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The author of these texts is Rostislav Walica. No part of the texts may be used elsewhere without the permission of the publisher.

From the Origin of the Earth to the Extinction of Dinosaurs

This book, and the other two that will follow, try to map comprehensively the part of Zdeněk Burian's work in which he devoted himself to a unique discipline on the border of science and art, a discipline that has been called artistic paleontological reconstruction (or restoration) for many years. In recent decades, the term „paleoart“ has become established for the discipline worldwide. Its origins date back to the first half of the 19th century. Paleoart seeks to interpret paleontological findings and data with a variety of visual arts, thus popularizing the sciences of prehistoric life to the widest public. Over time, Burian is considered the dominant figure in the "classic" period of this genre. 

Brachiosaurus 1941, one of the most iconic pictures of the „classic“ period of paleoart

In other words, in these books, we try to capture the whole of Burian's "prehistory.“ However, the term prehistory must first be defined and delimited, as it is a broad concept. In our "prehistoric" trilogy, we put into context those Burian images of ancient times that fall under the protection of two natural sciences, namely paleontology and paleoanthropology, i.e. the sciences researching fossils of plants, animals, and human ancestors. We don't deal with historical prehistory, which is studied by a discipline called archeology. We deal with archaeological prehistory in these books, in the third volume respectively, only when it overlaps in terms of time with paleoanthropological prehistory. Thus, on the timeline, we end at the beginning of the Neolithic, about twelve thousand years ago, when biological evolution in humans is slowing down and cultural evolution continues. Of the Neolithic scenes, we, in the third book, focus only on those in which Josef Augusta participated, as we strive to capture the Augusta-Burian cooperation in its entirety.

In addition to the prehistoric scenes themselves – from the most serious scientific reconstructions and all the preserved sketches and studies of them, through several free paintings with prehistoric themes and strong artistic overtones and various scenes from the category of genre scenes to illustrations of Josef Augusta's short stories. We also reproduce Burian's depictions of fossils, archaeological artifacts (if they fall within the time period defined by us), famous paleontological localities or paleontologists, and paleoanthropologists associated with them. We reproduce portraits of famous personalities of paleontology and evolutionary biology, who are not connected with specific finds, on the frontispiece, resp. in the introductory chapter.

Several keys were offered to sort the individual images. We chose the one that is most understandable to the reader – we follow the timeline from the origin of the Earth to the (geological) present. Virtually, we complete part of the pilgrimage of the heroes of the famous film „Journey to the Beginning of Time“, which the film itself did not capture, namely downstream of that mystical river from the primeval ocean and its trilobites back to the present. To paraphrase the name of the iconic film, we will experience a journey from the beginning of time with this trilogy. This criterion is combined with a systematic-taxonomic criterion, where a certain important group of animals is conceived as a whole and the chronological level is only a complementary aspect – for example, dinosaurs, which cover the period from the Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous.

The trilogy can thus be seen as an overview of the evolution of life on our planet. However, the main goal of the whole project is, as already mentioned, to contextualize Burian's work in this field with the state of the above-mentioned sciences in Burian's time and to confront it with today's level of knowledge. Only in this way can we outline the development of the interpretation of paleontological data during the 20th century.

Due to the chosen keys for sorting works, the other possible approaches had to be sidelined or used only partially, this mainly concerns the possible sorting of images by Burian's life timeline. Thus, we place side by side works from different periods comprising more than four decades, when the painter dealt with the topic, which naturally does not allow us to reflect the development of his artistic and professional career. We use the time sequence only when we line up the same scenes or the same animals. Another of the keys, which is used only as a secondary one, is the "incorrect" anthropocentric sorting of the evolution of life as a ranking "from lower to higher" - that is, from invertebrates to humans as the "peak" of evolution. It is an approach typical of the 20th century, and therefore of all Burian's books – that is why we respect it. In a similar spirit, for individual geological periods, (paleobotanical) landscape scenes are presented first, followed by animal depictions. We are not naturally scientifically "balanced“ in terms of geological periods, for example, the entire four billion years of the Precambrian weigh less than two million Quaternary years in the books. And third, in the same sense, we place animal groups side by side as their (often supposed) relationship was seen in the painter's time, and with few exceptions, we do not apply the latest findings in molecular genetics. We consciously leave the chronological-systematic key several times and focus on important paleontological localities, such as the Morisson formation.

Allosaurus and Stegosaurus 1950, a vision from the Morisson formation

Composition of images and captions

Volume 1 contains a total of 412 paintings, illustrations, and sketches, of which 209 items were borrowed for the possibility of reprinting from galleries and museums, 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, we reproduce scans from the original publications, in which case the label always states "original unavailable" (originál nedostupný).

We based the names of the individual works on the fact that they were the names of artifacts, and we, therefore, respect the names that were originally intended for the paintings. The vast majority were named by Vratislav Mazák in the cataloging he founded, later edited, and published in Vladimír Prokop's publications. Many animals depicted in the paintings are now classified as different species or genera after various revisions, but in our case, we do not take this fact into account in the names of the paintings, specific cases are then mentioned in the accompanying texts of the book. We capture the problems of so-called synonyms in the names of paintings only if Vratislav Mazák tried to capture them; thus reflecting the state of science until the mid-1980s at most. If Mazák thus changed the name of the animal against its original name in the publication for which the painting was originally intended, we put Mazák's name in parentheses. For school paintings and oils for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, we put their names in parentheses as an alternative. In the illustrations for Augustas' short stories, the titles are changed in several cases to give a better idea of ​​the specific animals in the illustration (similarly to the paintings for Vertebrate Paleontology – Paleontologie obratlovců). In illustrations for short stories, we also state after the hyphen the name of the specific Augusta‘s story and in square brackets the order of printing the illustration within the given short story. The position and form of the signature are clear on the vast majority of reproduced images, if this is not the case, we state both the location and the form of the signature behind the dimensions of the image. Under the current owner's name, the book or the exhibition title is listed, for which the image was primarily created. Subsequently, we present the titles in which the repainted variants appeared.

Only those Burian paintings that have a final character are included in the number system by which we strive to introduce a clear order into Burian's prehistoric works. This does not include studies or sketches, however elaborate: it includes only those paintings that are a scene from prehistoric times, even those didactically stylized (see, for example, pp. 304 and 354). Therefore, we did not include images of paleontological sites, paleontologists, or redrawn fossils in the system. The images that belong to the system according to the above-mentioned criteria are sorted according to the chronology of creation within Burian's work.

Burian's more than four decades with prehistory

The Šipka cave on the Kotouč hill near Štramberk (North Moravia, currently part of the Czech Republic) was a kind of initiation place that "determined" the painter's path in the field of paleo reconstruction. That hill is a Late Jurassic coral reef full of fossils. In the cave, the skeletal remains of a Neanderthal man were found in the late 19th century. Burian played here as a boy in the 1910s, and it could be his personal magical portal to the world of prehistory.

At present, when access to detailed professional paleontological data has lost its exclusivity, hundreds of people are dedicated to paleoart as a discipline globally. In Burian's time, however, the artistic representation of prehistory on a "professional" level was a matter for only a few individuals. The artist always had (there were only a few exceptions) to join forces with a scientist-paleontologist. This created famous author pairs. There were several in the 20th century, but the Augusta-Burian pair was the most famous, even so iconic that for many people, especially abroad, the phrase formed a whole.

Paleontologist Josef Augusta invited Burian to collaborate at a time when the painter was the star of Czech narrative illustration, especially books of the adventure genre. The unique combination of his imaginative realism with exceptional attention to detail, often scientific, made him an ideal candidate for popular science, which he had proved for many years in the magazine Wide World (Širým světem), especially in the series of ethnographic-geographical scenes reproduced here called Earth and People. However, Augusta's attention was most attracted by the painter's illustrations in the novel The Mammoth Hunters (Lovci mamutů) by Eduard Štorch. The book was published at the end of 1937.

Augusta began working with Burian probably shortly afterward. Some indications are that Augusta participated in the first six of Burian's prehistoric paintings, which were created around 1935. In any case, the first result of truly full collaboration between the two authors was a 1938 oil painting of a Tyrannosaurus attacking Trachodons, which they created as a sample for a forthcoming publication dealing with the complete history of life on Earth called The Wonders of the Prehistoric World (Divy prasvěta).

It started to be published in March 1941, first in serial form at fortnightly intervals; the last parts thus came out at a time of fading Nazi atrocities following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. At the end of 1942, the German occupiers had already banned the distribution of the subsequent hardcover edition.

Parallel to the serial volumes for The Wonders of the Prehistoric World, Burian created illustrations for the first collection of Augusta's short stories from prehistory called Buried Life (Zavátý život). Prehistoric scenes in both titles literally captivated the readership of the time as the painter applied his unique illustrative approach to this new theme and used all the advantages of his film reportage painting, which was visually extremely modern at the time. In addition, in his way of writing, Augusta provided the painter with something extremely important to his nature and creative approach in the reconstruction – the story.

With the end of the occupation, the painter resumed his collaboration with Josef Augusta by working on his new title on Neanderthals. In 1947 and 1948, Burian created illustrations for two of Augustus' other two zoopaleontological short stories – The Lost World (Ztracený svět) and From the Depths of Prehistory (Z hlubin pravěku). The six oil paintings for the latter book soon became almost classic.

With the nationalization of private publishing houses after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Burian's number of illustration orders was reduced to a minimum overnight, and cooperation with Augusta was, among other things, existential salvation for him. In addition, their work soon acquired an official, state-sanctioned status. The new regime represented by the then Ministry of Information and Enlightenment did not object to the creation of paleo reconstructions, on the contrary, it supported it, and perceived it as a popularization of Darwinism, which was considered part of dialectical materialism in the Marxist-Leninist conception of the world.

In socialist Czechoslovakia, the painter was attacked from many directions and the paleo reconstruction became a kind of refuge for him. He was at the peak of his creative powers and he dealt with the topic with extraordinary dedication. He collaborated with Augusta, but also with the leaders of Czech archeology, on a series of medium- and large-format portraits of human ancestors called "About Man (O člověku)", which had a representative character and was not originally intended for reproduction. At the same time, he created a single zoopaleontological painting with a similarly representative character – a portrait of an old Iguanodon in the "cemetery" of his species. He worked on contracts for many Czechoslovak institutions, especially museums.

Iguanodon 1950 in the „cemetery“ of his species

Closely connected with the officially controlled promotion of Darwinism among the "broadest popular classes" was the organization of a monumental exhibition called The Evolution of the Universe, Earth, and Man (Vývoj vesmíru, Země a člověka), which had its Prague and Bratislava parts. Burian created six oils for each. The author duo Augusta-Burian also began working for the State Textbook Publishing House on a project of teaching aids for schools in the form of wallboards, so-called school paintings (školní výuková tabule). The painter worked at irregular intervals for almost twenty years (from 1949 until Augusta died in 1968) on 44 oil paintings of the same dimensions (approx. 64 × 95 cm), which served as the basis for these boards. Remarkably, fewer than half of them were made into school boards by the press.

By the way, one of the results of that "propaganda" approach to prehistory at the time is the famous film Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955). Apart from the classic apolitical adventures of four boys set in the imaginative scenery of Karel Zeman (for whom Burian's paintings for The Wonders of the Prehistoric World were a clear primary inspiration), the didactic-enlightening aspect is obvious, and it was no coincidence that Josef Augusta was a scientific advisor in this film.

