Wonderful life. Burgess shale and the nature of history / Чудесная жизнь. Сланец Берджесса и природа истории

Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day. In February 1942, Knight designed a chronological series of panoramas, depicting the history of life from the advent of multicellular animals to the triumph of Homo sapiens, for the National Geographic. (This is the one issue that’s always saved and therefore always missing when you see a “complete” run of the magazine on sale for two bits an issue on the back shelves of the general store in Bucolia, Maine.) He based his first painting in the series—shown on the jacket of this book—on the animals of the Burgess Shale. <...>