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"I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake."
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Source: Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.348, W. W. Norton & Company
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