The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives, by Alan Turner

The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives

I haven't done much reading in this book, so can't speak to the text, but the illustrations by Mauricio Anton are incredible. Many are along the lines of those generally found in how-to art books, showing bone structure and muscles, but there are also comparison drawings that show extinct cats overlaid with other extinct cats or with modern cats, to show the differences. Some just show cats walking or scratching trees, etc. There are some hunting pictures, too, some of which admittedly pushed close to crossing my comfort line. (I could have done without the "Sketch of a leopard with a hominid carcass in a tree" for instance, even if they did use it as an excuse to write about how some "disarticulated" fossil bones may have become arranged they way they were arranged when found. Yuck. But, hey, life has always been tough out in the wilds, and there's no sense pretending otherwise, I guess.) Non-cat animals are also illustrated. Most illustrations are in black and white, but there are color plates as well.

The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives: An Illustrated Guide to Their Evolution and Natural History is published by Columbia University Press, New York, c. 1997. The "Further Reading" section is broken into subjects: Anatomy, Locomotion, and Function; Evolution, Extinction, Faunal Evolution, Fossil Formation and Recovery, Fossil Species, Modern Species, Paleoecology, Reconstruction, and Taxonomy.

According to the back cover copy, "Mauricio Anton is an artist and scientific illustrator based at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid."