Wellesley College.

Ednger’s major work on fossil brains, Die Fossilen Gehirne “was published in 1929 and won her international recognition... In 1948, she completed her major study of horse fossil brains, analysed from casts made of the interior of skulls (endocasts)... Her analysis, according to A. S. Romer and Stephen Jay Gould, helped establish the new field of paleoneurology. She demonstrated that brain evolution was more accurately interpreted directly from fossils rather than from a misleading hierarchy of modern or ancient forms. In the horse brain she showed that the forebrain had evolved several times, independently, demonstrating that rates and styles of change varied in different lineages. According to Gould, her work ranks among the dozen or so major figures of modern vertebrate palaeontology” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 401).

First edition, first printing. Presentation copy inscribed by the author to palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould on the front free endpaper, “For Steven [sic], This was written to you. Warm regards, Tim Mitchell”. Loosely inserted is a bookmark promoting Gould’s talk “Pattern and Lack of Progress in the History of Life”, the keynote lecture for Dinofest International 1996.

The Last Dinosaur Book was the first comprehensive, critical enquiry into the depiction of dinosaurs in popular culture, revealing “a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself”. Author W. J. T. Mitchell is a professor of English literature and art history at the University of Chicago. “A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues” and is editor of the journal Critical Inquiry and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (University of Chicago biography).

Recipient Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His theory of punctuated equilibria challenged the idea that evolution is a slow and constant accumulation of changes, pointing out that instead it often occurs in rapid bursts of speciation followed by periods of stasis. He was a prominent defender of teaching evolution in schools and a leading critic of the field of sociobiology, which he saw as providing a pseudoscientific basis for discrimination. But he was best known as a popular science writer, penning three hundred essays that were originally published in Natural History Magazine.

Gould is cited in the text several times, on the “archetypal fascination” of dinosaurs as “alluringly scary, but sufficiently safe” because of their extinction; on their commercialisation turning them from “sources of awe into clichés and commodities”; and on contemporary scientific disputes about dinosaur biology and evolution.

First edition, first printing. A beautiful copy of one of the most scholarly and best-selling of the dinosaur encyclopedias published during the "dinomania" of the 1990s.

The Complete Dinosaur, copiously illustrated and accessible to both professional and popular audiences, contains forty-three essays by leading geologists and palaeontologists on dinosaur physiology, behaviour, and evolution; the history of palaeontology around the world; and the appearance of dinosaurs in popular culture. The Quarterly Review of Biology described it as “the most readable and interesting book on many aspects of dinosaurs that I know” in which “even the dinosaurian veteran will find novel insights and perspectives”. They cite in particular the chapters on the history of dinosaur studies as “the most comprehensive and historiographically integrated treatment of the subject to date” as well as “Mary Higby Schweitzer’s thoughtful and rational review on how we study the biomolecular resides in fossil organisms, the ‘dialogue’ on dinosaur extinction between a gradualist (Peter Dodson) and a catastrophist (Dale A. Russell), and R. E. H. Reid’s powerful and comprehensive treatment of dinosaurian physiology” (The Quarterly Review of Biology vol. 73, no. 4, December 1998). 

Still in print, a second, revised and expanded, edition was published to much acclaim in 2012.

 First edition, first printing. A lovely copy of this important memoir of excavating Egg Mountain in Montana, one of the most productive fossil beds on earth and the location of both the first dinosaur embryos and the first nests of baby dinosaurs to be discovered.

John “Jack” Horner (1946 – ) is one of the most recognisable of contemporary palaeontologists. The recipient of numerous awards, including a McArthur Fellowship, for his work on dinosaur reproduction, development, and physiology, he was also a staple of 1980s and 90s documentaries and served as a technical advisor for the Jurassic Park films, whose main character, Dr. Alan Grant, he partially inspired. Horner has come under scrutiny in recent years for having a romantic relationship with an undergraduate volunteer in his laboratory, resulting in his early retirement.