In all paintings from the first half of the 1950s, Burian consciously or subconsciously adapted to the expectations of the time and partially suppressed his narrative, film-reporting approach to the topic (so typical for The Wonders of the Prehistoric World). With his formal expression (e.g. the layout of the composition), he turned more than ever to the painting techniques of the 19th century. However, the first half of the 1950s also includes five of Burian's most important prehistoric paintings, which belong to the so-called free creation (see Volume 2 and 3), where without the binding authority of a scientific advisor and didactic-educational requirements, guided only by his attitude and his "philosophy," the painter probably created the best works of his career.

The year 1955 was at a turning point in many ways, especially in that the author pair began to cooperate with the publishing section of the foreign trade company Artia, which helped them literally „conquer“ the world. They created a book that the renowned Stephen J. Gould later named one of the three most influential paleontological publications of the 20th century (the book also influenced artists such as Frank Frazetta). It was created from the very beginning with the proviso that it would be offered in individual language versions for all major European (and non-European) markets by contract with major publishers in individual countries. It was a kind of "turnkey delivery". The book was published in 1956, in the English version it was called Prehistoric Animals and it was also published in Czech (as the only Burian book from Artia for a long time) in the publishing house Mladá fronta under the title Hlubinami pravěku. The book was conceived more than generously in terms of graphics, polygraphy, and format; a text section is followed by 60 pictures on separate sheets, which clearly acquaint readers with the evolution of life on Earth. The book has a compilatory character, Augusta and Burian primarily chose the best of their work to date, modified many paintings with a time lag and new knowledge (this is the so-called first period of major corrections), and supplemented all this with brand new oil and gouache paintings.

After the huge success of Prehistoric Animals, Artia assigned the duo to work on another similarly conceived volume, this time dedicated to human evolution. Both authors again used the best of their work to date on the topic but compared to the first book they created many more original works – with an emphasis on scenes with Neanderthals, and especially with Cro-Magnons. Scenes from the life of the French or Moravian people of the Gravettien and Magdalenian cultures can be considered the painter's opus magnum in the paleoart field, especially in scenes where he captured the prehistoric man in the moments of the creation of the oldest art (ie paleo-art, the original meaning of the term). Burian thus created a kind of "Cro-Magnon Epic," in which the best part of his philosophy of life crystallized, i.e. the belief in the original, unspoiled civilization of man. This was a faith that corresponded to the Rousseau ideal of the noble savage and that the painter in his present projected into the lives of the so-called primitive people. In portraying these "Indians of the past," Burian largely relinquished the aforementioned academic-museum approach to his reconstructions of the first half of the 1950s, and again emphasized his typical "illustrative," narrative approach. It can be said that this is the most artistically valuable cycle of the painter's career. What's more paradoxical is that in the book, probably for spatial reasons, eventually only half of the series was used! The book was published in English as Prehistoric Man in 1960, but the paintings were painted as early as 1958.

The first half of the sixties is most of all connected with four Artia books following the highly successful Prehistoric Animals and Prehistoric Man. Burian worked on these four titles in 1960, 1961, 1962, and 1964 (always published one or two years later). The first was Prehistoric Reptiles and Birds about pterosaurs, Archaeopteryx, and Mesozoic birds (with two oil paintings on the theme of Doyle's Lost World), in a smaller square format, atypical for this series. The Book of Mammoths followed, which can be considered Burian's most beautiful book on prehistory in terms of the painter's top work with high-quality reproduction and book design. The painter himself considered the reproductions for the Japanese version of this book to be the best ever. The other two titles were Prehistoric Sea Monsters and The Age of Monsters, about Mesozoic sea reptiles and the megafauna of the Tertiary and Quaternary respectively. All these books were again published in many languages ​​except Czech. Burian was very much irritated by this fact, which he made clear in interviews from that time. For the communist regime at the time, these books were a source of hard currency, so they did not want to dilute it by wasting printing capacity for the "non-lucrative" Czechoslovak market.

The following five-year period, 1965–1969, was the painter‘s least active in the Paleoart field. Although Artia had large plans with other representative publications, only one title passed from the plans to the implementation phase. In 1967, the duo (probably in collaboration with paleobotanist František Němejc) created a total of 17 oils for a book with the working title History of the Forests (Dějiny pralesů). It was supposed to be the first purely paleobotanical title of both authors with special regard to the carboniferous flora. However, the title was never completed, as preparations were interrupted in early 1968 by Augusta's sudden death.

Professor Augusta's end was truly unexpected. Coincidentally, it happened just before the beginning of the democratization period called „Prague Spring“, but his death mainly marked the end of the so-called classical paleoart period. A period of distinctive artistic individuals, such as the American paleoartists Charles R. Knight and Rudolf Zallinger, or the Austrian painter Franz Roubal, a period of famous author duos (Knight-Osborn, Abel-Roubal, Harder-Bölsche), a period when Neanderthals were seen as hairy hunched primitives and dinosaurs as dull clumsy errors of nature, doomed to extinction. Robert T. Bakker marked the end of this era with a famous drawing for Ostrom's description of the bird-like, dynamic Deinonychus, which dates the beginning of the so-called „dinosaur renaissance“, i.e. a completely new interpretive view of this group of vertebrates.

In his "post-classical“ period, that is, in the last decade of his career, Burian adapted to these changes, he continued to be a top paleoartist, but he no longer seemed to belong to the new era. This was partly because just at the end of the 1960s his work began to show fatigue and uncertainty. Either way, Burian soon acquired a pair of new professional advisors. For Augusta's student and successor in the position of professor of vertebrate paleontology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Zdeněk Vlastimil Špinar, it was more or less logical. Zoologist Vratislav Mazák became acquainted with the painter as his admirer during the 1960s, sharing a passion for large felines, especially tigers. In 1966, they created the first "reconstruction" together, but not a paleontological one. Burian painted Amur, the famous male Ussuri tiger from the Prague Zoo, on a big canvas in his natural habitat in eastern Siberia. This created an image that already carried all the typical attributes of their subsequent cooperation in the field of paleoart. Painting on the border of scientific illustration, with the individual in an idealized, didactic posture, moreover with a somewhat academically realistic environment. The strength of the paintings from Augusta‘s period lay, as already mentioned, in their illustrative nature, i.e. storytelling, action, use of visually attractive compositions, and other compositional "tricks." The power of the best paintings created with Mazák, on the other hand, lies in simple, "classic" compositions, the viewer is mainly affected by the "philosophical aspect" of the central individuals, which is generally typical of Burian's paleoart, but excels even more in collaboration with Mazák.

Burian was approached by Bernhard Grzimek, a German naturalist and writer, in the second half of the 1960s. He offered him a collaboration on the encyclopedic project Grzimeks Tierleben, a kind of modern version of Brehm's Animal Life. And Mazák has become a professional guarantor for this series of paintings. In 1967, he and Burian created several tempera for volumes about birds and reptiles, and Mazák was already able to enforce some of the latest scientific findings here – such as "fur" in pterosaurs.

With the general easing of Czechoslovak social conditions in the second half of the 1960s, the regime allowed more direct contact between the painter and the West, and so, in addition to Grzimek, the Italian artist Rinaldo D’Ami also addressed the painter. D‘Ami led a team of illustrators working on a series of children's encyclopedias about animals, and Burian was invited to collaborate on a volume on prehistory (Guarda e scopri gli animali della preistoria/Prehistoric Animals, 1971).

After Augusta's death, Artia decided not to continue with the planned series of publications and focused on a completely new title, this time not monothematically focused. They again published a book with an overview of the evolution of life, thus a kind of updated version of Prehistoric Animals. The working title was Encyclopedia of Prehistory and Špinar was chosen as the author of the texts. Over 130 works from the Augustanian period were selected, including many never published. Many reconstructions had to be corrected again after years, so we are talking about the so-called second period of major corrections. Twenty-seven paintings were newly created directly for this book. New paintings were mostly from 1970.

Špinar cared much more than Augusta about the evolutionary or "geological" importance of a given species or habitat, even at the expense of their "spectator attractiveness." For Augusta, the bizarreness of the reconstructed species was crucial, especially in connection with the strong story in the background, while for Špinar, something like this was largely unimportant. Both were top educators and popularizers, but both with different approaches. Contrary to what has been said, most of the paintings for this book with the final English title Life before Man respect the visuality of Augusta‘s period, and the Tarbosaurus image (p. 511) for this publication closes this period (and also the aforementioned classical era of paleoart).

Tarbosaurus bataar 1970, a picture that ended the „classic“ period of paleoart

Before the actual release of Life before Man (1972), both scientists worked with the painter on one subsequent cycle. In 1971, Burian and Professor Špinar created twelve oils for an upcoming encyclopedia with the working title Man and Nature. The Encyclopedic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences worked on it. The whole project was canceled with the emerging communist "normalization" after the Russian invasion, and all twelve oils were incorporated into the sixth part of another project of this institute – The Small Czechoslovak Encyclopedia (Malá československá encyclopedie), sixteen years after their creation. These paintings are already easily distinguishable from the Augustanian period, either by their classic composition, which is related to the encyclopedic character of the paintings or by the contrasting colors, which were atypical for Burian until now. Here, Špinar again chose, with a few exceptions, scenes in which he wanted to depict those animals or paleontological localities that the painter had not worked on until then.

If the paintings for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences had an "encyclopedic" character, then the same is doubly true for the paintings for the next cycle from these years. He painted them under the professional supervision of Mazák at the turn of 1971 and 1972 for the last, supplementary volume of Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. The painter created a total of 13 oils for this special part dedicated to the evolution of life on Earth. German authors had always suggested merging a large number of species into a single scene, but this form of reconstruction was not Burian's own. Together with Mazák, they discussed the final version with a German publisher for a long time, nevertheless, the resulting oils can be considered problematic due to their excessive schematization and poster color.

In 1972 and 1973, Burian completed the sale of most of his hitherto created paleo paintings to the Moravian Museum and its Anthropos Institute, which was then headed by anthropologist Jan Jelínek. Jelínek initiated the purchase and transfer. At the time, Burian received many offers from the world for the complete purchase of his prehistory, but he rejected them for patriotic reasons. The financial aspect did not play a role for the painter, he sold his entire monumental work to the Brno institution for a negligible amount, even in the context of the time. In addition to being a Czechoslovak center of Paleolithic research, Burian chose Brno also of Moravian patriotism. The institution also promised the painter that it would build a special pavilion for the permanent exhibition of this unique collection, which unfortunately has not happened to date.

In 1974, Burian drew and painted a number of line drawings and oil paintings for Mazák's opus magnum in the field of paleoanthropology, a book titled How a Man Was Born (Jak vznikl člověk), subtitled „The Saga of the Genus Homo“. With the oil portraits of Gigantopithecus or Ramapithecus for this title, finally published only in 1977, the authors probably reached the peak of their collaboration. This includes also the oil Mazák and the painter created for the cover of Živa magazine in 1975, which introduced the audience to a completely new type of human called Homo ergaster, in the scientific description of which Mazák participated. The description of this type of human was the greatest success for Mazák in the field of paleoanthropology.

In addition, between 1974 and 1977, the painter, together with Professor Špinar, created 25 paintings for the university textbook Vertebrate Paleontology (Paleontologie obratlovců), which was being prepared by the scientist. Špinar again, similarly to Life before Man or the cycle for the Academy of Sciences, focused on evolutionarily important groups and interesting solitary species, either newly discovered or older, but not covered by Augusta. He focuses also on landscape shots reconstructing significant Czechoslovak localities with vertebrate finds and especially discoveries of Polish-Mongolian expeditions in the Gobi Desert, including Mesozoic mammals. These paintings reflect Špinar's harmony with the rising dinosaur renaissance, with which Mazák also strongly harmonized.

