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Eye-witness accounts of a living "panther", a leopard, two tigers and a hyena, appended to "Idea institutionum Trichozoologiae", an unpublished manuscript on mammal classification by Swedish naturalist Peter Artedi (1705–1735), made during a visit to London sometime between early November 1734 and June 1735, are described. Interest is focused on his account of the hyena, which appears to have been the only modern source for Carl Linnaeus, who acknowledged Artedi in the first edition of Systema naturae. Evidence is provided to show that Artedi's account was accurate and original, having never had the opportunity to witness the animal previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, in the Villa Medici of Poggio a Caiano in the vicinity of Florence, the Florentine artist Andrea del Sarto painted a great fresco, commissioned by Pope Leo X in honour of his late father, Lorenzo de’ Medici. This fresco contains one of the earliest representations in Europe of a living South American primate, which can easily be identified as Marcgrave's capuchin, Cebus flavius (Schreber, 1774). The appearance is so accurate that we can assume that the painter was familiar with the animal, and may even have used a live monkey as a model. Marcgrave's capuchin is a taxon that was recently rediscovered in Brazil, where it has been found in fragments of the Atlantic Forest in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Paraíba. The portrayal of this species in the early sixteenth-century decoration of Poggio a Caiano raises interesting questions about the popularity of Brazilian primates in European artistic and scientific circles from the time of the discovery of the New World, and about the rapidity of the initial anthropogenic diffusion of some of these animals beyond their homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]