THE AUSTRIAN PALEONTOLOGIST GUIDO STACHE’S UNPUBLISHED MONOGRAPH OF SILURIAN FAUNAS

ABSTRACT

The Austrian geologist and paleontologist Guido Stache (1833–1921) had a long and successful career at the Imperial Geological Survey in Vienna (Austria) in the second half of the nineteenth century. His interests were strongly focussed on the geology and mapping of the Austrian Hungarian Imperial lands and on the use of fossils for stratigraphy. In particular, he tried to use fossils for correlation of the Paleozoic strata he had mapped in areas of the Eastern Alps with those documented by Joachim Barrande (1799–1883) in his monumental work on the faunas of Bohemia. This paper highlights Stache's plans in the 1890s to publish a monograph on the fossils he had collected, a ‘hidden history’ that unfolded during systematic revision of fossil collections held at the Geological Survey of Austria one hundred years later in the 1990s. This case study emphasizes sources to be found in taxonomic monographs within the historiography of the discipline of paleontology.