Barosaurus 1976 demonstrates Burian's openness to the dinosaur renaissance

Already in 1970, Mazák wrote an article in the Živa magazine "Dinosaurs and Zdeněk Burian", in which he states that the painter portrayed dinosaurs (especially the limb position of ceratopsids) in this new vision as early as the early 1940s. Burian reacted positively to the dinosaur renaissance, his attempts to cope with Bakker's drawings are interesting, yet we feel that the painter's "terrible lizards" from the 1940s and 1950s are somehow more "true". In 1975, Burian began collaborating with another scientist, anthropologist Josef Wolf, whom Artia urged to write and compile a large representative publication on human evolution. The 70-year-old Burian was literally overwhelmed with work at the time, and he was also burdened by mental and physical ailments. This is inadvertently reflected in these oils, which with their awkward figures sometimes give a panoptical impression.

In 1977 and 1978, the painter worked on two of Artia's books in a "pocket" format and with the character of a natural atlas. The first book was named Prehistoric Animals and Plants (1979) and in addition to the obligatory selection of older items (often severely cropped due to the nature of the book), 16 color gouaches were created for this title under the guidance of the National Museum vertebrate paleontologist Josef Beneš. As a scientist, the painter logically focused on Cenozoic mammals, especially ungulates and carnivorans. A kind of counterpart for Beneš's book was a similarly conceived volume by Vratislav Mazák Prehistoric Man, published in 1980, for which the already well-coordinated duo produced 7 gouaches and 7 oils, in which they repeated the compositional schemes of their previous works.

The last book project with a prehistoric theme was a book called Prehistoric Life on Earth (Die Welt der ausgestorbenen Tiere/Svět vymřelých zvířat) – Artia’s third book, which could be published in Czech at the same time as or shortly after the foreign language edition. Its author at the time was Burian's youngest collaborator, Bořivoj Záruba. The painter no longer held the finished book in his hand, it was not published in German until after his death in 1982, and in Czech and English a year later. Burian worked on it in 1977 (partly probably in 1979). This book was aimed more at the child reader, the emphasis was on pictures accompanied by brief texts. There were illustrative diagrams and pictures with a simplified instructive character.

In 1977, Jan Skořepa, an admirer and student of Burian, introduced Zdeněk Burian to Josef Vágner, a long-time director of the East Bohemian Zoo and Safari in Dvůr Králové. He challenged the painter to create an image for the zoo depicting the evolution of life on Earth. His original idea was based on Rudolph Zallinger's two famous murals, „The Age of Reptiles“ and „The Age of Mammals“, which are large-scale panoramic paintings at Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. However, Burian rejected such a physically demanding project due to his age. In the end, he promised Vágner to create an equally demanding cycle of 34 paintings measuring 120 × 155 cm and 120 × 100 cm, which in total meant by far the most extensive painter's project in the field of paleoart. Mazák became a professional advisor and Burian between 1977 and his death managed to complete 22 canvases. The painter suspected that he might die in the middle of the project, and in order for the cycle to make sense even in such a case, he was creating the paintings gradually in the rhythm of individual geological eras. For these canvases, as with some of his 1950s oils, Burian adapted the composition and painting style to the fact that the paintings were intended primarily for installation in an exhibition, not for reproduction. More than ever, the painter indulged in the smallest details, and in almost every painting he became intoxicated with interesting atmospheric phenomena. And perhaps in anticipation of his death, he filled many of these paintings with a calm, contemplative atmosphere with lots of old or dead trees and rotting trunks. Although Mazák was a supporter of a new view of dinosaurs, he and Burian returned to the traditional concept. Perhaps he was led by the fact that these were paintings for a permanent exhibition intended for the general public and not for a university textbook reserved for a narrow circle of insiders, as was the case for paintings for Špinar's Vertebrate Paleontology (at the turn of the seventies and the eighties many Czech laypeople including Czech public knew almost nothing about the dinosaur renaissance).

In the 1970s, the painter's work enjoyed considerable popularity abroad thanks to a series of Artia books of the Augustanian era, and it was again supported by the title Life before Man. With the knowledge of certain inertia, more than 20 paintings from the "classic" period, which appeared in the prestigious publication Our Continent by the National Geographic Society (the publishing house sent its photographer to Czechoslovakia at that time) can be described as the culmination of this response. The painter's paleoanthropological reconstructions of the 1970s also reached the West through repeated editions of Wolf (1977) and Mazák (1980), but their response to the lay and general professional public was smaller than that of the Prehistoric Man (1960) paintings. Zoopaleontological reconstructions from the last decade of the painter's life were practically unknown to the Western audience (and partly also to the Czech audience) until the mid-1990s. To this day, they cause embarrassment, and for many people abroad even the impression that they had to be created by another artist.

Since 1978, Burian (except for a few paintings for Mazák and Špinar) has focused only on the series for Dvůr Králové Zoo, he did not have enough strength for other larger projects. Even though he was overwhelmed by "prehistoric" commissions in the last decade of his life, the painter, thanks to his essential honesty and extremely responsible approach to creation, performed the tasks stoically. He believed that it was his life mission, that, as he said, he was born to do so. The social significance of this part of his work was unquestionable to him. Although he had to use words about the "development of a scientific worldview" in interviews for media of the communist "normalization“ era, the painter entirely authentically believed in the power of human evolution sciences to "prove the absurdity of racist theories." In addition to knowing the enormous impact his books had on adolescents, he was fascinated by the subject until the last moment. As he said: "You know, a person who has been doing something as wonderful as studying human evolution for over thirty years will find it difficult to paint a still life with two mugs."

When the painter died in mid-1981, his unfinished cycle for the Dvůr Králové Zoo made sense in itself, but it was still considered how to supplement it. Directly offered was a magnificent collection of more than thirty oils for school paintings, which until then lay in the depository of the national company Komenium. Two years after the artist's death, a permanent exhibition, supplemented by these paintings, was finally opened. A year later, Špinar‘s Vertebrate Paleontology was finally published, and three years later (sixteen years after their creation) paintings for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in one of its encyclopedias. In the 1980s, however, not many books with Burian's illustrations were published and the only significant exhibition at which his prehistoric paintings could be seen after his death was opened in 1984 in Olomouc. Finally, after eleven years, in 1983, Artia received permission to publish Life before Man in Czech.

With the return to democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1989, there was a general Burianian boom, which, however, only partially concerned the painter's prehistory. Exhibitions with painter's book illustrations were held several times a year in the 1990s, but important canvases from his paleo work appeared (and do appear) only sporadically. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Burian's prehistory found itself in a special position: the whole paleontology (especially its parts focused on the research of dinosaurs and human ancestors) developed rapidly at that time and Burian's paleo reconstructions quickly became outdated from a professional point of view. The last two titles where Burian's paintings could still be taken seriously in terms of a credible accompaniment to a popular science text about prehistory were Bořivoj Záruba's new book The Journey to Prehistory and the new, updated edition of Life before Man in the mid-1990s. The latter-mentioned book was published again in several foreign versions, and in contrast to the 1972 edition, its pictorial part was supplemented with Burian's paintings from the 1970s. Zdeněk Burian and his paleoart have since become respected classics. Burian was already a legend during his lifetime, but over time his uniqueness became more and more obvious. The factual side of his paintings is obsolete, but their natural-historical and, above all, artistic aspect will remain permanently part of the golden fund of the entire discipline.

Burian's more than four billion years of prehistory

Burian did not start creating the first Precambrian paintings until the post-Augustanian period. Together with Zdeněk Špinar for Life before Man, they reacted to the huge development of geology and planetary science in the 1960s. In 1977, together with Josef Beneš, Burian also reconstructed the Ediacaran biota.

The Early Paleozoic (Starší prvohory) was covered by Burian with many paintings of the legendary Czech geological-paleontological area called Barrandian. In 1971, Špinar also created a scene of the Burgess Shale (pp. 78-79). He closes the Early Paleozoic with scenes with the tetrapod Ichthyostega.

Burian created iconic Late Palaeozoic (Mladší prvohory) scenes of the Carboniferous forests based on abundant finds in the Czech lands. He also dealt in detail with the so-called stegocephalians from the Nýřany region and the Boskovice furrow. These tetrapods were the focus of both Josef Augusta and Zdeněk Špinar.

Edaphosaurus became the most important creature of the Late Paleozoic for Burian. In connection with it, the confusion with the composite Naosaurus is interesting, which Josef Augusta clarified only in the mid-1950s when the most famous repainting took place in the entire Burian paleoart (p. 187).

The Permian scenes are closed with Burian's gorgonopsids. However, his Sauroctonus on p. 211 is actually Inostrancevia. The painting was created in collaboration with Augusta. After his death, Špinar mistakenly identified the animal for Life before Man.

Sauroctonus and Scutosaurus 1966, the gorgonopsid is in reality Inostrancevia

The Mesozoic (Druhohory) is once again opened by landscape scenes, where the painter reaches his peak as a paleoartist-landscape painter with his sequoias, stylized araucarias and tree-like ferns, and Bennettitales ("cycads with flowers").

The author duo devoted themselves to the mysterious Chirotherium in 1955 and thus completed W. Soergel's calculations. After an absolutely exceptional depiction of invertebrates after the end of the Early Paleozoic (ammonites and belemnites for Grzimek's encyclopedia), we see a large block dedicated to the German Triassic formations – Muschelkalk and Keuper. With the nothosaur as Burian's most important Triassic beast (he modified its head in many paintings with Mazák in the early 1970s).

The development of crocodilians is followed by a block dedicated to ichthyosaurs with the painter's iconic scenes of "dolphin-like" groups of the genus Stenopterygius. This is followed by plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and the entire section of Mesozoic marine reptiles culminates in the Cretaceous of Kansas with two iconic scenes of Tylosaurus fighting with Elasmosaurus (pp. 342 and 344-345).

The pterosaur part begins with Dimophodon, which Frank Frazetta copied a few years later on one of his fantasy covers. In the 1970s, under the leadership of V. Mazák, Burian repainted his older pterosaurs with "fur" (pp. 358 and 365). On page 360 ​​we see a photograph of one of the seven "lost" school paintings (for more about them see Volume 3). The scenes of the pteranodons feeding their offspring are the only paleobehavioral interpretations that the Augusta-Burian duo were the first to portray.

The largest block of the Mesozoic logically belongs to the dinosaurs. The painter's dinosaurs from the Augustanian period are a mix of a very progressive view (especially in the posture and locomotion of ceratopsids – pp. 472-573 and 497) with the iconization of the traditional pre-Bakkerian view of these creatures (see Brontosaurus on pp. 412-413).

Burian's paintings of Iguanodon (1950), Brontosaurus (1950), Tyrannosaurus with Trachodon (1938), Brachiosaurus (1941, which is physically and physiologically completely wrong), and Tarbosaurus (1970) were engraved in the minds of people in the second half of the 20th century around the world and were copied countless times. Burian's Iguanodon from 1950 can be considered the most valuable work in the entire history of the Paleoart.

As part of the division of the dinosaur block, after the Triassic scenes, a separate subsection is devoted to the Jurassic Morrison Formation (later similar blocks dedicated to the Cretaceous of the Gobi Desert or the Judith River Formation can also be found). In the case of sauropods, Burian and Mazák and Špinar later dealt with the position of the nostrils (several paintings were repainted).

