Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the major geological journals such as Annals andMagazine of Natural
History and Benjamin Silliman's American Journal of Science, but it
was not until the middle of the twentieth century that more specialist
palaeontological societies and journals began to emerge. In the 1800s a
major vehicle for the publication of palaeontological information was
the monograph. In 1847 the Palaeontographical Society was estab-
lished purely to publish such volumes on British fossils. A century
and a half later it is still active, and during that time has produced
numerous volumes that would fill nearly five metres of shelving. It
has published works by the leading palaeontological authorities, on
diverse subjects including Mesozoic reptiles, Eocene fish otoliths and
Cambrian trilobites. Richard Owen (1804-1892), the founder of the
Natural History Museum in London, produced seven monographs,
one of which was on the reptiles of the Wealden and Purbeck forma-
tions. Published in parts, which was typical, the first appeared in 1853
and the final part and title page in 1889 three years before his death.
Among other classic titles produced by the Society were those
by Thomas Davidson (1817-1885) on brachiopods (in six volumes,
1851-1886), Charles Darwin on fossil cirripedes (1851-1855), and
more recently the separate monographs on ammonites by Sydney
Savory Buckman (1860-1929), and William Joscelyn Arkell (1904-
1958). In Ireland the most important paloeontological monograph
was Frederick M'Coy's (1817-1899) Synopsis of the Characters of the
Carboniferous Limestone Fossils of Ireland which was published pri-
vately in 1844 by Richard Griffith. In it a wide variety of taxonomic
groups of Irish fossils was described, many of which were new genera
or species. Like many collections dating from the mid-1800s the
specimens described by M'Coy are still to be found in museums and
individual specimens can be recognised from his illustrations. In
Belgium, Laurent Guillaume de Koninck (1809-1887) published an
important series of monographs on fossils of a similar age, while
Joachim Barrande (1799-1852) described in twenty-two volumes the
Lower Palaeozoic fossils in his own cabinet, which he had collected
from around Prague; this region is now called the Barrandian and is
