Abstract
PROF. GEORG GURICH has prepared a well illustrated handbook of characteristic fossils which is now in course of publication in eight parts. It is intended for elementary students and amateurs who are occupied with geological work and desire an exact knowledge of those fossils which are of special value in determining the relative ages of rock-formations. It is not a treatise on common fossils, and those who seek in it an account of so familiar a brachiopod as Atrypa reticularis, for example, will be disappointed; but it deals with those species and genera which, whether common or not, happen to be restricted in their geological range, and are thus of service as unerring time-markers. The fossils of each successive period are taken in order, beginning with the earliest; and the twenty-eight plates included in the first part of the book are devoted to those of the Cambrian and Silurian formations. The figures are not original, but judiciously selected from standard works, and all are beautifully reproduced by a halftone process. The accompanying text consists chiefly of brief definitions of the various groups, families, genera, and species, in systematic order under each geological formation. There are also useful synoptical tables, both of the formations themselves in different parts of the world and of the fossil species which are characteristic of each special stage. Occasional text-figures are added to explain structural features and the more important anatomical terms employed. In the first part, the figures illustrating the structure of trilobites and graptolites are especially good.
Leitfossilien: ein Hilfsbuch zum Bestimmen von Versteinerungen bei geologischen Arbeiten in der Sammlung und im Felde.
Lief. I.: Kambrium und Silur. By Prof. Georg Gürich. Pp. 95. (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1908.)
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Leitfossilien: ein Hilfsbuch zum Bestimmen von Versteinerungen bei geologischen Arbeiten in der Sammlung und im Felde . Nature 84, 200 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084200a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084200a0