Burian's postclassical dinosaurs agreed with Bakker's ideas (see Cetiosaurus on p. 391 or paintings for Špinar's Vertebrate Paleontology on p. 426, 452-453, 454-455, 456-457, and 482-483). With their last series (for the Dvůr Králové Zoo), Mazák and Burian decided to return to a conservative approach.

In the section devoted to the development of birds, we see interesting studies devoted to Heilmann's theory of the origin of birds from the so-called thecodont reptiles. The whole theory culminated in a painting from 1960 on page 516. Archaeopteryx was portrayed many times by the painter for its evolutionary importance. The most iconic (and thus also the most copied) became the one from p. 527.

The final part, which is a kind of prelude to Volume 2, is devoted to Mesozoic mammals, especially the discoveries of Polish paleontologists in the Mongolian Gobi Desert.

Burian's creative method

A total of four "personalities" competed in Burian as an artist, and it was in his paleoart that this was most evident. The first one was a Burian the Romantic, an uncomplicated and playful man captivated by the atmosphere of the full moon or the combat of a man with a shark. The other one was a Burian the scientist, obsessed with detail, whether a Siberian shaman's costume or the mouth of an allosaur male. The third one was a Burian the "moralist", a Burian the educator and the pedagogue, whose life credo was that art must educate and serve in the best sense of the word. While these three "personalities" in Burian fought each other brutally, the fourth seemed to stand outside. It was a Burian the "philosopher," a personality that is difficult to define and rather subconscious. With these foundations, Burian entered the world of adventurous exotic romance and applied them phenomenally. And prehistory was nothing but a new challenge for all these "personalities." The Jurassic world was as good for them as the world of Gran Chaco.

In terms of form, the "prehistoric" Burian is as old-fashioned as the "adventurous" Burian. His painting technique is based on the methods of the 19th century (the Austrian paleoartist Franz Roubal from 1920 is therefore much more modern in artistic terms than Zdeněk Burian from 1960) and the painter never leaned towards any artistic movement. He had much in common with the artists of the 19th century in his thinking; just like them, he was captivated by the silhouette of a bizarre reptile against the backdrop of an erupting volcano or tropical night sky (pp. 286 and 434-435). His duel of the Tylosaurus with the Elasmosaurus (p. 342) is just a realistically crafted artistic vision of the "Victorian era" (see Riou's engraving from Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth) with all its attributes of dark bizarreness and mystery. On the other hand, Burian can be a very modern, new (almost postmodern) man who, with extraordinary ease, incorporates progressive elements of Hollywood film or reportage photography of his time into his paintings (he often arrived at these elements completely independently). He is not afraid to take a pair of plesiosaurs from a completely unexpected perspective (p. 332).

Tylosaurus and Elasmosaurus 1941, Burian’s variation of the 19th-century classic

The scientific aspect of Burian's reconstructions arose in close contact with scientists. It was always consulted with a professional advisor countless times before finalization (and gradually changed in the developed picture). Repairs were often made even after years (or decades, with another expert). The two periods in which these corrections were concentrated were mentioned above (1955 and 1970). Of course, the optimal technique for such a style of work is an oil painting, because it is ideal for later repainting.

To this day, Burian's paleoart is unique in how holistically its reconstructions are conceived. This holistic approach consists mainly of how well-thought-out the phytopaleontological aspects and the broader "geological-climatological" conditions of the scenery are in paintings that are focused on prehistoric fauna. In some paintings, a whole constellation of scientists guaranteed that the result was perfect from the point of view of contemporary science. (At the same time, despite the above mentioned, Burian's preparations for reconstruction cannot be compared to the possibilities available to today's elite Paleo-artists, such as John Gurche.) The holistic nature of Burian's scenes also includes the fact that the painter's scenes stand up in an ecological-behavioral point of view, namely that his animals react very naturally with their surroundings and other species, despite the fact that in his time these aspects of paleontology were still given relatively little importance.

Burian created several preparatory sketches for each scene. He talked about the preparation process in many interviews: “It is not possible to take a canvas, a palette and start painting right away. First, there are several drawings, where the basis is always a skeleton. Finally, I have the approved shape of the animal and its head, and limbs in motion… Then I make them on a piece of paper in colors and finally in a large format on canvas. ” This was the case, for example, with school paintings, in which some of the elaborate watercolor studies on paper have survived to this day (e.g. Brown Coal Forest, 1950 or Deinotherium, 1951 – Volume 2). Burian continues: "Reconstruction (…) is hard work." "The creation of the image is really strenuous and responsible. I'll get a skeleton, sometimes incomplete, sometimes its photo." It has to be added that in the vast majority of cases he had only a photograph as a basis, he, in Czechoslovakia of his time, did not have a chance to get to the real fossils of most of the vertebrates he depicted. Even with this handicap (pointed out by Mark Witton), he was able to surpass Charles R. Knight, who worked in the heart of the most prestigious natural history museum in the world, the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “A skeleton is assembled from skeletal material; I then draw this in the positions I consider most appropriate for the future painting." "The movement can be represented by the displacement of the bones. It's a bit like a cartoon.” These words are beautifully illustrated by many sketches reproduced in all three volumes of the monograph. "Then we supplement the skeleton with muscle." "Before it comes to life, it looks like a skinned rabbit." However, there are relatively few such scenes in the painter's work (as the sketches we reproduce prove again). Burian mostly skipped this phase, he didn't need it because he knew the anatomy perfectly – as a self-taught person. In this, too, Knight, who studied anatomy professionally, was surpassed by him. "It's best seen on horses. Every muscle is beautifully visible there. After all, I've been painting horses since I was a kid. We had them at home. Horses and dogs." "And by the way – the horse's anatomy is decisive for all quadrupeds, the changes in their muscles are only slight."

Traditional art historians blame Burian for being too focused on detail, but this is a clear misunderstanding of the function of artistic paleo reconstruction. For this, of course, detail is crucial. The painter himself said: “It depends on every detail. If the animal in the foreground is painted with all the details, the color of the fur, the eyes, the claws, and so on, the background must be painted in the same style.” "My imagination is only in the composition of the image and its mood." At the same time, he knew that if anyone in the author duo could at least partially unleash that imagination, it was him. "Each of the scientists has to take care of his reputation, so he doesn't dare to 'fantasize‘." Of course, Burian himself was not a natural scientist; in this respect, professional supervision was necessary for his paleoart. However, he managed to be very inspiring to scientists with his layman's view, see, for example, his interpretation of the death of a group of Ethiopian australopithecines (Volume 2). Sometimes, with his legendary intuition for which he needed no formal education — it was based on his unique observational skills — he even was ahead of scientific knowledge. For example, in the locomotion of dinosaurs or the gender of a finding of an early member of the genus Homo (Volume 3). As a person who believes in the pantheistic character of "Nature," he had a rather reserved relationship with evolution as the official scientific theory of his time, the so-called neo-Darwinism. Juraj Gullár, Burian's student, talks about Burian’s understanding of the "motion of matter."

Burian inserted the above-mentioned "philosophy" unknowingly into his paintings, not thinking that he might want to philosophize. That philosophy, which is a kind of his author's license, lies primarily in Burian's specific "existentialism." Elements of loneliness and sadness, a kind of Burianian melancholy, play a huge role in him. The characters in his paintings are mostly lonely individuals, maximally small (family) groups. Sadness is contained in the expression of many of his animal heroes, and it does not matter whether it is an old Monoclonius (p. 468) or a wolf, much of the painter's soul can be seen in their faces. It is the supreme pathos engraved on the faces of the old Iguanodon or Styracosaurus (pp. 441 and 477), the poetic pathos that is the goal of Burian's endeavor. However, foreign theorists see this melancholy and sadness as a dark (sometimes the adjective brutal is used) aspect of his scenes. Abroad, the painter's visions of the Neanderthals have always resonated in this regard. This interesting observation is often related to the political atmosphere of Central Europe in Burian's time. Although some such judgments are somewhat stereotypical, it is indisputable that the spirit of the time, but also the painter's difficult childhood and youth, certainly influenced the atmosphere of his paintings.

Monoclonius 1948, an example of Burian‘s contemplative attitude in paleoart

Augusta‘s fiction short stories became the inspiring platform for the motives on which he was based, in which he could apply his philosophy and which were necessary for his artistic approach. However, Burian chose only what he wanted, his approach was free of all expressive bloodthirsty brutality (Augusta officially refused it, but his stories are still full of it). There is almost no blood in his paintings. His fighting animals are usually captured just before they blow, squeeze, or bite. And two fighting predators are rather an exception with him.

There are certain elements in Augusta's short stories that made Burian artistically extremely excited, such as the victim's fatal surrender to his conqueror. That is, something completely unacceptable to today's generation of paleoartists. For Burian, however, it is something extremely powerful – that Iguanodon's pathetic reconciliation with destiny (p. 437), that (super)human suffering of Brontosaurus or Edmontonia (p 408, and 494). Probably the strongest element for Burian is the motif of a lonely dying individual – the end of the life journey of an old Iguanodon in a "cemetery of its species" (p. 441) or the heroic death of a giant deer Megaloceros or the Berezovka mammoth (Volume 2). For Burian, death is a matter of extreme intimacy, free from all sensationalism. This is one of the reasons why there is no scene of a catastrophic end of dinosaurs in his work.

One of his artistic approaches, and his author's license, is that he distributes his sympathies or antipathies to his heroes. Journalist Ondřej Neff recalls an interview over one painting: ZB: "This is such an unsympathetic reptile." So which one is the most likable? ZB: “I prefer Iguanodon. But I don't like the Tyrannosaurus. His dwarf hands… Some animal is beautiful, yes, some is not beautiful. There is nothing that can be done about it.“ His prehistoric animals are "personalities“, and Burian identified with these creatures. At the end of the creative process, he tried to tell us his experience, his "obsession with nature," as Juraj Gullár called it.

Burian's main tool is synthesis. In his adventurous-romantic work, as the theorist, Petr Sadecký, said, "he composes his ideal lion out of many photos of lions." His paleo reconstruction is about two aspects of understanding this synthesis. There are two seemingly contradictory approaches. The first is a synthesis of scientific data transformed, in the words of Vratislav Mazák, thanks to Burian‘s "specific vision of nature, combined with an exceptionally developed sense of shape, its biological function and usefulness" into the resulting artistic reconstruction. Several years before Mazák, an art critic Miroslav Klivar hinted at a similar thing with words about Burian's understanding of the analogy and homology of form. All of the above was based on the painter's extraordinary observational skills in a broader sense. Burian himself said, "I can only say that I live by observation."

The form that Burian visualizes that "synthesis" is its specific composition and choice of colors. Sometimes he expresses "everything" with a simple monumental vertical composition – as in the oil Mammuthus (Parelephas) ​​trogontherii, 1961 (Volume 2) or preferably in the painting Tarbosaurus bataar (p. 511). At other times, he "scatters" the individual elements intricately (and yet intuitively) throughout the image. As a student of late Burian, Juraj Gullár speaks of the most important thing he gained from Burian, as the realization that the most perfect system is purposeful chaos. In this sense, he speaks of Burian's synthesis as the composition (again, rather intuitive, unconscious) of individual meaning-forming elements and symbols in an effort to communicate his "obsession with nature." In his eyes, this is Burian's true art.

