Animals Of A Bygone Era: An Illustrated Compendium, by Maia Safstrom

Although this book is a simple enough one to read, it has a surprising degree of poignancy and relevance, in that it is a book about creatures who are not dinosaurs which have gone extinct, which the author/illustrator finds to be worthy of more knowledge and reflection. Some of these species are pretty well-known, at least to students of prehistory (or, in the case of the Dodo, Tasmanian Tiger, and Saddle-Backed Rodrigues Giant tortoise, even history), while other creatures here will likely be pretty new to everyone who reads this book. Regardless of whether or not you as a reader are likely to be familiar with these creatures, there is a lot here to enjoy as far as the animals go. This is a lovely book full of endearing animals drawn by someone who has a well-earned reputation for quirky animal drawings. In many ways, the endearing quirkiness of the animals makes their extinction all the more sad, as these are animals that, at least as displayed by the author, are ones that one would have liked to have known and to have interacted with.

This book is a short one at just over 100 pages, and it consists of a generally but not entirely chronological order of species that have gone extinct that are not dinosaurs from early prehistory to the near-contemporary era within recorded history. The book begins with a brief introduction from the writer/illustrator, who comments on the goal that she had for this book and her travels to see animals. Each creature takes up two pages, with a black and white drawing, often with humorous notes attached to it or cute dialogue that it says, sometimes with a scale and notable aspects of their physiology or anatomy, and in the bottom right of the left page there is a note about where and when the creature lived during the course of the earth’s natural history. The book begins with the primitive water creature Dickensonia Costata, which had no growth limit and continued to grow until it died, which lived around 550 million years or so, and ends with the friendly and long-necked Saddle-Backed Rodrigues Giant Tortoises, who went extinct in the 1800’s on an island in the nation of Mauritius. In between are a host of species that range from the very familiar–Smilodons and woolly mammoths to the immensely obscure vegetarian eomanis, an early pangolin. At the end of the book, the author thanks various people and provides copyright information.

In reading this book I was reminded of my own very rare encounters with endangered and threatened animals. I have seen, for example, the population of entire nations motivated in defense of creatures like the Asiatic Cheetah, mourning and seeking someone to blame when a rare member of this species dies, thus making it unable to help the species recover from its dire place. In most of the cases discussed here, there was no one around on this earth to mourn the passing of the creatures, but one of the more notable aspects of being interested in past life is pondering the temporary nature of all species. At some point, it is likely that conditions on the earth and within our genome will mean that every species’ number will be up. Some species, like humanity, appear destined for particularly short periods of existence much less than the 2 million or so year average, while some species, like the trilobite, are often taken for granted because of their long appearance, while still others are living fossils which have not changed for apparently long periods of time. Those who read this book are encouraged to look at this book and find their own favorites among the many odd and endearing creatures drawn here.