extinct mammals

Book review – Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

7-minute read
keywords: art, biography, paleontology

Jay Matternes is one of the more underrecognized palaeoarists. Born in 1933, he has laboured away as a freelance artist in relative obscurity for over six decades. In 2020, I reviewed Visions of Lost Worlds which celebrated the six large prehistoric mammal murals he painted for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I concluded that review by asking about the rest of his career and suggested this was an area ripe for a biographer. Little did I know that such a book was already in the making and it flew under my radar[1] until very recently. As if the prospect of more artwork by Matternes was not enough, when I saw that it was authored by Richard Milner, who wrote the de-facto career retrospective of renowned palaeoartist Charles R. Knight, I was positively salivating. To say that I am pleased with the result would be putting it mildly.

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Book review – The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, & Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century

9-minute read
keywords: history of science, paleontology

In modern palaeontology, dinosaurs always hog the limelight. However, as science historian Chris Manias shows in The Age of Mammals, for a long time this was not the case. This scholarly book shows how palaeontology, from its inception in the 1700s until the 1910s, revolved around mammals. In a wide-ranging book that examines historical episodes around the world, Manias convincingly shows that you cannot understand the history of palaeontology without considering mammals.

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Book review – Mesozoic Art: Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals in Art

6-minute read
keywords: paleoart, paleontology

When done well, palaeoart represents one of the finest examples of science and art intersecting. As a genre, it continues to advance and reinvent itself, especially in its professionalism and scientific accuracy. Mesozoic Art might represent Bloomsbury’s entry into this market but the book has two experienced editors at the helm. Artist Steve White and palaeozoologist Darren Naish both have more than their fair share of producing and thinking about palaeoart. Featuring twenty artists, Mesozoic Art is a gorgeously produced, large-format portfolio that shows palaeoart at its current pinnacle. For lovers of dinosaur illustrations, this book is a no-brainer, and I imagine that many will have already gone ahead and purchased it. But just in case you still need convincing…

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Book review – Locked in Time: Animal Behavior Unearthed in 50 Extraordinary Fossils

7-minute read

Fossils can tell us what animals living in the distant past looked like. Over the centuries, palaeontologists have made incredible strides in reconstructing extinct life forms, helped along by cumulative experience, technological advances, and a steadily increasing body of rare but truly exceptionally preserved fossils. But reconstructing their behaviour—surely that is all just speculative? In Locked in Time, palaeontologist and science communicator Dean R. Lomax, with the able help of palaeoartist Bob Nicholls, presents fifty of the most exceptional fossils that preserve evidence of past behaviour: from pregnant plesiosaurs to a pterosaur pierced by a predatory fish. I was eagerly awaiting this book from the moment it was announced, but I was still caught off-guard by some of the astonishing fossil discoveries featured here.

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Book review – The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins

7-minute read

The history of human evolution has become firmly wedded to the Out of Africa hypothesis: the idea that we evolved in Africa and from there spread around the world. Back in 2015, palaeoanthropologist David R. Begun gave the proverbial tree of life a firm shake with The Real Planet of the Apes, making the case that the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Providing an incredibly well-written overview of the deep evolutionary history of great apes and humans, an interesting picture emerges of species moving into and out of Africa over time. Some reviewers hailed it as provocative—but is it really?

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Book review – Europasaurus: Life on Jurassic Islands / Urzeitinseln voller Leben

6-minute read

One appropriate way to start this review would be with “once upon a time…”. Europasaurus uses the unusual medium of a graphic novel to tell the story of Europe’s very own dwarf sauropod dinosaur that roamed the continent some 154 million years ago. The brainchild of palaeontologist Oliver Wings and palaeoartist Joschua Knüppe, this beautifully illustrated bilingual book is the perfect gift for the younger dinosaur enthusiast. The realistic tone of the story and the addition of a more serious factual section at the end, however, make this book attractive for a mature audience as well.

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Book review – On the Prowl: In Search of Big Cat Origins

7-minute read

Charismatic as big cats might be, their origins and evolutionary history are still not fully understood. In a mind-bogglingly beautiful marriage of art and science, On the Prowl provides a current overview of big cat evolution that will have many a book lover purring with pleasure.

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Book review – Life through the Ages II: Twenty-First Century Visions of Prehistory

6-minute read

When it comes to modern palaeoartists, Mark Witton has become a leading light in my opinion. Next to bringing a background as a professional palaeontologist to his artwork, he also wrote The Palaeoartist’s Handbook, which is a unique resource for this field as far as I can tell. Who could be better suited to produce a homage and sequel to one of the most iconic palaeoart books of all times: Knight’s Life through the Ages?

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