Gullár even goes so far as to speak in connection with Burian's understanding of nature about a completely independent understanding of the laws of the Japanese art of ikebana and bonsai. The main role here is played by the so-called motif of three, which is contained, for example, in the image of three Elasmosaurus individuals (p. 340) or in the depiction of the family element – father, mother, and son in the second version of the proboscidean Deinotherium motif, 1951 (Volume 2). Here, in Gullár's understanding, Burian disengages from the disturbing element of the python (from the first version, 1940) and lets the viewer influence only his pure composition.

And here we encounter that second understanding of Burian synthesis. They are presented by Petr Sadecký's realistic-journalistic concept. He sees as the main thing that will survive, not science (which, according to him, is transient), but romance, an adventurous-romantic element of Burian's paintings. In this sense, on the contrary, he understands the most mature version of Burian's Deinotheriuml search the first one from The Wonders of the Prehistoric World, where he perceives the python not as a disturbing element but as a carrier of romantic excitement and criticizes the 1951 version of the "pose for the pose" of the old male…

In Sadecký's conception, Burian synthesizes from the motives of other authors, chooses what he needs, and adds his perfect technique, his main external uniqueness, a feeling for the surface, for structure in the most general sense of the word (from anatomy to geomorphology) and finally mainly adds its romance. The result is convincing, and at the same time stimulates the imagination. In later years, however, Sadecký began to talk about a significant element of plagiarism in connection with the "synthesis from the motives of other authors." Let us add that Burian's method is in some respects not entirely original. Augusta himself says in an afterword of The Wonders of the Prehistoric World: "… If possible, we based the reconstructions on skeletal material published in professional monographs, taking into account all older and newer pictorial reconstructions, if they were made." We have to say that they were made, the painter and Augusta probably did not depict a single species that someone else had not artistically reconstructed before them. However, originality in this regard was not the most important thing for Burian. The painter wanted to insert his view, his "personalities" outlined above, all his "external uniqueness" and, last but not least, his "philosophy" into scenes from prehistory.

Two examples for all: first Abel reconstructed the Solnhofen landscape, then Burian came, took over all the elements of this drawing, including the ramphorhynchus in the sky, and created one of his gems, 2nd version of the motif "meeting of the Compsognathus with Archaeopteryx" (p. 526 and 528-529). And the example for understanding Burian's "inspiration" perhaps even clearer: H. Kalmsteiner, following a design by F. König, created an amusingly amateurish scene of a prehistoric proboscidean‘s encounter with a saber-toothed tiger. Burian no doubt saw it – and then created his own version. It is an inspiration that is completely legitimate, just as legitimate as contemporary artists are nowadays inspired by Burian (in addition to the parallel existence of obvious plagiarism, of course), as Mark Hallett in the creation of his fighting Triceratops males. He took over all the main attributes from Burian's Arsinoiterium rut – both males in exactly the same situation and positions (only taken by the creator from a different angle), even that romantic forest and the "indifferent" female remain in the background. The whole Hallett painting is inspired in a completely creative way (and at the same time it is a tribute to the old master).

Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx 1950 as a result of Burian’s „synthesizing “ method

Stephen Jay Gould defined the approach of the paleoartists of the 1970s and 1980s as postmodern – that is, playful, original, iconoclastic – with the most typical representatives being Gregory S. Paul and especially William Stout. Burian's method, characterized by Gullár-Sadecký's synthesis, aimed to express his "philosophy" and "vision of nature", and those postmodern elements are more of a by-product. These are the exceptions seen only in the "second plan" - meant figuratively and specifically in the background of his paintings. Thanks to Burian's first "personality" (the playful Romantic mentioned above), these postmodern elements in Burian’s work often flash, but not to a greater extent, because the painter naturally created in a different scientific-historical context.

Burian enters the scene when Charles R. Knight reigns in the field of paleo reconstruction. At a time when dinosaur orthodoxy is reaching its climax. The depiction of (not only) dinosaurs then stabilized in a kind of, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, "a modern consensus." Burian clearly follows Knight and overcomes him in every way. In any case, the two are the most famous paleoart creators, and people of the major part of the 20th century saw prehistory through their eyes. In both of them, their paleo-creation is timeless in its beginnings. For Knight, this is due to the unconsolidated dinosaur orthodoxy at the end of the 19th century, a time that was still completely open to different opinions and concepts. After getting into the machinery of a professional team at the American Museum of Natural History, his work becomes one of the pillars of that orthodoxy.

Even Burian is timeless with dinosaurs at first. In his case, this is due to the not yet fully consolidated process of creating an "ideal reconstruction" in the author pair: Augusta leaves some freedom to the painter, and his feeling and naturalness are not yet suppressed. And fortunately, they will never be completely suppressed. The two great paleoartists together formed the so-called Knight-Burian era in the first seven decades of the 20th century. The era that followed the Hawkins-Riou era. The time when this activity still had a very romantic touch, which is now irretrievably gone, as Gregory S. Paul points out. The period of famous couples: Osborn – Knight, Abel – Roubal, Augusta – Burian. This "classical" period ends in 1968 when Augusta dies, and the new, postmodern or, say, Renaissance, begins a year later with the publication of Bakker's visualizations of the running Deinonychus in Ostrom's famous study. As already mentioned, Burian concludes "his" era heroically in 1970 with the legendary Tarbosaurus bataar oil.

The Knight-Burian period was entirely connected with the science and state of social thought of the time, Gould's internal and external factors. Although Augusta, compared to his predecessors, under the influence of Othenio Abel understood paleontology as a science much closer to biology than geology, it was still a rather descriptive discipline (in contrast to today's contextual one with a clear focus on ecology and ethology). The paintings he created with the painter were not a visualization of the original paleobiological ideas, they were primarily a kind of "mission" – the spread of evolutionary teaching. In addition, Augusta‘s work has the whole character of anthropocentric thinking, so typical for society at the time, in which evolution is conceived as steps leading to an imaginary peak – humans. Indeed, Burian does not deal, with a few exceptions, with invertebrates after the older Paleozoic in his entire work. The painter took this "mission" extremely seriously. Due to his third "personality", he considered the scientific and pedagogical side to be almost sacred, which led to his sometimes blind obedience to scientists. One of the main criteria for creating the "ideal image" was the didactic criterion. This played a key role, often suppressing Burian's nature. The painter himself said: "As a rule, there is always one exact reconstruction in the painting and the other animals are in different positions, where of course my knowledge of anatomy, perspective, etc. will be applied." Let us give three examples: the first – Pteranodon ingens, 1960 (p. 380-381). A group circling over the Kansas Upper Cretaceous Sea, all individuals on the left and back are fantastically natural – like live jet fighters. The "central individual" on the right seems to be frozen as if hung in a museum on the lines someone had overpainted here. The body is in an unnatural position so that none of the body proportions are distorted by perspective so that the number of fingers and the shape of the claws are absolutely clear… School paintings were exemplary for the application of didactic aspects (e.g. A Settlement of a Prehistoric Man from the Early Stone Age, 1950, Volume 3). First a preparatory sketch – on it, the whole group of Neanderthals is excited by the presence of woolly rhinos behind the stream. But already here, under the man in the foreground, there is a "threatening" painter's note – "calm posture" written. On the resulting canvas, the man is already standing like a statue, completely ignoring the surrounding events. And one last example: both of Burian's scenes of the Silurian shelf world. The first is a school painting from 1951 (pp. 86-87). Everything is influenced by those didactic aspects, everything is bound by strict rules. The cephalopods are symmetrically arranged, each "focused" in the same way, one never overlapping the other. The older version of The Wonders of the Prehistoric World (pp. 84-85) has not yet been bound by such strict didactic rules. With the blurred shadows and silhouettes of the nautiloids in the background, we will not find anything like that in the school picture. Nevertheless, both belong to the Burian‘s classics.

Sadecký speaks of Burian as a "court painter" of prehistory. He thus encounters his idealization of reality, its deformation, a kind of its censorship in the sense of the phenomenon that Sadecký generally calls "antisepticism." According to him, Burian excludes all details and elements which, according to the painter, are disruptive due to their overly naturalistic realism. He also transfers the scientific rules for "ideal reconstruction" to the level of his own artistic approach. So, exceptionally, we see blowing dust, feet buried in mud or steam at the trunks of mammoths. We can explain this with the already mentioned "reconstruction law", which always orders to clearly show all the important morphological features, not excluding the tip of the trunk. This is undoubtedly the case, but Sadecký is convinced that "idealization" has passed into Burian's "state of mind." Burian excludes all unaesthetic things (remember his third "personality") – Sadecký speaks of Burian's "Victorianism." Dung and excretion (as we can see at Stout or even at Henry de la Beche) or flies flying around the stinking mouths of beasts, we won't see in Burian. And mating? There is only one exception, and that is given by the painter in a highly lyrical form (p. 324).

According to Sadecký, Burian seems to be losing his courage in his quest for maximum seriousness. He didn't need any of Gurche‘s "dust vortex simulations," which wasn't a problem for him, but rather that he didn't dare. Sadecký recalls August's statement: "Only no wilderness." (This conservatism, on the other hand, allowed them both to avoid embarrassing mistakes.) Example for all: Burian's pterosaurs almost always have their wings in a horizontal position in flight, slightly above it at most, never below it, it's okay with pteranodon gliders, but it sometimes seems unnatural for Rhamphorynchus and Pterodactylus. With this "idealization" approach, Burian got into certain clichés, especially with the postures of individuals. As a result of the main, i.e. didactic criterion (time stress often played an indisputable role), we can see most of the quadrupeds in Burian’s work in the right or left half-profile from a slight top view.

Sadecký finds the ideal of the paleoart in the work of the Italians Giorgio De Gaspari and Sergio Budicin for the book Guarda e scopri gli animali della preistoria (for which Burian himself created the paintings) and especially the already mentioned William Stout, in their quest for maximum originality. According to Sadecký's ideal, big fish should swim between limbs of Burian's famous Tendaguru Brachiosaurus (pp. 428-429) …

But is Sadecký's overtaking in originality and romantic elements a real goal? Certainly not. As has already been said, there are many of those "postmodern" elements in the painter's prehistory. But these are not the most important, there are just so many in Burian's work that they do not become self-serving. Burian's genius in paleoart lies elsewhere. The painter became a legend thanks to the fact that he fully devoted himself to this topic, that he put all his phenomenal talent and diligence into it, and that with a persistent effort to balance the four "personalities" mentioned above tried to get the result – to see and capture those long-extinct worlds. As he said: "Maybe it's just such a quality, a gift I've always had. (…) I guess I was born for this profession."

Tyrannosaurus and Trachodon 1938, the painting that made Burian one of the elites of world paleoart

Monsters of the Tertiary and Quaternary

The structure and conception of the second volume are entirely related to Book 1.

In the Tertiary chapter (pp. 42-265) Burian depicts landscape images from the Central European Miocene, mainly the brown coal marshes of northwest Bohemia. Among the lower vertebrates, he later depicted frogs from the Bechlejovice locality with Špinar. Two landscape shots from the Geiseltal are followed by primitive carnivores, with an inset of predatory marsupials, and then false and true saber-tooths (followed by Pleistocene saber-tooths in the chapter on the Quaternary). The cetaceans are followed by various ungulates, and the mystery of Burian's signature on oil from 1955, which was originally Flyorov-Burian 55, is discussed for the indricotheria. The section on Proboscidea is introduced by a painting of a giant daman, painted for the University of Tripoli in Libya, whose fate is now unknown. Burian made several paintings of the Deinotherium in 1968 and 1973 for the Bavarian amateur archaeologist Hugo Rehorik. The chapter on the Tertiary period concludes with three paintings reconstructing the Czech and Slovak sites of Tuchořice, Děvínská Nová Ves and Hajnáčka.

