Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Review: Register Prehistoria




Mention prehistoric animals and a person’s thoughts will most likely go to dinosaurs. Then perhaps to the more popular Pleistocene animals like mammoths, sabertooth cats, giant ground sloths. Maybe a fossil enthusiast will think of ammonites and trilobites.

But there is so much more diversity to the 4 billion years of life on Earth. Piles and piles of creatures deserving more attention. That’s where Stanton Fink’s Register Prehistorica comes in.


Fink’s tome, which doubles as a coloring book, showcases an eclectic mix of trilobites, pterosaurs, mammals, echinoderms, amphibians, and even stranger beasts. The book covers a temporal range from the dawn of multicellular life in the Ediacaran all the way to the 1800s.

Fink gives each creature its own character with interesting anecdotes about unusual behavior, history of discovery, or odd name origins. See, for example, the trilobite Triproetus bonbon- whose species name refers to the French chocolate candies- because the creature’s extremely well-preserved fossils were a “treat” to discover. Or the fearsome mesonychid mammal Ankalagon saurognathus, which was named after a dragon from JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion.


Animal reconstructions are meticulously detailed, with lavish attention given to each tooth, scale, and osteoderm. Many of the illustrations are the first depictions of animals that are only known from a few fragmentary bones or shell pieces buried in an academic paper.

The backgrounds, by contrast, are quite simple, often little more than broad strokes to suggest scenery in the manner of a Japanese sumi-e or a Chinese shui mo hua ink painting.  This juxtaposition can be a bit jarring at first, but the simple backgrounds help to highlight the details of the subject animals without distracting from them.

Even cats like Register Prehistoria.

Fink has drawn and written many, many more books covering all sorts of obscure and fascinating prehistoric creatures. Register Prehistoria is an excellent jumping-off point to discovering more of Earth’s ancient diversity.

You can get a copy of Register Prehistoria here.

You can get a book of Stanton Fink's Ordovician animals here.




And, of course, Trilobites!

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