Gessner and his contemporaries used the terms listed below in quotation marks; these either describe the appearance of a ‘fossil’ (‘star stone’) or refer to its – supposed – origin (‘toad stones’).
Fossil crab Palaeocarpilius macrochelus (Desmarest, 1822), ‘stone sea crab’ Natural History Museum Basel, replica of the original from the Gessner/Platter collection; cf. Gessner, Fossil Book fol. 167r