About this Item
Gran-Folio. vi, 65 p. [4] leaves of plates : ill. 52 cm. Bound in original cartonee. Spanish and German in parallel columns. Work executed by order of the Superior Government of the Nation, to be presented at the Paris Exhibition. Adolph Methfesel (1835-1909), painter, draftsman, landscape architect and lithographer, was born in Switzerland in 1836 and was commissioned to draw the fossils, under the direction of H. Burmeister, during his brief contract that began in 1867 with funds from the Paleontological Society of Buenos Aires, but was only published in the supplement "Los Caballos Fósiles", 1889. Today this horses are classified as the Stegomastodon platensis, the southernmost gonfoterio, typical of the Pampean Region, Argentina, especially in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Santiago del Estero. It is also cited in Uruguay and possibly present in Paraguay. The authors propose two possible migratory routes, one via Chile and the other through the Brazilian plains, which would follow the genus Stegomastodon and reach its southernmost level in the Pampas of Argentina. Ameghino and other authors are unaware that Burmeister dealt with this genus in 1889. At fossil footprints in Pehuen-Có, Pcia, Buenos Aires, fossils of mastodons and other 12,000-year-old fossil mammals can be seen. From 1875 he began to publish two scientific works destined to represent the Argentine Republic in the international exhibitions of Philadelphia (1876) and Paris (1878 and 1889). The first, Fossil Horses of the Argentine Pampa, was published in Spanish and German, and of the second, the Physical Description of the Argentine Republic, a first volume appeared in German, but was continued in French. From the Atlas of the description physique of the Argentine Republic several volumes appeared, but the publication plan was not completed. The scientific knowledge about fossil horses in South America up to that time was fragmentary and was based almost always on fossil molars found isolated in different regions of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. The first remains of a fossil horse had been discovered in a quarry at Monmartre, Paris in the 1820s, which was later identified by Cuvier as an equine related to the tapir. In Argentina, during the expedition of the "Beagle", Darwin was surprised to find in Bahía Blanca (10/10/1833) a fossil horse tooth mixed with the remains of a glyptodont, a toxodon and a mastodon, all of them in the same matrix, and wondered if it had been washed and hauled by rain from an older stratum, coming to the conclusion that it was not probable. When returning the expedition to England, the British scientist Richard Owen in 1839 confirmed that the curved tooth was of an extinct species, to which it denominated Equus curvidens. At the same time in Brazil, Lund had discovered a metacarpus IIIo. right of a fossil horse, in 1840 of what was another species that he named Equus neogaeus (later Hippidium neogaeum). In Bolivia, Weddell (1845) found remains of another fossil horse in deposits near Tarija and described them as Equus macrognatus. Again Lund in 1845 describes the Hippidium principale based on a right upper molar found in a cave in Lagoa Santa, Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil A little later Gay in Chile found a horse fossil tooth (1848) and called it Equus americanus. The Equus andium, Branco, 1883 was described on the basis of a mandible, nowadays lost, coming from the Andean region (especially Ecuador). When arriving at Rio de la Plata Burmeister quickly understood the importance that as a means of transport had the horse in the daily life of the gaucho, the soldiers and the own Buenos Aires elite and even the indigenous. Being able to show the Argentines that the horse that they used in the 19th century on a daily basis had existed and disappeared in the pampas, thousands of years ago, must have caused a sensation among those who had access to their work. CodBos.
Seller Inventory # ABE-1553105996483
Contact seller
Report this item
