Tracing Amphibians:
Primary Sources in the Herpetological Works of Linnaeus
and His Disciples
Esteban Lavilla and Lászlo Krecsák
Tracing Amphibians is the definitive reference guide to the primary bibliographic sources cited by Carl Linnaeus and his disciples in their herpetological and zoological publications. Herpetologists and historians of science have long struggled with Linnaeus’s distinctive system of binominal abbreviations—a parallel to his binominal nomenclature for organisms—which compressed 15th–18th century book titles into abbreviated two-part citations that are often cryptic, inconsistent across editions, and difficult to resolve without knowing which edition Linnaeus actually consulted.
This volume systematically identifies and analyzes 166 primary sources containing 351 abbreviations and abbreviation variants relating to Amphibia (encompassing both amphibians and reptiles as Linnaeus defined the class) across the full corpus of Linnaean and disciplular zoological publications, including Systema Naturae (editions 10 and 12), Fauna Svecica, and student dissertations. For each source, the authors provide the full title as it appears in the original, all abbreviation variants used by Linnaeus, the Linnaean publications that reference the source, a content summary with herpetological emphasis, and critical commentary on edition identification-drawing on holdings of Linnaeus’s private library (now at the Linnean Society of London) and the library of the Academy of Uppsala. The work extends and corrects the two prior major assessments by Dundee (1994) and Heller (2007), identifying 21 cases where the edition actually consulted by Linnaeus differs from previous determinations
Hardcover, ISBN: 979-8-234-09728-6. x + 214 (2) pages.
Retail (includes postage): $92.00
ISHBH Members: $58.00
To be published July 20, 2026
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