#phaeodaria

Kunstformen der Natur is Ernst Haeckel's book of 100 rare specimen illustrations, first published between 1899 and 1904. The lithographs were made by Haeckel and Adolf Giltsch

Ernst Haeckel actually beat Darwin to the mark in applying the evolutionary theory to humans by proposing in 1868 that humankind had developed in phases, one of them being a step halfway between apes and humans that he called the Missing Link. He dubbed his theoretical creation Pithecanthropus Alalus, "speechless ape-man", eliciting scathing criticism from his contemporaries for be-stowing a scientific name on a creature that existed only in the abstract (he was one of the first but by no means the last to do so, and nearly all the many concepts he postulated turned out to be wrong—including a number of hypothetical microorganisms that have never been found to exist).