ABSTRACT

A recent reappraisal of two passages in Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, in which the then young Leonardo reports on visiting a cave and on some sort of ʽmarine monster’, has led to the proposition that Leonardo observed and wrote on fossil remains of a whale preserved in a cave. Whereas this hypothesis appears reasonable overall, some problems persist in accepting the purported location in which Leonardo would have observed the fossil. Here we provide a new analysis of the aforementioned passages by Leonardo which allows us to confirm that Leonardo saw a fossil whale and recognised it as such. However, his observation did not occur in a cave, but likely along the flank of a hill, as relatively common for Tuscan Pliocene fossil cetaceans. Leonardo seemingly made taphonomic observations on the fossil whale and inferred that a considerable amount of time must have passed from the death of the whale in the sea to allow for its eventual discovery on land – an observation that likely contributed to shaping Leonardo’s later thoughts on sedimentation and fossilisation. This might represent Leonardo’s earliest text devoted to a palaeontological theme. Moreover, it comprises the first known description of a cetacean fossil.

摘要

最近对列奥纳多·达·芬奇 (Leonardo da Vinci) 的《阿伦德尔手抄本》(Codex Arundel) 中的两段进行了重新评估，其中当时年轻的列奥纳多 (Leonardo) 报告了参观洞穴和某种“海洋怪物”的情况，这导致了列奥纳多 (Leonardo) 在保存的鲸鱼化石遗骸上观察和书写的命题在一个山洞里。尽管这一假设总体上看起来是合理的，但在接受莱昂纳多可能观察到化石的声称位置方面仍然存在一些问题。在这里，我们对列奥纳多的上述段落进行了新的分析，这使我们能够确认列奥纳多看到了鲸鱼化石并认出了它。然而，他的观察并非发生在洞穴中，而是发生在山的侧面​​，这对于托斯卡纳上新世鲸类化石来说相对常见。莱昂纳多似乎对鲸鱼化石进行了埋藏学观察，并推断出鲸鱼在海中死亡后必须经过相当长的时间才能最终在陆地上被发现——这一观察可能有助于塑造莱昂纳多后来对沉积的想法和石化。这可能代表了列奥纳多最早的古生物学主题文本。此外，它包括对鲸类化石的第一个已知描述。