This incredible 578-page tome reproduces over 600 Burian paintings, illustrations, and sketches of the prehistoric world!

This volume is subtitled "Tertiary and Quaternary Monsters."

From the publisher:

The monsters of prehistoric times come to life in the paintings and illustrations of Zdenek Burian! The second volume of a trilogy summarizing Burian's work inspired by the prehistoric world.

The second volume of the prehistoric trilogy is devoted to that part of Zdenek Burian's paleoart, in which the painter and his expert advisors dealt with the development of life on Earth from the end of the Mesozoic to the present (interglacial) period, i.e. the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, the so-called era of mammals. The final part of the book is devoted to the development of primates and human ancestors in these periods and is introduced by a chapter by Associate Professor Václav Vančata, who summarizes the latest findings on this topic. The book, like the first volume, offers newly photographed and scanned oil paintings of bizarre Tertiary mammals and birds, Quaternary mammoths, cave bears and lions, or even australopithecines. However, we also find here lesser-known gouache illustrations and line drawings of Josef Augusta's short stories, which have never been published in Czech, as well as dozens of completely unknown painter's preparatory sketches. The paintings...today are in natural history museums in Vienna, Salzburg, Regensburg, Frankfurt or even in the Libyan Tripoli. Everything is accompanied by texts that place the painter's work in a wider paleontological and artistic context.

*****

Charles R. Knight and Z. Burian were the two artists most responsible for the twentieth century's collective image of prehistoric times and animals. "Many of Burian's early paintings appeared in a series of large format books with text by Augusta, the first of which, Prehistoric Animals, was originally published in Czechoslovakia by Artia (1956) and later in many other countries including Italy, France, Germany, England and Japan. The late S.J. Gould, who was an enthusiast of the work of Charles R. Knight, described it as one of the 20th Century's three most influential visual books on prehistory (many would argue that it was the most influential), and it was followed by a series of other landmark titles: Prehistoric Birds & Reptiles, Prehistoric Sea Monsters, The Book of Mammoths, and Prehistoric Man, all of which became famous and collectable in their own right."

The Prehistoric World of Zdeněk Burian, Book 2 (9 1/2" x 13" and 578 pages) contains over 600 paintings, illustrations, and sketches

This is the fiftth volume in this Czech series collecting the complete works of Zdeněk Burian (1905-1981). After "The Adventurous World of Zdenek Burian" "The Wonderful World of Zdenek Burian," and "The Forgotten World of Zdeněk Burian," and "The Prehistoric World of Zdeněk Burian, Book 1."