Found [Science] Art

After hosting TB last week, I had been planning a bit of a break to spend time with family and get lost in the mountains for a bit (while secretly waiting in line last Saturday at midnight for the new Harry Potter - review pending).

We had a chance to sift through some flea markets and I found a wonderful set of small, illustrated books on nature published by the National Audubon Society and a book on fossil collecting in PA, both put out back in the 1960's. I thought I would share some of the finer illustrations below the fold.

The fossil collecting book has some really great ones, like the one pictured above and the one below, but it's hard to say whether or not the info on actual fossil collecting is still viable. The mines described in the book have long since been reclaimed by now, though Western Pennsylvania is hardly lacking of surfaced mined areas.

I thought Brian would like this one, especially with the inception of The Boneyard.

My personal fav of the bunch, of course.

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Lucky! You know me and old books dealing with paleo & evolution; there's always something interesting or funny in their pages (i.e. in Osborn's The Origin and Evolution of Life the dinosaurs had only died out about 6 million years before present, the whole world being less than 500 million years old based on the amount of salt in the oceans). I have to go back and look through some of the Time/Life books I got as a kid; I'm pretty sure there's some outdated stuff in there too.

I always find it funny when famous images just get copied over here and there; the T. rex on the one cover is a rip-off of Zallinger's "Age of Reptiles" painting. Along with some of Charles R. Knight's stuff, that has to be one of the most copied dino paintings ever (at least until the dino renaissance, anyway). Thanks for sharing these!