The Quaternary block (pp. 274-445) begins with the avian megafauna of Madagascar and New Zealand, continues with the megafauna of the Americas, and moves to Europe, where a forgery called Bison priscus is mentioned next to an image reconstructing the site at Koněprusy. A newly discovered oil of an American mastodon from the Regensburg Museum is mentioned, and the American mammoths are followed by paintings tracing the story of the Berezovka mammoth.  The chapter concludes with paintings of a megaloceros, a cave bear and a cave lion, including an unpublished painting shown by the paleontologist Beneš to William Stout during his visit to Prague in 1980.

In the chapter on primate evolution (pp. 454-553), the genera Aegyptopithecus, Pliopithecus, Proconsul, Oreopithecus, and others appear after the primitive prosimians.  The theory of the so-called seed-eaters and the position of the Ramapithecus in comparison with the present view is discussed. The accompanying text reproduces many of Burian's drawings and paintings of recent primates, especially great apes. The robust australopithecines are followed by the gracile ones, and a comparison of the gouache, on which Burian has remodelled an autralopithecine into Homo habilis with a few details, is a kind of entrée to the third volume.

Phororhacos inflatus, a gouache from 1941, printed in Josef Augusta's book Divy prasvěta (1942) and later in Prehistoric Animals (1956).

Witnesses of the ancient past – Burian's predecessors and contemporaries (pp.12-27)

Fossils have stimulated the human imagination since time immemorial. From antiquity to the Renaissance, people have interpreted them as the remains of mythical creatures – cyclopes, dragons, the Roc bird, sea serpents, unicorns, and later, from a biblical perspective, as the remains of witnesses to the Deluge. Research in this area, i. e. the pre-scientific interpretation of fossils, was a favourite topic of Josef Augusta, who liked to include chapters on the connections between ancient myths and the remains of real animals in his popularization books. One of them, written together with Karel Pejml, was even devoted solely to this topic (Dragons and Giants, 1947). This volume of the trilogy, after all, depicts many animals related to this theme – see for all Andrias scheuchzeri, interpreted in the 16th century as Homo diluvii testis (Man, witness of the Deluge) - see p. 60.

It was not until the early 19th century, with the development of the earth sciences, comparative zoology, which was at the origin of paleontology, with figures such as Georges Cuvier (who identified the aforementioned Andrias scheuchzeri as an extinct polymath), that the first truly scientific interpretations of the fossil remains of animals and plants came into being. And with them came the first attempts to visually reconstruct these fossils as living creatures.

From the beginning to the present day, scientists have faced the dilemma of how far to go in such reconstructions. For many, it is too speculative and therefore scientifically undignified. Cuvier himself tended to avoid outlining the body line in his skeletal drawings for precisely these reasons. Throughout the history of palaeontology, however, there has always been a considerable group of scientists who have considered the popularisation of the field among the general public and the associated reconstructions of a similar type to be essential.

The first real work of palaeoart is often claimed to be an 1830 drawing by the British geologist and palaeontologist Henry de la Beche (1796-1855), reflecting Mary Anning's discoveries of the Jurassic marine fauna of Dorset, England. The painting is highly detailed, and despite its cartoonish, fantasy-animal visuality from today's perspective, it addresses what we would now call paleoecological or paleobehavioral questions.

One of the first professional artists to address the subject was the eminent British painter John Martin (1789-1854), a star of the "apocalyptic" Romanticism, who, following his famous depictions of the biblical flood, created a reconstruction of one of the first described dinosaurs, the iguanodon, together with its discoverer Gideon Mantell, in the 1930s.

In the 1850s, the first major figure in the history of the discipline, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894), came on the scene and, under the guidance of palaeontologist Richard Owen (coiner of the term Dinosauria), created concrete models of English dinosaurs (an iguanodon and a megalosaur) for the World's Fair at the Crystal Palace in 1851. These sculptures can still be seen in the local park today and have become a cultural monument. However, like Martin, Hawkins based his work on the entirely fragmentary finds of these creatures, and his depiction of them is therefore erroneous from today's perspective.

In the 1960s, Hawkins was invited to the United States, and in New York he collaborated with the paleontologist Joseph Leidy to reconstruct a hadrosaur skeleton. Later, he began working on a large paleontological exhibit for the forthcoming Museum of Natural History in Central Park. However, the entire work was destroyed by William M. Tweed, a corrupt politician involved in the project. Hawkins later created artistic reconstructions for Princeton University; these works are still preserved at the institution today. 

Machairodus (Megantereon) cultridens. Oil painting from 1940 for Divy prasvěta. In 1955 modified for Prehistoric Animals, and again in 1970 for Life before Man.

With Hawkins' work, especially that for the World's Fair, artistic representations of prehistory reached the masses. His paintings, like those of Henry de la Beche and Martin before him, reflected (as do all works of palaeoart up to the present day) a threefold distortion: that caused by the level of scientific knowledge of the field at the time, i.e. palaeontology, which was then based on very fragmentary findings. It was a time when science had not yet been able to put the findings into meaningful context and the scenes of all three artists mentioned so far had an almost fantastically bizarre atmosphere. This is related to the second distortion, namely that paleoart has always faithfully reflected the "spirit of the times". Inevitably – as well as being intended to educate the general public, it was also intended to entertain them, and thus became part of wider pop culture from the outset. The images thus reflect the spirit of post-Napoleonic and early Victorian Europe, when biblical motifs such as the Deluge still resonated strongly in society. The third distortion is the contemporary level of development of the visual arts. For the paintings mentioned above, we are in the periods of High and Late Romanticism, the period before the rise of Realism, when fauna, with the exception of animalist painters specialising in the depiction of domestic animals such as dogs, horses and cattle, was still depicted in a highly stylised manner, without a deeper knowledge of anatomy and animal locomotion. This was naturally reflected in early palaeoart.

In the 1850s and 1860s, the biblical aspect of the Flood gradually disappeared from paleoart. Two major cycles of engravings also date from this period. The first was intended for a book by the Austrian palaeobotanist Franz Unger, entitled Die Urwelt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden, first published in 1851. It is a series of 14 watercolours, converted into lithographs for the book, by the Austrian landscape painter Josef Kuwasseg (1799-1859), a native of Trieste. The book and paintings already cover many geological periods from the Carboniferous to the Pleistocene, more or less as we understand them today. Unger was a botanist and Kuwasseg a landscape painter, so naturally the zoopaleontological aspect of the paintings is neglected.

The second extremely influential title of this period was the 1863 book La terre avant le deluge (the word deluge still lingers in the title out of inertia) by the French scientist and popularizer Louis Figuier, for which the images (converted into xylographs) were created by Édouard Riou (1833-1900), a French illustrator of the works of Jules Verne. If Kuwasseg's scenes reflected his experience as a landscape painter, the scenes for Figuier's book reflected Riou's passion for adventure literature. At the same time, Riou began working on illustrations for Verne's novels; Journey to the Center of the Earth was published a year after Figuier's book. By comparing the illustrations from the two books, one can see how they are intertwined. Zdeněk Burian knew these illustrations well and they influenced him in a specific way (see THEME: Burian's Creative Method, Book I).

Developments in geology and paleontology were reflected in subsequent editions of both titles, Unger and Kuwasseg adding scenes from the Silurian and Devonian periods to the 1858 edition. Figuier responded to the latest title by the British geologist Charles Lyell, and in the second edition (1867) of his book he omitted the scene of Adam and Eve in Eden and replaced it with Riou's scene of Stone Age humans.

At that time, a fine Czech contribution to the subject also appeared. In 1874, the palaeontologist Antonín Frič published the title Geological Images from the Prehistory of the Czech Lands with six engravings based on designs by Antonín Josef Levý (1845-1897), depicting scenes from the Silurian of Malé Chuchle, the Rokycany Carboniferous (created under the guidance of the palaeobotanist Otakar Feistmantel), the Permo-Carboniferous of Broumov, the Bílá Hora Cretaceous, the Tertiary of northern Bohemia and the Ice Age in the Šárka Valley. Levý was an excellent landscape artist (especially of the areas in northern Bohemia) and his concepts are reconstructions that do not usually rely on foreign models.

In the last third of the 19th century, even in the derivative, "popular" paleoart of common periodicals and titles, references to the biblical flood gradually reverberated. Increasingly, Darwin's theory of evolution and new discoveries of the remains of prehistoric humans and the ancestors of modern man were reflected. The really major turning point in the visualisation of palaeoart came with the arrival of Charles Robert Knight (1874-1953) in 1894. The era of early palaeoart, which might be called the Hawkins-Rioux era, came to an end, and the 'golden age' of the discipline (which might be called the Knight-Burian era) began. 

Brontotherium (Megacerops) platyceras. Oil painting from 1960 created as a basis for an unrelieved school teaching board. Later used in the books The Age of Monsters and Life before Man.

Charles R. Knight will always remain the dominant figure in the field. He was the first to devote a lifetime to the subject with a fully professional approach, and his work has had an immeasurable impact on his contemporaries and successors. Knight entered the paleoart field as a young man of 20, when he was approached by a local palaeontologist during a visit to the taxidermy department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and together they produced the first reconstruction in the truly modern sense - the palaeontologist (Jacob Wortman) gave Knight an expert presentation of the skeletal remains of a pig-like mammal of the genus Entelodon (then Elotherium) and Knight, using his deep knowledge of the anatomy of recent animals (in this case pigs) and the techniques of modern painterly realism, reconstructed the living form of the animal.

Soon after, he began to collaborate with the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, founder of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the AMNH and for 25 years president of the institution. He recognized Knight's talent and, with the help of his paintings (based on skeletons assembled in the museum in natural postures, something unheard of until then), wanted to make the New York museum a magnet for the public, which he soon did. Over the next more than two and a half decades, Knight created dozens of paintings for the AMNH, including several large-scale murals. He also collaborated briefly but extensively with Edward D. Cope, a famous participant in the so-called Bone Wars, with whom he stayed at his Philadelphia villa in 1897, a few weeks before his death. After his association with AMNH ended, Knight worked on the second major commission of his career. In the latter half of the 1920s, he moved from his native New York to Chicago for four years to create a series of 28 large-scale murals for the Field Museum of Natural History there. During his lifetime he created paintings for many other American museums, and in the 1930s and 1940s he published a total of four books that he wrote and illustrated himself. He is also known for his February 1942 article for National Geographic Magazine entitled "Parade of Life through the Ages," which he accompanied with 24 watercolors.

There are many similarities and differences between Knight and Zdeněk Burian. Both were highly sensitive to the point of being emotionally unstable (the American somewhat more so, later suffering from various phobias) and highly impractical (Knight's finances, including his allowance, were handled by his wife, later his daughter). Both developed a strong relationship with animals in childhood (Knight every summer at Peck's farm in Connecticut, Burian by watching dogs and horses at their Kopřivnice home), and both began attending art school at the age of fourteen, where they met much older classmates - Burian at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Knight at Manhattan's Metropolitan Art School and the Art Students League, and both began to make art for a living at sixteen - Knight with (mostly animalistic) designs for church stained glass windows, Burian with illustrations for the Workers' Publishing House. Both were never inclined towards any modern artistic movement, they were based on realistic painting, in the case of the American still subtly influenced by impressionism, in the case of Burian partly by Czech symbolism of the early 20th century. They both loved sketching animals at the zoo, with a particular fondness for tigers. Both learned to work under pressure, creating quickly and efficiently under tight deadlines, Burian at Vilímek Publishing House, Knight at McClure's Magazine. Both formed strong author duos with scientific partners, Knight with Osborne, Burian with Augusta, both depicting dinosaurs progressively in the early days of their paleoart (Knight mainly by influence of Cope), but their paintings subsequently became pillars of the so-called modern consensus (for more see THEME: Burian's Creative Method, Book I). Both experienced a decline in the quality of their work in the last decade of their lives (somewhat more so for Knight, especially his series in National Geographic does not stand up to the work of his prime), caused in both by the simple facts of advancing age and illness. 

