John Conway's Leaellynasaura art is one of my favorites. Honestly, it's worth checking out the whole book it's from, All Yesterdays, which isn't necessarily full of completely out-there interpretations of dinosaurs, but refreshing ones.
Romans were similar. https://www.amazon.com/First-Fossil-Hunters-Dinosaurs-Mammoths/dp/0691150133/ref=pd_sim_b_1 is a book someone has written about how dinosaur bones are the influence for many roman myths
Will take a little longer for it to turn green:
There are some arguments for that– in a book called The First Fossil Hunters, particularly, though not too much evidence. Similarly, it's often repeated that dinosaur bones inspired dragon myths, but I can't find any actual sources for that.
One fun story though- the first dinosaur bone to be scientifically illustrated and described by western science in the 1600s was just part of a femur, not recognizable as a dinosaur. The naturalist who described it first thought it might have belonged to a roman war elephant, but it was even bigger, so he concluded it must have belonged to a giant- citing the Bible as evidence that giants could have once existed in the UK. He had no concept not only of evolution, but of extinction either, he was only choosing candidates from extant animals.
Prehistoric Life (link is to Amazon listing for the book). A lot of interesting things about prehistoric life, evolution and the way the atmosphere (and entire planet) has changed over the millennia.
Of course it would't be proof per se. But it might contribute to figuring out whether unicorns ever existed or not, if you were a geologist or scientist/researcher in some other relevant way, and presented a rational and documented argument for your theory.
That's exactly what the book recommended claims (I haven't read it, though):
>https://www.amazon.com/First-Fossil-Hunters-Dinosaurs-Mammoths/dp/0691150133/ref=pd\_sim\_b\_1
"Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species..."
It seems to have good reviews.
It is 9 years old but I found All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals interesting.
I think it’s All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. Looked really interesting to me but I was never able to find a paper copy.
I saw a thing about a controversy over colorizing photos. What do you guys think? I don't really have enough information to have an opinion, but it reminded me a bit about some paleoart discussions I've seen...it's almost certain dinosaurs had bright colors and did all sorts of stuff we can't see directly in the fossil record, but we don't know exactly what those things were. You can draw a gray dinosaur just standing there and be fairly sure you aren't providing any inaccurate information...but also be fairly sure you aren't giving people the right idea of what dinosaurs would really have been like. Or you can add in some color and likely behaviors and be sure you have the details wrong...but might be providing a more accurate impression of the overall way the animal would have been.
I see both kinds of art used in different contexts, ranging from simple black outlines in papers to All Yesterdays which might be the best solution.
Is there anything like the paleoart community for historical art?
Also, in this era of violated norms, it's nice to see the administration hewing so tightly to the historical norm of being vague and sketchy about the president's health status
These illustrations are from a book called All Yesterdays where they explain how a lot of paleontological illustrations of the past largely just shrink wrapped skin around the musculature (easier to determine based on bone position) and failed to account for soft tissue (fat, cartilage, etc) and uses the reimagining of familiar animals to demonstrate how lacking that approach can be. They also try to add those features to dinosaurs to change our ideas of what they might have looked like.
When sexually aroused, excited or unable to find available members of their own kind, animals mate with members of other species with surprising regularity. Incidents of this sort are probably more common than generally realised, and there is evidence from the modern world that they occur increasingly during times of environmental stress or as populations become reduced or brought together due to changing conditions. When the species concerned are closely related, hybrid babies can be the result: numerous such cases are known from the modern world. However, matings between distantly-related species also occur in the wild. These seem to serve no function other than to relieve the frustration or boredom of at least one of the participants. As unsettling as they may seem, such acts may even be considered to bepart of the animal's play behavior. In one especially celebrated recent case, an apparently frustrated Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella ) copulated with a King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus ). It is well known that modern elephants are prone to a sort of seasonal sexual madness when they go through a phase of heightened sexual aggression termed musth. While in musth, elephants have been observed trying to forcefully mate with members of different species, such as rhinos.
We combined ideas about interspecies mating events with both the possibility of oversized sexual organs and of a seasonal 'sexual madness'. The result: a bull Stegosaurus trying to mount an innocent Haplocanthosaurus . In order to mate with females bearing a phalanx of dangerous spines and armored plates, we imagined male stegosaurs to have developed some of the largest and most frighteningly dextrous penises of the dinosaur world.
Source: All Yesterdays Book by C.M. Kösemen, Darren Naish, and John Conway
When sexually aroused, excited or unable to find available members of their own kind, animals mate with members of other species with surprising regularity. Incidents of this sort are probably more common than generally realised, and there is evidence from the modern world that they occur increasingly during times of environmental stress or as populations become reduced or brought together due to changing conditions. When the species concerned are closely related, hybrid babies can be the result: numerous such cases are known from the modern world. However, matings between distantly-related species also occur in the wild. These seem to serve no function other than to relieve the frustration or boredom of at least one of the participants. As unsettling as they may seem, such acts may even be considered to bepart of the animal's play behavior. In one especially celebrated recent case, an apparently frustrated Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella ) copulated with a King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus ). It is well known that modern elephants are prone to a sort of seasonal sexual madness when they go through a phase of heightened sexual aggression termed musth. While in musth, elephants have been observed trying to forcefully mate with members of different species, such as rhinos.
