Albums of

It's always difficult to know why I did or didn't buy certain things as a kid. Certainly, my limited budget was a constraint, but why I bought one thing and not another is sometimes now lost in the mists of time. For example...

My favorite non-fiction series of books when I was a kid were the Album Of books, most of which (and all of the ones I was interested in) were authored by Tom McGowan and illustrated by Rod Ruth. I really loved these books, but sadly, the only one that I actually bought and therefore still have access to today (albeit in a pretty beat-up format) is the Album of Sharks. I'm pretty sure that the Album of Whales was only available in one of my middle school libraries, so I only had access to it while I was a student at that particular school, and our local public library had Album of Dinosaurs and Album of Prehistoric Animals, which were of course my favorites. The Album of Reptiles is the last one that I might have been interested in, although I only ever saw that once or twice in a book store or two, and honestly it was the least interesting of the bunch, because it talked as much about turtles and regular lizards as it did Komodo dragons and crocodiles. Which was, of course, a major failing. (In fact, Komodo dragons might well have merely been part of the monitor lizard section, and didn't even get a color full page illustration. Maybe that's why I never had as much interest in that one as I thought that I would.) These books are nearly as old as I am; first published in the mid 70s, but they remained in print through the 80s at least, including with updated text from time to time as scientific names changed and what-not. I don't know when the last printing was, but I know that there was one in 1989.

Now don't get me wrong. I loved my Album of Sharks book. I read it and re-read it over and over again. But I really missed out on not getting the others while I could. As luck would have it, I recently found a used copy in decent shape at a pretty cheap price for Album of Prehistoric Animals and just ordered it. I'll enjoy that, even if it was written for kids. I have a particular fondness for the extinct Cenozoic animals. I remember back in the mid 90s or so, when I was in my early to mid-20s and the book was already a good ten years old or so, reading Robert Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies and hearing him talk about how in the "bad old days" dinosaur paleontology was a dead-end to nowhere, and all of the sexy work in the field was being done with mammals, which is what most people were interested in. As a kid, the exact opposite was true. It was easy to find a whole shelf at every library I ever went to (granted, as a kid, that was usually limited to my modest yet pretty capable public library as well as the various school libraries of the public schools I was enrolled in, which changed from year to year, naturally) of dinosaur books. It was hard to find any information at all on prehistoric mammals. Everyone knew about woolly mammoths, of course, and everyone knew about saber-tooth tigers, but actually finding material to read about them was pretty difficult. And finding out about anything else was a nightmare. I think maybe that's the reason that my love of Album of Prehistoric Animals was so intense; I had an fierce demand for that kind of product, and it was one of the very few books that provided it. I also had the Golden Play Book of Animals of the Past Stamps. It covered the entire gamut of prehistoric life, but that's where I first read about Seymouria, for example, and Uintatherium. I really treasured the rare opportunity to get an illustrated exegesis on Cenozoic animal life.

I've included an image that I found online that was always my favorite and probably the most memorable (aside from the cover) of the full color illustrations in this book; Brontotherium running away from a volcano. Brothotherium has, sadly, had to see a lot of name changes due to the pedantic way in which scientific names for fossils works. Given how well known it was, changing it seems almost petty and sadistic, but it's actually changed at least four times, and its current name is one that is very poorly known compared to some of the others. Brontotherium worked. Titanotherium was OK, and seems to have replaced it in popularity at one point. And then suddenly, we had Brontops, which—hey, it's easier to spell, at least. Now, we're at... Megacerops? Does anyone who's not a professional Cenozoic paleontologist know that name? What a joke.

Anyhoo, the brontotheres belong to the Priabonian, or Late Eocene; about a five million year period from 38-33 million years ago. Lots of them have been found in the northern Great Plains area, in particular Nebraska and South Dakota. The Sioux used to find their bones exposed by rainstorms, and called them "thunder beasts", hence the name brontothere. Many of these seem to have been killed in volcanic eruptions; during the Eocene the Rocky Mountains were still volcanically more active than they are today (it's not true to say that they're not today. Haven't you ever been to Yellowstone?) In this sense, both the text by Mr. McGowan and the art by Mr. Ruth are quite well-informed and well-researched, which I appreciate even today. The art also features herds of Poebrotherium, "grass-eating beast" although this early sheep-like camelid was probably more of a browser than a grazer. Indeed; the transition from Eocene to Oligocene was marked by cooling and drying, and the great forests of the early Eocene giving way to the early expanses of great prairies and steppes, which previously had been much smaller and less ecologically significant. This is frequently a theme throughout the Cenozoic. The early Cenozoic indeed was probably even warmer than much of the Mesozoic, in which tropical and subtropical conditions extended into fairly high latitudes and there was no polar ice at all. The PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were the conditions in which gigantic snakes like Titanoboa could thrive, and crocodilians existed in high latitudes. Of course, the end of this trend was the literal Ice Ages of the Pleistocene, but the reality is that the climate is not as steady as we are often led to believe, and warming and cooling pulses seem to be constant, and separated by relatively small windows measured more in centures than in millions of years. That said, the Cenozoic more broadly can certainly be described as a cooling period from this PETM to the Ice Age, and also broadly, one can say that cooling leads to more aridity. Forests turn into grasslands and grasslands into deserts. Where the Eocene may well have seen most of the world covered with forests, these shrank over time and steppes and prairies expanded. During the coldest part of the Cenozoic, the glacial maximums, much of what is now boreal forest was completely turned into mammoth steppe, for instance. These pulses of climate change led to pulses of ecological change, which led to extinctions and the subsequent spread of new animal life. While much of the fascination with the Mesozoic era has to do with its extreme exoticness—nothing like the dinosaurs is around today—the Cenozoic is instead interesting because of it's subtle exoticness. Animals that are clearly related to and similar to animals that we know quite well, and yet not quite right. Camels in North America that correspond ecologically to antelope or giraffes. Rhinos in Florida that look more like hippos. Horses that are one part wild horse, one part zebra, and one part... something a little different. Bear-dogs and dog-bears. (Yes, those are two completely different types of animals. That happen to look almost exactly like each other.) Hell pigs. Gomphotheres. The list goes on and on.

Anyway, I'd like to start a new series of on again off again posts. These will be like my Meet the Tyrants or Meet the Carnosaurs posts, but less regular, less organized, and focused on a family of Cenozoic mammals, like the Camelidae or the Nimravidae. Rather than talking specifically about each individual, I'll probably talk about the family overall and maybe hitting some of the highlights, and maybe skipping over species or genera that we don't know enough about to say anything interesting about.