Gessner’s fossil crab

Nearly 450 years ago, the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner was the first to use illustrations in a systematic manner in a book devoted to the subject of fossils. In his treatise De rerum fossilium . . . liber (1565), around 200 single objects are illustrated, of which almost fifty are fossils in the modern sense. Most of the figures were illustrations of pieces from Gessner’s private collection. Against all odds, some of these have survived to the present day in the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland. These remains form the oldest palaeontological reference collection in the world. Among them is the crab that figured prominently in Gessner’s book and became an icon of the early palaeontological literature

Art · Art history · Icon · Polymath · Subject (documents) · Classics · Computer Science · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · Marine and environmental studies · Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils