The Wonders of Geology;

£950 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

dramatic frontispiece by john martin The rare first edition of this successful popular work on the Earth's deep history by the founder of dinosaur palaeontology Gideon Mantell, with the remarkable mezzotint frontispiece 'The Country of the Iguanodon' by Romantic painter John Martin, as well as illustrations by Mary Ann Mantell, who is credited with discovering the first Iguanodon tooth. Educated as a physician, Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) made enormously important contributions to geology and palaeontology. 'His assiduous investigations of the strata and invertebrate fossils of eastern Sussex culminated in The Fossils of the South Downs (1822), his first book (of twelve), with lithography by his wife. Having by then explored the rich vertebrate deposits of Tilgate Forest, he announced in February 1825 the discovery of Iguanodon, one of the various kinds of dinosaurs (not yet so called) with which he was subsequently associated' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). His discovery of the second dinosaur to be identified, Hylaeosaurus, showed that dinosaurs were land animals, not sea-dwellers, as had been assumed. For a time Mantell displayed his fossils in his private museum in Brighton, where the painter John Martin, already known for his fantastical compositions, 'was among the stream of famous and fashionable visitors'. Mantell recorded in his journal that Martin was 'deeply interested in the remains of the Iguanodon etc. I wish I could induce him to portray the country

• Binding: Hardcover

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