The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives by Mauricio Anton, Alan Turner, F. Clark. Howell (Foreword by)

Product Details

Synopsis

In this beautifully illustrated natural history that links extinct larger feline species with those still in existence, collaborators Alan Turner and Mauricio Antón weave together the evidence of modern feline behavior with that of the fossil record.

Annotation

Voted Best Book on Prehistoric Animals of 1997 by the readers of Prehistoric Times

Dawn A. Adams

As Alan Turner notes, relatively little has been written for the non-specialist about the evolution of the cats. He and artist Mauricio Antón therefore set out to provide ‘an authoritative and yet popular and accessible account of the evolution of the larger cats by bringing together the evidence of modern behavior and the fossil record.´ Their book does exactly that. Antón´s illustrations, refreshingly ‘based directly on the skeletal evidence available and . . . not merely slightly altered versions of living cats with the addition of large fangs, ´ are perhaps the finest ever published. They are intertwined with Turner´s cogent text in an eloquent demonstration of the interplay between art and science, paleontology and zoology, predator and prey, ecology and behavior, and anatomy and geography.

Biography

Mauricio Antón is an artist and scientific illustrator based at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid. His work has appeared in numerous scientific publications, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Alan Turner is a paleontologist and reader in vertebrate paleontology in the School of Biological and Earth Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University and is a former senior curator of paleontology at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa.