Prehistoric Animals (First English Edition, Illustrated)

AUGUSTA, Dr Josef (text) & Zdeněk BURIAN (illustrations). Prehistoric Animals. Translated by Dr Greta Hort. London: Spring Books, 1958.

Folio (approx. 35 x 25 cm). Original publisher's buckram cloth. Pictorial dust jacket. 47 pp. text, followed by 60 colour and monochrome plates by Zdeněk Burian. First English edition.

One of the most instrumental books in shaping the world's perception of prehistoric life ever published. The sixty plates in Prehistoric Animals carry the reader from the earliest single-celled organisms through the Palaeozoic seas, the great Carboniferous forests, the age of the dinosaurs, and into the Pleistocene — a visual history of life on earth of extraordinary ambition and beauty.

Stephen Jay Gould described the book as one of the three most influential works on prehistory published in the twentieth century, and the influence has proved entirely durable: Burian's images shaped the imagination of an entire generation of palaeontologists, and the partnership of Augusta and Burian remains one of the great creative collaborations in the history of scientific illustration.

Very good in an unclipped dust jacket. Jacket edges a bit weathered and creased. Some small markings along lower edge. Otherwise in excellent shape and well preserved throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000430