The Last Dinosaur Book

W. J. T. Mitchell begins The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (University of Chicago Press, 1998) by hypothesizing a post-human future, when visitors from another galaxy — imagined as erect bipedal reptiles — arrive on earth and attempt to reconstruct human life from the fossil remains. To these visitors,…

Dinomania

“To make sense of phenomena like dinomania, we need to understand ‘dinosaur’ broadly as a construction in which palaeontologists are not the sole arbiters.” (p. 238) Boria Sax is a professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College and is known for his writing on human-animal relations. In Dinomania: Why We Love, Fear…

Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

I happened upon a digital version of the The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2nd ed., 2016) in the New School Library collection. The author and illustrator, Gregory S. Paul is a dinosaur illustrator and independent researcher. As a reference book, the bulk of the text is, as the title suggests, field guide-style listing of…

All Yesterdays

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (Irregular Books, 2012) is a small art book by vertebrate paleontologist Darren Naish and paleoartists John Conway and C. M. Kosemen. When the book was first released in 2012, it got a lot of attention online on the “speculative” illustrations of extant animals….

Articulating Dinosaurs

Brian Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. One area of Noble’s research is the anthropology of science, techniques and expertise. Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (University of Toronto Press, 2016) explores how scientific knowledge and public practices intersect to articulate dinosaur natures. Noble begins by…

Science Comics

Science Comics: Dinosaurs: Feathers and Fossils by MK Reed and Joe Flood (First Second, 2016) Dinosaurs: Feathers and Fossils was one of the first two books in First Second’s Science Comics series. Author MK Reed is the author of several graphic novels, including Americus, The Cute Girl Network, and Science Comics: Wild Weather, as well as…