John Conway (3)

A book about reconstructing the appearance of extinct animals, and how that involves both scientific anatomical work and essentially artistic guesses about unknown or unknowable aspects of soft tissue and behaviour.

The first part of the book offers heterodox, but not impossible or necessarily unlikely, reconstructions of extinct animals (mostly dinosaurs), such as a spiny Triceratops, tree-climbing Protoceratops, and furball Leaellynasaura. The second, and to my perverted tastes more show more interesting, part depicts modern animals as if they were known only from their skeletons and using techniques that have been employed in palaeoart, showing how things may go wrong. Most notably, it criticizes what the authors call "skin-wrapping", the tendency to depict dinosaurs and other ancient "reptiles" with minimal fat, skin flaps, feathers, etc, leaving the skeleton and musculature visible in life to an extent rare among living animals. Birds and whales, in particular, illustrated in this style turn into nightmarish creatures that would seem more appropriate in an SF movie than in a wildlife show.

A good and thought-provoking book. show less

I heard about this book maybe a year ago, and wanted it immediately. At the time, though, I could only find it as an e-book, which, meh. Somehow I saw that it was in paperback right around the time I was putting together a Christmas wishlist, and a few weeks later, I was delighted to unwrap it. It was instantly at the top of my reading pile.

It took longer than I would have predicted to read, but in all the best ways! I had been expecting just an art book -- creatively imagining how dinosaurs show more might have looked because -- who knows!? The sample illustrations (especially the sleeping T Rex) sold me, I wasn't really expecting science. But it was science. Each picture came with a story of how paleoart works, and the prejudices we hold that have prevented species from being depicted a certain way in the past. For instance -- why are there almost no pictures of dinosaurs sleeping? Why no pictures of smaller dinosaurs sheltering in dens, despite recent evidence some certainly did. Why are all tall spines in dinosaurs almost always interpreted as "skin sails" like the Dimetrodon, even though the Dimetrodon isn't a dinosaur, and modern species like chameleons exhibit tall vertebral spines but do not have sails.

In addition to all the cutting edge paleoart discussion, there was also a fantastic section illustrating the difficulties of drawing an animal based only on its skeleton by imaging future scientists, lacking picture of present-day species, trying to imagine what cats, cows, vultures, etc., looked like based only on theirs.

Fascinating and delightful. Highly recommended! show less

Love it- been following TetZoo blog on and off for the past few years, and John Conway is one of my favorite modern paleoartists. In All Yesterdays, Naish, Conway, and Kosemen consider the bits that don't fossilize- integument, musculature and fat, and behavior such as play and rest. There's a short section on All Todays, applying conventional paleoartists trends and interpretations to today's extant critters- my favorite is probably the swan.

Fun, but probably mostly of interest for dinosaur buffs. While the artwork is imaginative, it isn't up to the quality that I expected.