We combined ideas about interspecies mating events with both the possibility of oversized sexual organs and of a seasonal 'sexual madness'. The result: a bull Stegosaurus trying to mount an innocent Haplocanthosaurus . In order to mate with females bearing a phalanx of dangerous spines and armored plates, we imagined male stegosaurs to have developed some of the largest and most frighteningly dextrous penises of the dinosaur world.
​
Source: All Yesterdays Book by C.M. Kösemen, Darren Naish, and John Conway
When I say easier to digest, that includes getting more nutrients out of the meat you eat.
You can check this great bookout if you’re interested in learning more.
In my opinion I would recommend: Dinosaurs-The Grand Tour: Everything Worth Knowing About Dinosaurs from Aardonyx to Zuniceratops.
It goes throughout the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous period detailing information about the various dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that lived during that time. There are also some visuals provided for the creatures, and even size comparisons as well!
I just began rereading it recently, so it was the example I could come up with that I had read about. I recommend getting the second, updated version from 2019. Here's the link to it in case you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs_The-Grand-Tour-Second-Zuniceratops/dp/161519519X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3T16J1T0G6U2L&keywords=Dinosaurs%E2%80%95The+Grand+Tour&qid=1648907888&sprefix=dinosaurs+the+grand+tour%2Caps%2C200&sr=8-1
Keiron Pim's Dinosaurs: The Grand Tour
It is a, little misleading and doesn't have as much illustrations but it's fairly up to date.
Dk Smithsonian' Visual Guide to Prehistoric Animals covers dinos and other extinct animals.
>At least this creationist says that they are: Martin Lubenow, "Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils." He cites by evolutionists who said that homo erectus was living in Australia in historical times, if I remember right, not pre-historic times. https://www.amazon.com/Bones-Contention-Creationist-Assessment-Fossils/dp/0801065232
Can you cite the page number or chapter? I have the book for just such reference purposes.
At least this creationist says that they are: Martin Lubenow, "Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils." He cites by evolutionists who said that homo erectus was living in Australia in historical times, if I remember right, not pre-historic times. https://www.amazon.com/Bones-Contention-Creationist-Assessment-Fossils/dp/0801065232
I recommend "dinosaurs, the grand tour' https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs_The-Grand-Tour-Second-Zuniceratops/dp/161519519X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=dinosaurs+the+grand+tour&qid=1627485792&sprefix=dinosaurs+the+g&sr=8-3 It has some inaccurate reconstructions, but the text is really informative
This book talks about theories of how different mythological creatures might have come about from unearthing fossils. Elephant bones, for instance, look a lot like human bones — except the eye sockets are tiny, and there’s a huge hole in the front. If you didn’t know it was an elephant, it could read as an eye socket — which could trigger the myth of cyclopes.
Yeah, that's what I did. At the time the exchange rate murdered me but I really wanted it.
There was a kindle version as I recall? It's only $9: https://www.amazon.com.au/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
Thanks for the reply, I figured the Princeton guide might be a little out of date as it was published in 2016 according to Amazon.
The Grand Tour was published as a second edition in December 2019 (again according to Amazon), is it the second edition or the first edition that you own?
That’s the second edition on Amazon, is that the edition you own and say is outdated?
Thanks again!
We evolved with food that was cooked. First by following the paths of wild fires where root vegetables and nuts were cooked by natural processes and then, with the control of fire, did it intentionally. The burned food offered nutrients that were easier for our bodies to process.
This book explains it in lay terms way better than I can, and I think I remember seeing a TED Talk by Daniel Dennett that talks about it as well.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465020410/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_kaU2Fb3VZV5ZF
Support the book this is from, it's great
https://www.amazon.ca/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
> Isn't it strange that we are the ones who are lucky enough to be in the world of technology?
Technology is 2 million years old: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/
Check out the book <em>the First Fossil Hunters</em> by Adrienne Mayor.
She believes in evolution, while I don't, so we tend to disagree on the interpretation of the evidence, but the evidence itself is very interesting.
She mostly deals with historical finds, anachronisms and the like, and tries to explain them.
Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design
> When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock.
Correct. Check out Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. Hunter-gatherer populations worldwide generally had/have a 30% violent death rate for males. A rate identical to our closest primate cousins.
> Casualty rates were high-about 29% among Dani men were killed in warfare, according to the anthologist Karl Heider. The death rate is very similar to the male battle casualties among chimpanzees and the Yanomamo of South America
Possession and violence have always existed. We're all animals in a pit.
https://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/014303832X
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NAxmmgG5S94/UMtKcA4OYNI/AAAAAAAACEM/9twpzSOuJp0/s1600/kosemen%2Bstego.jpg
That's from a really cool book about the limitations of paleo-reconstructive art called All Yesterdays.
> Cooking "denatures" the protein to make it more bioavaible but this seems totally counter-intuitive to all other foods where cooking reduces benefits.
This is just patently false.
There is tons of research showing that cooking increases our digestive system's capacity to extract nutrients from food, and Catching Fire actually takes it so far as to argue that eating cooked food allowed our ancestors to evolve larger brains by reducing the amount of energy required by our digestive tracts.
Prehistoric Life by DK Publishing. Quite the opposite of a dense book. It is definitely an illustration-heavy text. This was our main textbook for my Paleontology class last fall.