The rhinoceros and the megatherium : an essay in natural history

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Title The rhinoceros and the megatherium : an essay in natural history Type Bibliographic Edition Year 2017 TOC Summary One animal left India in 1515, caged in the hold of a Portuguese ship, and sailed around Africa to Lisbon...the first of its species to see Europe for more than a thousand years. The other crossed the Atlantic from South America to Madrid in 1789, its huge fossilized bones packed in crates, its species unknown. How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to these two mysterious beasts...a rhinoceros, known only from ancient texts, and a nameless monster? As Juan Pimentel explains, the reactions reflect deep intellectual changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to shape our understanding of the natural world. We know the rhinoceros today as "Dürer's Rhinoceros," after the German artist's iconic woodcut. His portrait was inaccurate...Dürer never saw the beast and relied on conjecture, aided by a sketch from Lisbon. But the influence of his extraordinary work reflected a steady move away from ancient authority to the dissemination in print of new ideas and images. By the time the megatherium arrived in Spain, that movement had transformed science. When published drawings found their way to Paris, the great zoologist Georges Cuvier correctly deduced that the massive bones must have belonged to an extinct giant sloth. It was a pivotal moment in the discovery of the prehistoric world. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium offers a penetrating account of two remarkable episodes in the cultural history of science and is itself a vivid example of the scientific imagination at work.... BH ID BV044954532 Link EPIC Open Data ID BVB01-030347224

Name	Pimentel, Juan
Type	700
Year
Title
Relationship	aut
Relator	Verfasser
Wikidata

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Name	Mason, Peter
Type	100
Year
Title
Relationship	trl
Relator	Übersetzer
Wikidata

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Name	Megatherium
GND ID	4382551-5 : json
Wikidata

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Name	Fossile Nashörner
GND ID	4750377-4 : json
Wikidata

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Name	Nashörner
GND ID	4140574-2 : json
Wikidata	Q34718

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Name	599.66/8
Type	082
Tag	082
Scheme	ddc
Edition	23

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