This incredible 600-page tome reproduces 412 Burian paintings, illustrations, and sketches of the prehistoric world!

This volume covers "the Origin of the Earth to the Extinction of Dinosaurs" and includes the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods).

Early sea life, trilobites, dimetrodons, stegosaurus, iguanodons, and all your childhood favorites are here in all their glory.

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."

From the publisher:

A vision of prehistoric worlds in the fourth monograph of this legend of Czech painting

Zdenek Burian's Prehistoric World Trilogy will capture in its entirety the most famous part of the work of the well-known painter and illustrator -- his vision of prehistoric worlds. Burian was a leading figure of the so-called paleoart in the 20th century. In these books, we will find all the artist's works on the subject of paleontology and paleoanthropology, collected, and moreover with exceptional reproduction quality.

The reader of the trilogy will become familiar with the development of knowledge of the prehistoric world in Burian's time, and at the same time, he can follow the chronological development of life on Earth from its origin to the (geological) present.

In Book I, whose subtitle "From the Creation of the Earth to the Extinction of the Dinosaurs" clearly defines it in terms of time, we come across Burian's iconic images of the trilobites of the Czech Barrandien, the fauna of coal marshes, and well-known animal groups of the Mesozoic period -- marine reptiles, pterosaurs and especially dinosaurs.

The Prehistoric World of Zdenek Burian, Book 1 (9 1/2" x 13" and 600 pages) contains a total of 412 paintings, illustrations, and sketches, of which 209 items were from museums and galleries, and 135 items were obtained from private collectors. The vast majority of the works reproduced in this book were photographed or scanned in connection with its creation. High-quality negatives, slides, or xerocopies created earlier were also partially used. Only for a small part of the works, those that we could not track down were reproduced from original publications, in which case the caption always states "originál nedostupný" (original unavailable).

The text is in Czech, but the majority of the book is taken up reproducing artwork.

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