Author: Buckland, W.
Title: Account of an assemblage of fossil teeth and bones of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bear, tiger, and hyena, and sixteen other animals; discovered in a cave near Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the year 1821: with a comparative view of five similar caverns in various parts of England, and others on the Continent.
Description: London, The Royal Society, 1822. 4to. 66 pp.; 12 engraved plates. Disbound. = First major scientific work by the British palaeontologist, geologist and clergyman William Buckland (1793-1856). It contains the groundwork for his famous Reliquiae diluvianae (1823). "From his investigations of fossil bones at Kirkdale Cave, in Yorkshire, he concluded that the cave had actually been inhabited by hyaenas in antediluvian times, and that the fossils were the remains of these hyaenas and the animals they had eaten, rather than being remains of animals that had perished in the Flood and then carried from the tropics by the surging waters, as he and others had at first thought. In 1822 he wrote: It must already appear probable, from the facts above described, particularly from the comminuted state and apparently gnawed condition of the bones, that the cave in Kirkdale was, during a long succession of years, inhabited as a den of hyaenas, and that they dragged into its recesses the other animal bodies whose remains are found mixed indiscriminately with their own: this conjecture is rendered almost certain by the discovery I made, of many small balls of the solid calcareous excrement of an animal that had fed on bones... It was at first sight recognised by the keeper of the Menagerie at Exter Change, as resembling, in both form and appearance, the faeces of the spotted or cape hyaena, which he stated to be greedy of bones beyond all other beasts in his care. While criticised by some, Buckland's analysis of Kirkland Cave and other bone caves was widely seen as a model for how careful analysis could be used to reconstruct the Earth's past, and the Royal Society awarded Buckland the Copley Medal in 1822 for his paper on Kirkdale Cave" (Wikipedia). Published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions, volume 112(1). Uncut. With the widest possible margins. Plates marginally stained, with scattered foxing elsewhere; text clean. A very good copy. Neither in Nissen, nor in Ward and Carozzi, nor in Wood.

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