Why read All Yesterdays?

Book cover of All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

Book description

All Yesterdays is a book about the way we see dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Lavishly illustrated with over sixty original artworks, All Yesterdays aims to challenge our notions of how prehistoric animals looked and behaved. As a critical exploration of palaeontological art, All Yesterdays asks questions about what is…

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Why read it?

1 author picked All Yesterdays as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Dougal Dixon

Author

The reason that many dinosaur restorations are inaccurate is mostly because the artists base them only on the bones and skeletons. In an interesting exercise the authors and artists here have taken modern animals and imagined how future palaeontologists would illustrate them on the same basis. An elephant has no trunk (the soft musclular material would not have fossilized). A humming bird is a vampire (its long narrow beak looks so much like a hypodermic needle). A manatee is a pig-like animal grazing on upland meadows (or so we would surmise if we only knew of its skull). As a…

From Dougal's list on The best books on the popular cultural depiction of evolution, of the life of the past, and, how it changes.