The deep past harbours many events, epochs, and places that are still a mystery to me. Case in point: once upon a time, North America was cut in half by an enormous ocean. Something I was only dimly aware of. Luckily, Indiana University Press’s flagship palaeontology series Life of the Past has just the book to remedy that. I may be three years late to the party, but this 2017 book provides all the details one could ask for, and then some.
What is better than a good dinosaur story? How about 25 of them? Geologist and palaeontologist Donald R. Prothero returns to Columbia University Press for the third book in this format. Having covered fossils and rocks, he now serves up 25 fascinating vignettes of famous dinosaurs and the people who discovered them.
Pick a map. Any map really. Chances are that the map is oriented with North at the top. But why is that? Maps are a visual language onto themselves, rich in iconography and symbols, and especially rich in mutually agreed conventions. So rich, in fact, that you will take many for granted without even realising it. In Why North is Up, cartographer Mick Ashworth leads the way through the history of cartographical conventions, introducing when and why they came into being, and how they have changed over time. And as a book published by the Bodleian Library, it is very attractively illustrated with a large number of maps from their – and other – collections.
The Life of the Past series of Indiana University Press has got to be one of my favourite book series on palaeontology. Coming to think of it, it is probably also the only book series written for a wide audience on palaeontology that I can think of (cue the comments that will prove me wrong…). Jane P. Davidson has previously written A History of Paleontology Illustration in this series (Indiana UP, I like how you harked back to the cover design of that book with this book). With the current book, she takes a look at the financial supporters of this discipline, and how their support has shaped the science. Sounds like a fairly esoteric topic, yet my interest was piqued.
The Inquisitive Biologist