The Book:
Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time (UCL Press, 2025)
In 2025, UCL Press published the book Palaeontology in Public: Lost Creatures, Popular Science and Deep Time, an open-access edited collection based on the discussions of the Popularizing Palaeontology to date.
It can be downloaded as a free pdf here: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/palaeontology-in-public/
Summary
Since the establishment of concepts of deep time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, palaeontology has been one of the most high-profile sciences. Dinosaurs, mammoths, human ancestors and other lost creatures from Earth’s history are some of the most prominent icons of science, and are essential for our understanding of nature and time. Palaeontology and its practitioners have had a huge impact on public understandings of science, despite their often precarious and unsteady position within scientific institutions and networks.
Palaeontology in Public considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. In so doing, it explores how these public dimensions have been crucial to the development of palaeontology, and indeed how they conditioned wider views of science, nature, the environment, time and the world. The book provides a history of vertebrate palaeontology through a series of compelling case studies. Dinosaurs feature, of course, including Spinosaurus, Winsor McCay’s ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ and the creatures of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. But there are also the small mammals of the Mesozoic, South American Glyptodons, and human ancestors like Neanderthals and Australopithecines. This book shows how palaeontology is defined by its relationship with public audiences and how this connection is central to our vision of the past and future of the Earth and its inhabitants.
Chapter List
1. Chris Manias, Introduction
Part I: Extinct Reptiles
2. Richard Fallon and David Hone, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Crichton, and the Case of Palaeontological Fiction’
3. Victoria Coules, ‘Winsor McCay’s Gertie: The First Living Dinosaur’
4. Will Tattersdill and Mark P. Witton, ‘The “Spin” in Spinosaurus: Inventing A Modern Dinosaur Superstar’
5. Ilja Nieuwland, ‘A Good Officer: The Long and Remarkable Career of the Chimaeral Naosaurus’
6. Zichuan Qin and Lukas Rieppel, ‘From “Long” to “Feng:” The Marvellous New Era of Feathered Dinosaur Discoveries in China’
Part II: Mammals & Hominins
7. Elsa Panciroli and Chris Manias, ‘Mammals, the Measure of Success? The Legacy of “Progress” in Natural Sciences’
8. Irina Podgorny, ‘Literary Beasts: Fossil Mammals, Bone Seekers and Palaeontology in twentieth-century Argentina; Or, An Illusory Future. A Fossil History of Argentine Culture’
9. Joe Cain, ‘When Fieldwork Goes Wrong, Go Public: George Gaylord Simpson and Anne Roe in Venezuela, 1938-1939’
10. Chris Manias, Rebecca Wragg Sykes and Lydia Pyne, ‘Shadows in the Mirror: A Discussion on Understandings of Neanderthals and Australopithecines’
11. Oliver Hochadel, ‘Palaeoanthropology and the Mass Media: An Entangled History’
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12. Chris Manias, ‘Pageants of Life: Conclusion & Epilogue’