Vilhelm Lund

The cave where Lund made his discovery of "Lagoa Santa Man" is now protected by the 2,004 hectares (4,950 acres) Sumidouro State Park, created in 1980. The journal Lundiana is named in his honour [1], as is a town in Lagoa Santa. Lund is considered the "Father of Brazilian paleontology and archeology." His voluminous correspondence with Brazilian scientists and institutions is still uncollected.

He was an actor, known for Brudeferden i Hardanger (1926), Skjærgårdsflirt (1932) and Vildanden (1970).

Vilhelm Lund was born on April 7, 1900 in Christiania, Norway.

The next 35 years were spent exchanging letters with the curators of his collections in Copenhagen, as well as receiving the visits of young European naturalists. The complete study of his collections, E Museo Lundii, was published only in 1888.

Then in 1843, Lund made a remarkable discovery. During a severe drought, he discovered, deep in a flooded cave, fossilized skulls and bones of 30 human beings. Since these individuals were found among the remains of long-extinct species. This finding led him to realize that humans and the prehistoric animals had co-existed, something which was in frontal opposition to Cuvier's catastrophic theory.

Then in 1835, Lund traveling inland through the province of Minas Gerais, and in Lagoa, an area characterised by a peculiar Karst geology, discovered several caves full of fossilized bones from extinct Ice Age megafauna species. He eventually settled in the small town of Lagoa Santa, and dedicated the next eight years to excavating, collecting, classifying and studying more than 20,000 bones of extinct species, including mastodons and ground sloths. With him was the Norwegian painter Peter Andreas Brandt who assisted him throughout his work as an illustrator. He was also assisted by the Danish botanist Eugen Warming from 1839 to 1859.

In 1832 Lund returned to Brazil never to return to Europe. He spent the first two years collecting mainly botanical Specimens in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Charles Darwin also passed through Rio in 1832 but it is unknown whether the two naturalists met.

Back in Europe in 1829, he achieved a doctoral degree at the University of Kiel, traveled to Italy and later established himself in Paris, where he came under the influence of Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle and the most influential naturalist and zoologist of the time.

Due to a beginning tuberculosis, he traveled to Brazil in 1825 and spent the following three and a half years collecting Specimens of plants, birds and insects in the area around Rio de Janeiro, and writing about ants, snails and birds of the region.

Peter Wilhelm Lund (14 June 1801 – 25 May 1880) was a Danish paleontologist, zoologist, archeologist and who spent most of his life working and living in Brazil. He is considered the father of Brazilian paleontology as well as archeology.