Indricotherium (Paraceratherium) transouralicum. Oil painting from 1955 for Prehistoric Animals. The part with Flyorov's name (in Cyrillic) is overpainted near the signature.

The differences lay primarily in the fact that Knight was born into a well-to-do family in New York, where he lived pretty much his entire life (except for a four-year intermezzo in Chicago). Burian was born into a family that belonged to the Moravian middle class, but after moving to Prague, also due to a complicated relationship with his father (Knight, on the other hand, had an extremely harmonious relationship with his father until his early death), he fell to the bottom of society and lived in poverty for several years. The geopolitical aspect is important – Knight lived all his life in a free country, Burian in 20th century Czechoslovakia. As a young man, Knight travelled around Europe, enjoyed visits to the Natural History Museum in Paris and London, and sketched in the top zoos of Antwerp and Amsterdam. In Paris, he met and talked to his artistic idols, the legends of historicism and orientalism (and those who first depicted exotic animals realistically) Frémiet and Gérôme. At McClure's Magazine he met such inspirational figures as Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the late 1920s, accompanied by Henri Breuil, he visited the famous Cro-Magnon sites in the Dordogne Valley and the Spanish cave of Altamira. Burian, on the other hand, was happy to visit Rimini for a few weeks in 1931. Then, as a soldier, his passport was confiscated, later he was prevented from further travel by the Nazi occupation, then by the Communist regime.

Burian's isolation was not only related to the geopolitical situation. The fundamental difference between the two artists was that Knight, despite his phobias, was a very sociable man and throughout his life was a respected member of the New York social elite. Burian, on the other hand, was a lifelong recluse, confined to the shell of his studio, socialising essentially only with his friends from the tramping movement. While Knight clearly benefited from his contact with his older classmates at school, Burian rather suffered from it.

All of the above is also related to how both were financially rewarded for their works. Burian's palaeoart was under state control and funding after the communist coup in 1948, and although it was not poorly paid (by Czechoslovak standards), it was naturally not comparable to Knight's situation. The American's work for the AMNH was sponsored by the famous banker J. P. Morgan, and his daughter negotiated a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Chicago commission with the Field Museum, a staggering sum in the mid-twenties. Towards the end of his life, Burian was working on a comparably challenging project, a series of paintings for the Zoo Dvůr Králové. Josef Vágner initiated the commission and arranged the finances, and if anyone in Czechoslovakia at the time could arrange quality financing, it was he, yet it was a sum of money incommensurate with American standards.

Comparing Knight and Burian with regard to the quality of their paleoart is all but pointless. To say that one or the other was better is naturally purely subjective. Knight was completely original in his work, he did not follow any of the older paleoartists, he couldn't actually, given his chosen approach. He had the superior professional and financial backing of one of the world's greatest natural history institutions, and he had access to all the famous skeletons. He did not work under any time stress, he could afford to create a small sculpture of the animal in question before the actual painting, so that he could then use it to get the shadow correctly captured in the painting. Burian didn't need any lighting of the three-dimensional model, the play of light and shadow was one of his strongest points. His painting technique was objectively more inventive. But let us not forget, in such comparisons, Knight's lifelong handicap – his severe astigmatism and the fact that from the age of six, when he was hit with a stone by a peer, he was essentially blind in his right eye. He painted all his life with his head inches from the canvas, wearing special glasses. It is also not objective to compare the medium-size oil paintings on canvas with, for example, the large-scale murals of the Chicago museum.

In any case, Knight was not very strong in depicting animals in motion; in this respect, he remained entirely beholden to the 19th century. Sketching recent animals, he devoted dozens of drawings to studies of muscle. With this in mind, it is interesting that he never attempted this with dinosaurs, always applying the musculature of modern reptiles in a relatively slavish manner. As incorrectly conceived as both Knight's and Burian's dinosaurs are from today's perspective, it is Burian's that are more convincing, and this is due, among other things, to the application of non-reptilian musculature (especially in the pelvic and femoral regions). 

Arsinoitherium zitteli, a gouache from 1941, printed in Josef Augusta's book Divy prasvěta (1942) and later in Prehistoric Animals (1956).

Burian's weakness (not only in paleoart) was that throughout his life he worked mainly with secondary sources. He never stood directly in front of a dinosaur skeleton. He worked primarily with photographs. And also with the works of his predecessors. And so he inevitably arrived at his synthesizing method (see THEME: Burian's Creative Method, Book I), which may seem unoriginal at first glance, but in Burian's rendition it gained worldwide renown.

One of the main sources of inspiration for Burian and his aforementioned synthesizing method was the work of Knight. He had known his series for the Field Museum since the mid-1930s. The person who initiated Burian's first six paintings for The Great Illustrated Natural History of the Three Kingdoms probably provided him with Knight's 1935 book Before the Dawn of History, in which Knight published photographs of his paintings for Chicago (for more, see THEME: The Beginnings of the Augusta-Burian Collaboration, Book I). This series, and other paintings by the American, were a lifelong inspiration to him and Augusta.

Another talented artist, Erwin Sachem Christman (1885-1921), worked at the AMNH alongside Knight and produced aesthetically pleasing drawings of fossils in addition to three-dimensional reconstructions.

However, the only artist besides Knight who could hold his own in American paleoart of the first decades of the 20th century was Robert Bruce Horsfall (1869-1948). Most of the major paleoartists of the 20th century had the same professional background. They started out as either illustrators of action literature or wildlife artists. Horsfall was one of the latter, and was particularly well known for his illustrations in many atlases of American birds. His contribution to paleoart, however, concerns mammals, and is essentially a single book, but a major one: the 1913 A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere by paleontologist William B. Scott on the Cenozoic mammals of the Americas – a seven-hundred-page folio with more than a hundred drawings by Horsfall. Burian knew this book well from Augusta, and it was a lifelong source of inspiration for him, as evidenced especially in this volume of Zdeněk Burian's Prehistoric World trilogy.

The Englishwoman Alice Bolingbroke Woodward (1862-1951) was one of those who came to paleoart from the illustrations of literature, in her case children's books. The fact that her father was a distinguished geologist at the Natural History Museum in London and her sister (a close friend of the famous illustrator Beatrix Potter) was an anatomical draughtswoman certainly played a role. Woodward's paleoart appeared in the Illustrated London News and in Henry R. Knipe's books Nebula to Man (1905) and Evolution in the Past (1912). Her illustrative approach rejected the so-called idealizing approach to reconstruction with its canonized rules about postures and composition, and her paleoart continues to captivate today with its fresh perspectives and timeless compositional ideas. 

Deinotherium giganteum. Oil painting from 1951 created as a basis for a school teaching board printed in 1952.

The European equivalent of Charles Knight was the German Heinrich Harder (1858-1935). The Pomeranian-born artist did not come to paleoart until he was in his early forties in the early 20th century. He was an established landscape photographer when he began to collaborate with the well-known popularizer of natural history Wilhelm Bölsch, with whom he produced several magazine articles and books on prehistory, but most importantly two series (2 x 30) of collectible cards from the Tiere der Urwelt series, which were part of the products of the cocoa merchant Theodor Reichardt.

Harder was not yet too influenced by Knight's work in the years before the First World War, and his reconstruction gives a sophisticated and original impression. In particular, the incorporation of animals into the landscape and the emphasis on the precise rendering of its mood (unsurprising in a landscape painter) was typical of his work. Just before the First World War, the decoration of the exterior facades of the new aquarium building of the Berlin Zoo was based on his designs. These included tile mosaics, bas-reliefs and a statue of an iguanodon in front of the entrance. The style of these works can thus be described as a kind of Art Nouveau palaeoart. The building was damaged at the end of the Second World War, but after the original Harder designs were found, the decoration of the façade was restored in the late 1970s and early 1980s (it was a kind of reconstruction of reconstructions). Harder's vision of dinosaurs was not out of step with the conservative concept already established at the time. Especially his reptilian diplodocuses corresponded exactly to the way this sauropod was reconstructed in the German-speaking area until the late 1930s (for more see p. 424 in Book I).

One of the few paleoartists who combined both, scientist and artist, was the eminent Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel (1875-1946). He accompanied his paleobiological theories and texts with his own successful drawings, but he was aware of his artistic limitations, unable to produce an oil painting or a sculpture. He therefore approached two artists in turn. The first was Friedrich König (1877-1934), a naturalist who had inherited artistic talent from both his parents and was a former student of Abel. Already familiar with Knight's reconstructions, he approached the problem very responsibly, even writing several theoretical studies on the subject. He concentrated mostly on three-dimensional models of prehistoric creatures, using the term paleozooplastica for his creations. A large number of them date from the early 1910s and König sold them to museums in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Another Viennese who was approached by Abel in the early 1920s with an offer of collaboration was Franz Roubal (1889-1967), a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was an established animalist artist at the time (following the work of Wilhelm Kuhnert) who, unlike Knight, did not sketch animals only in zoos, but had experience with them directly from the wild. His artistic style was modernist realism, so he was much more "artistic" compared to Burian, like the Russian Flyorov. Under Abel's direction he produced many sculptures and oil paintings in the 1920s and 1930s, for Austrian museums and, after Abel's move to the University of Göttingen in 1935, for the university museum there. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Roubal then returned to the subject under the guidance of other professional advisors. Two paintings from that time are worth mentioning, of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, conceived in a very monumental almost Frazzettian style. For the Austrian, unlike both Knight and Burian, there was no decline in the quality of his work towards the end of his life.

Abel's books had a huge influence on Josef Augusta (especially the 1939 title Tiere der Vorzeit in ihrem Lebensraum), and Burian knew the Roubal‘s paintings well and was inspired by them in his synthesizing method. 

Pliopithecus vindobonensis at the Miocene locality of Děvínská Nová Ves. Oil paintings from 1977 for Špinar's textbook Paleontology of Vertebrates.

Gerhard Heilmann (1859-1946) is one of the most original figures in the history of paleoart. This Dane with a complicated personality never received a formal scientific education, and his colleagues let him know it. He was intensely interested in birds from an early age, published excellent paintings of birds in several books, and in 1913-1916 printed a series of articles in the Danish Ornithological Journal on the evolution of birds, accompanied by many meticulously executed drawings of prehistoric birds and dinosaurs. These were heavily criticised by his colleagues. In 1926, however, Heilmann succeeded in publishing a revised summary of these articles in English under the title The Origin of Birds, and this book soon became highly influential thanks to the author's precise theoretical deductions and the thoughtful and impressive accompanying drawings. Heilmann, being a scholar not affiliated with any official institution, resembled the later Gregory S. Paul, except that while Paul's 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World not only became influential, but also helped establish a scientific paradigm for dinosaurs that is still understood to be valid today, Heilmann's theses on the evolution of birds from thecodonts coincidentally proved to be wrong, despite his precise deductions. However, for four decades they were canon, precisely because of the quality of their arguments. As late as the early 1960s, Augusta did not doubt this theory, and Burian's "proavis" oil paintings were the culmination of Heilmann's original drawings. However, Heilmann influenced Burian minimally with his timeless vision of the body structure and locomotion of dinosaurs.

