Leidy, Joseph; The Ancient Fauna of Nebraska, or a Description of Extinct Mammalian and Chelonia, from the Mauvaises Terres of Nebraska. Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge, Vol 6, 1853.

Leidy, Joseph; The Ancient Fauna of Nebraska, or a Description of Extinct Mammalian and Chelonia, from the Mauvaises Terres of Nebraska. Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge, Vol 6, 1853. Large quarto, pp. 126, 24 plates, 1 map.

The work is complete and in contemporary boards with a later cloth spine. Wear and light soiling to boards, lacks spine label, text is clean, light to moderate spotting to plates. Still a very good copy of original rare study.

Joseph Leidy, (1823-1891) was born in Philadelphia and died in the same city. He was educated as a physician and naturalist and made important contributions throughout his life to the fields of medicine, comparative anatomy, parasitology and paleontology. 

Soon after his appointment as librarian and curator at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences (1846) he was to become the head of the Board of Curators. Leidy made extensive studies of fossil deposits in the western states. The first of his many works on the subject, “On the Fossil Horse of America” (1847), showed that the horse had lived and become extinct on the North American continent long before the arrival of Columbus. He subsequently proved the prehistoric presence in the western United States of the lion, tiger, camel, and rhinoceros.

Leidy was also the first individual to recognize dinosaur remains in North America. In 1856, Leidy identified some teeth that had been discovered by Ferdinand Hayden in the Nebraska Territory; he named three of the new genera Trachodon, Troodon, and Deinodon, all of which are dinosaurs. Leidy  understood what they were, as he pointed out that Trachodon teeth were similar to those of Iguanodon (the second dinosaur discovered, in England, by Gideon Mantell, and Deinodon resembled Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur discovered, described in 1824 by William Buckland.

Two years later, in 1858, the partial remains of a large dinosaur were discovered in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and presented to the Academy. Leidy described the fossils and named the animal Hadrosaurus. He pointed out that, because of its large hind limbs and smaller forelimbs, Hadrosaurus probably moved more like a kangaroo that a lizard. This was the first suggestion that some dinosaurs might not have been quadrupeds, as they had been modeled yBenjamin Waterhouse Hawkins at Sydenham Park near London a few years before. Leidy published his finds in two volumes of the Proceedings of the Academy.

In all, Leidy published more than 600 works. He is best remembered for his studies of vertebrate fossil deposits from the western states and territories. His pioneering work on the fossil Mammals (ungulates and carnivores) and Chelonia from the Nebraska Territory is based on fossils collected primarily by David Dale Owen, and Hiram Prout.