Palaeontology in Public

To write that I’ve long been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to read a copy of the recently published Palaeontology in Public; Popular Science, Lost Creatures, and Deep Time is an gross understatement. It’s quite an amusing story that I’ll tell you at another time, and it becomes even funnier when the fact that it is available as an Open Access PDF from its publisher University College of London Press is made known, but enough of that for now…

Edited by Dr. Chris Manias, Palaeontology in Public features a collection case studies, each published as a chapter, by a remarkable assembly of noteworthy authors in the field, including some of my favourites such as Dr. Mark P. Witton, Dr. Elsa Panciroli, and Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Focusing primarily on vertebrate palaeontology, the collected studies present a lively overview of the history of the subject through the intersections of palaeontology and popular interest (which, naturally, includes popular culture), which, as you’ll come to learn from reading it, are more diverse and numerous than you may have imagined.

From Jurrasic Park and and recent “rock star” Spinosaurus back to into the literary depictions of dinosaurs (and creatures previously thought to have been dinosaurs) of the past two centuries, encompassing not only the charismatic large dinosaurs but also the smaller creatures, including early humans such as Homo neanderthalensis, the earlier Australopithecines, and the even earlier non-Primate mammals, these studies offer the reader grand, entertaining, and mind-expanding adventures in a subject that has captivated the human imagination since its beginnings in the Eighteenth Century.

I’ll have much more to write about Palaeontology in Public very soon, but for now, if this is a subject in which you are even casually interested, and certainly if strongly, it’s well worth making note of the book now.