“Parentesco entre los muertos y los vivos” nas cavernas de Lagoa Santa, no Brasil

Abstract

Peter W. Lund (1801-1880), a Danish naturalist, sent systematically his Memoirs on Brazilian cave paleontology, from Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais to Copenhagen, Denmark, between 1836 and 1846. Widely published in the international journals of the time, these Memoirs were quoted and discussed by Darwin and several scholars like Owen, Buckland, Bronn and Burmeister. A first reading of some of the general aspects of Lund’s Memoirs may lead to the hypotheses, that deserves to be better investigated, that Lund, absolutely well informed about the main discussions of those decades, committed himself not to follow – as repeated by his biographers – but to systematically question and advance, alike many of his contemporaries, some of the fundamental references of the classical works, mainly by Cuvier.