In 1977 Marion Brandvold, the owner of a mineral shop in Bynum, Montana, discovered fossils of juvenile dinosaurs and asked Horner to identify them when he happened to stop at the shop during a scouting trip the following year. At the time, only a handful of juvenile dinosaurs were known, and their absence in the geological record was a major problem for palaeontology. Realising their significance, Horner immediately contacted his employers at Princeton (remarkably, he was then working as a preparator of other researcher’s finds, and had not yet run a dig of his own) for permission to remain in Montana and begin excavating the site. Within a few days Horner, his colleague Bob Makela, and the Brandvolds had uncovered whole nests containing young duck-billed dinosaurs – a world first. The juveniles were clearly being cared for by their parents for an extended period, much like birds, and this discovery was the first evidence of complex reproductive behaviour in dinosaurs. The site also revealed the first egg clutches in the Western hemisphere and the first dinosaur embryos found anywhere. Excavations have since revealed that the site was home to thousands of Cretaceous-period dinosaurs, with evidence of more than 15,000 individuals, making it the largest group of dinosaur skeletons on Earth and evidence that some species exhibited social and possibly migratory behaviours (”Digging for Dino Eggs with Famed Paleontologist Jack Horner”, Wired, October 28, 2011).

Published in 1988, Digging Dinosaurs was written for a popular audience and covers the first six years of excavations, including the major discoveries of nests and embryos, and includes a foreword by Sir David Attenborough as well as numerous illustrations.

First edition, first printing. This volume is the first appearance in print of 150 lithographs of sauropod and stegosaurian dinosaur fossils excavated at Como Bluff in Wyoming by Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899).

“Othniel Marsh was one of the towering figures in the early years of American paleontology. He discovered, described, and classified the fossils of many fossil vertebrates, including well-known dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Marsh was an early adherent of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and his enormous fossil collection allowed him to demonstrate a evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs, and to trace the fifty-million year development of horses from Eohippus to the modern Equus... Marsh spent his academic career at Yale University where he led the first Yale Scientific Expeditions into the west and was the first professor of vertebrate palaeontology. Marsh’s uncle was George Peabody, a wealthy and well-connected banker and merchant who funded Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History at Marsh’s request. Marsh was named one of the museum’s first curators and used his own money to enlarge the museum’s collections” (National Academy of Sciences biography).

The fossil field at Como Bluff, discovered in 1877, was “one of the greatest assemblages of giant and small dinosaurs and of minute and extremely precious Jurassic mammals ever to be found” (preface). The fossils’ excavation, study, and display at Yale’s Peabody Museum and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D. C. “probably had greater impact on the study of palaeontology than any other event save the publication of Darwin’s theory. The finds at Como Bluff revolutionzed field and collecting procedures, generated a startling growth in paleontological studies, stimulated great public interest, and left a permanent mark on the major museums of the world. For the next sixty years paleontological expeditions were planned and undertaken with the fervent hope that another ‘Como Bluff’ might be discovered... The one hundred and fifty lithographs published here were originally intended to be part of monographic studies by Marsh of the sauropod and stegosaurian dinosaurs. They were prepared under Marsh’s direction by illustrator F. Berger and lithographer E. Crisand, and financed by the United States Geological Survey; their total cost of preparation during the 1880s exceeded $45,000. Only a few had been previously published, chiefly in Marsh’s Dinosaurs of North America. the majority are published here for the first time... to commemorate the founding of the Peabody Museum” (preface).

First edition, first printing. Presentation copy inscribed by the author on the half title, “To Stephen Jay Gould, Many thanks for the inspiration of your essays. Best wishes, John Noble Wilford”.

A lovely copy of this popular account of recent developments in dinosaur palaeontology, including the discoveries that they were likely warm-blooded and that a comet probably caused their extinction, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist John Noble Wilford (1933 - ). Wilford was responsible for the paper’s front-page story on the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, and his by-line was the only one that appeared on the front page that day. Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, described one of the sentences in the Moon landing piece – describing Armstrong’ heart-rate during the descent to the surface – as “one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article” (Dubner, “When Data Tell the Story”, Freakonomics blog, July 21, 2009).

Recipient Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His theory of punctuated equilibria challenged the idea that evolution is a slow and constant accumulation of changes, pointing out that instead it often occurs in rapid bursts of speciation followed by periods of stasis. He was a prominent defender of teaching evolution in schools and a leading critic of the field of sociobiology, which he saw as providing a pseudoscientific basis for discrimination. But he was best known as a popular science writer, penning three hundred essays that were originally published in Natural History Magazine. In 1991 Wilford reviewed Gould’s fifth essay collection, Bully for Brontosaurus, calling its contents “provocative and delightfully discursive”.