Three early books on birds’ eggs: Marsili’s Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus (1726), Zinanni’s Delle Uova e dei Nidi degli Uccelli (1737) and Klein’s Ova avium plurimarum ad naturalem magnitudinem delineata et genuinis coloribus picta (1766)

• Main Authors: T. R. Birkhead, A. Pilastro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2018-01-01
• Series: The European Zoological Journal
• Subjects: Oology; egg airways; Willughby; Bellini; Vallisneri
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24750263.2018.1549277

The three earliest – all eighteenth-century – illustrated accounts of birds’ eggs were by Luigi Marsili (or Marsigli): Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus, Giuseppe Zinanni (or Ginanni): Delle Uova e dei Nidi degli Uccelli, and Jacob Theodor Klein: Ova avium plurimarum ad naturalem magnitudinem delineata et genuinis coloribus picta. Marsili’s account describes and illustrates the nests and eggs of just 15 different birds (whose identity is sometimes uncertain), which together with 59 plates of birds forms part of a multi-disciplinary account of the River Danube. Zinanni’s volume (which also includes an appendix on grasshoppers) describes the nests and eggs of 106 birds, and is more extensive and accurate since he shot the adult birds attending nests from which the illustrated eggs were collected. Zinanni’s book includes 34 black-and-white engraved plates each with between one and nine eggs of species that (excluding domesticated or exotic species) were probably those that occurred around his home in north-east Italy. Klein’s volume includes 145 coloured plates of eggs – the first published coloured images of eggs – and his classification of birds based on feet and toes. We present some biographical information and details of each author’s career and a summary of their books’ contents. The text of Zinanni’s volume is the most “philosophical” of the three and includes a discussion – based on the writings of Lorenzo Bellini and Antonio Vallisneri – of what he calls “airways” within the egg that have apparently not been noticed or commented on by subsequent researchers.