In the Czech society of the late 19th and first decades of the 20th century, the theme of prehistoric times and prehistoric people resonated strongly, as it did elsewhere in the world; it was still a relatively new and exciting topic. Several prominent Czech painters of the time dealt with it, for example Mikoláš Aleš, who created, among other things, a drawing of a mammoth. In the first three decades of the new century, Jaroslav Panuška (1872-1958) and Jan Konůpek (1883-1950) addressed prehistory, as confirmed by their illustrations for books by Eduard Štorch and Rudolf Richard Hofmeister. Panuška created several Pleistocene and older (Silurian, Devonian) landscapes in his typical, darkly melancholic atmosphere. Konůpek was very interested in the subject, after the first war he had a lively correspondence with Hofmeister and created a series of works on the subject (prehistoric man, but also older prehistory, including Mesozoic and Tertiary animals, the latter also in the first part of the John H. Bradley's 1940 Czech edition of his book Autobiography of Earth) many illustrations, also in his typical style influenced by Symbolist mysticism, in which he was in harmony with Hofmeister's approach to the subject matter. The second part of Hofmeister's Prehistoric Bohemia trilogy was illustrated with three etchings by Max Švabinský (the first was illustrated by Panuška, the third by Konůpek), again in his typical style of idealized scenes. In Švabinský's case, but also in Panuška's or Konůpek's, we cannot speak of a professionally unique or informed approach. All these prominent artists were merely inspired by this attractive subject matter in their own artistic work.

The situation was somewhat different in the case of Jiří Židlický (1895-1950), a self-taught painter from Vysočina. He was a talented animalist with an interest in gamekeeping. In the first half of the 1920s, he created several drawings of prehistoric reptiles under the guidance of Jan Svatopluk Procházka, a naturalist at the National Museum, which later caught the eye of Josef Augusta, with whom, in the late 1930s, he created illustrations for a more than 100-page chapter entitled Prehistoric Deer in František Vodička's book The Carpathian Deer and Its Family, published in 1942, where Židlický linked the themes of palaeoart and gamekeeping in a unique way in dozens of drawings.

At the same time, Zdeněk Burian came on the scene and logically dominated the topic in the Czech lands until the 1980s. The only exception was the unique palaeobotanical and geological landscape paintings by Luděk Pešek (1919-1999) from the late 1960s (see pages 47 and 53 in Book I). 

Smilodon neogaeus and Nothrotherium roveri, 1948. Oil painting for Augusta‘s book Z hlubin pravěku. Later used in Prehistoric Animals, influencing Frank Frazetta.

A Siberian-born Austrian-Russian, living in the United States since the age of five, Rudolph Zallinger (1919-1995) is generally ranked, along with Knight and Burian, among the three most important representatives of paleoart history. He achieved this with essentially a single, but fundamental work. He graduated with a degree in fine arts from Yale University and immediately after graduation, in 1942, was approached with an offer to create paleoart paintings for the main hall of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Several individual paintings were originally planned for the huge wall of the hall, but the concept was eventually changed to a huge panoramic scene measuring 16 x 110 feet, executed using the fresco secco technique. It is called The Age of Reptiles. University scientists gave Zallinger a six-month crash course in paleontology, and in 1943 the artist began painting. Due to the location of the entrance to the hall, the scene is conceived from right to left (from older to younger times). It depicts fauna and flora from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous. The transitions between the different periods are indicated by trees across the entire height of the painting. He first created an exact scale version of the planned mural (30 x 200 cm) and worked on the actual painting until 1947. During that time, the scaffolding at the wall was not covered in any way and visitors could directly observe the process of creating the monumental work. In 1952, the painting was reproduced in Life Magazine (mirrored in reverse) and gained worldwide popularity. The painting as a whole, even more than Knight's work, reinforced the traditional, conservative view of dinosaurs as dull, inactive monsters.

For Life magazine in 1953, Zallinger created a similar scene from the Cenozoic called The Age of Mammals. In the early 1960s, enough funds were found to convert this scene into a large-scale (1.7 x 18.3 meters) version at the Peabody Museum, using the same technique as The Age of Reptiles. The work was completed in 1967. It is in the depiction of the mammals that Zallinger's highly stylized and less than realistic artwork stands out. In 1965, he also contributed to F. C. Howell's Early Man with his illustration entitled The Road to Homo sapiens, later known as The March of Progress, depicting 15 primates (ancestors of man) walking in sequential order on a fold-out double-page spread. This image has become iconic, has come to embody the notion of evolution as the road to progress, and is now the subject of countless derivations and parodies.

Among the greats of 20th century paleoart was undoubtedly the Russian Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyorov (1904-1980, often spelled Flerov). His life almost overlaps in time with Burian's, including the fact that they both came to depicting prehistory in the late 1930s. Fljorov was primarily a naturalist. In this he differed fundamentally from most other paleoartists of his time. He was a professional scientist (zoologist and paleontologist) and artist (he studied in the studio of A. S. Stepanov). After returning to Moscow from Leningrad he began, on the advice of his mentor Vasily A. Vatagin (1884-1969), a prominent Russian animal painter and also a distinguished paleoartist, to create paintings and sculptures for the State Darwin Museum. His sculptures, unlike those created by Knight, were life-size and became a full part of the museum's exhibition. After the war he became director of the (Orlov) Museum of Palaeontology. In his post-war paintings, he fully freed himself from Vatagin's influence and created his own distinctive artistic expression. Soviet Paleoart became the one that most endured the criteria of the academic art of the time. In Flyorov's case especially. In his style, the reflections of the early 20th-century painterly modernism are most evident, and elements of impressionism, expressionism and fauvism can be found (in this respect, his paintings of prehistoric people are reminiscent of the later works of the Czech painter-paleoartist Jiří Mikula). Compared to Burian, the Russian‘s style was very different. Burian's paleoart was based on his background as an illustrator, his reportage style emphasized narrative and detail (which Russian theorists see as a thoroughly Western element), while Flyorov also illustrated several books (e.g., his colleague Yefremov's novel The Road of Winds or Obruchev's Plutonia), but his style bore all the elements of so-called free art, with an emphasis on the atmosphere and colourful mood of the landscape. 

Coelodonta antiquitatis, a gouache from 1941, printed in Josef Augusta's book Divy prasvěta (1942) and later in Prehistoric Animals (1956).

In addition to paleoart, Fljorov was also an excellent painter of wild animals, he painted scenes from the study of the behaviour of apes and monumental historical scenes from the history of Russia and Central Asia. As a personality, he was more than arrogant (he attacked, for example, the paintings of his colleague and another outstanding artist-scientist Alexei P. Bystrov (1899-1959), the author of, among others, the well-known 1933 painting of an inostrancevia feasting on a slain scutosaur); he himself said, "There are only four of us" – he considered only Vatagin, Knight and Burian to be his equals in the field of artistic palaeo-reconstruction. Burian and Flyorov knew each other very well, of course, although it is questionable how well Burian actually knew Russian's work, given that it has never been seen much in reproduction. Correspondence or other contact probably never took place, but Burian said in an interview for Tvorba in 1976: "The Soviet academic Flerov once jokingly commented on it (the style of Burian's paleoreconstructions - author's note) that I was simply clairvoyant". Unfortunately, we do not know when and under what circumstances he made such a remark.

Among the most important creators of post-war palaeo-reconstruction in Britain were Neave Parker (1910-1961) and Maurice Wilson (1914-1987). Parker showed artistic talent from a young age but did not become a professional artist until the early 1950s, after meeting Maurice Burton, a staff member of the Natural History Museum in London and science editor of the Illustrated London News. With him he produced a number of popular educational plates on the world of contemporary fauna for that periodical, as well as reconstructions of prehistoric creatures. For the museum he painted a series of paintings in the same monochrome gouache technique, which the museum also published as a series of postcards. Burton later introduced Parker to the well-known paleontologist W. E. Swinton, with whom he created several "mass" scenes of Jurrasic and Cretaceous in the second half of the 1950s (again for the Illustrated London News), which Swinton later incorporated into his book The Dinosaurs (1970), making them globally famous. Parker's experience as a photographer in the RAF was evident in the composition and perspective of these paintings. Parker's dinosaurs, despite being conceived in terms of a conservative understanding (before the so-called Dinosaur Renaissance), were entirely original, although some influence of Burian's work is evident in them, especially in the conception of the musculature of the limbs. Burian was (long after Briton's death) inspired by his concept of the triconodon (see p. 549 in Book I). What the two artists had in common was the fact that they were both masters of black-and-white worlds, which they both published in the Illustrated London News (Burian only one work, but it was a major one: a reconstruction of the burial of a Hallstatt culture great man at Býčí skála in a gouache printed in 1946).

Maurice Wilson worked at essentially the same time, in the 1950s, with the same scholars (Burton, Swinton) and for the same museum and periodical, but as Zoë Lescaze (2017) has observed, he could not have been more different in his artistic style from Parker's "reportage" style. He made very poetic paintings inspired by the visual arts of the Far East. Lescaze also highlighted the fundamental difference between Zdeněk Burian's and Maurice Wilson's conceptions of Neanderthals; Wilson's paintings are not as naturalistically beastly. Wilson, like Harder before him, also produced a series of drawings of prehistoric animals for collector's cards, though not for a cocoa company, but for a tea company.

In post-Knight's America, in the 1950s, a period when dinosaur and non-dinosaur paleontology stagnated, William B. Scheele (1920-1998), one of the other examples of paleontologist and artist in one person, stood out for his aesthetic artistic expression. The longtime director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History wrote and illustrated a total of seven books on prehistoric creatures, presenting an approach free from the schematized illustrations of this type of literature, endlessly repeating Knightian motifs. The paintings of William D. Berry (1926-1979) are a harbinger of the coming dinosaur renaissance. He was a painter of wild animals and published many books on the subject. Before he moved to Alaska in 1965, he worked for several years with the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, for which he created several paintings and dioramas (a photograph of one of these served as a model for Burian, see p. 394 in Book I). They are exceptional in their thoughtful scientific aspect from a reconstructive point of view, and were completely out of step with the uninventive dinosaur illustrations of the time. 

Mammuthus meridionalis, an oil painting from 1961, printed in Josef Augusta's book A Book of Mammoths (1942) and later in Life before Man (1972).

A living legend of 20th century paleoart is the American Jay Matternes (1933) who produced his masterpieces when Burian was still at his peak (in the first half of the 1960s). Matternes created his best and most famous works for Washington's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), part of the Smithsonian Institution. For the museum, he painted six large-scale (averaging four by six feet) murals depicting North American fauna in various periods of the Tertiary and Quaternary (Cenozoic) eras in 1960-1964, 1969, and 1975. The degree of expertise (both painterly and scientific), the number of preliminary sketches and studies, and the amount of work involved are unparalleled in the history of paleoart. The famous painting by Zallinger appears in this respect as an alla prima painting in comparison with this cycle. Matternes has become a legend in the field for the degree of his honesty and diligence. He also contributed to three Mesozoic ("dinosaur") dioramas for the Washington Museum and its Fossil Hall with his background drawings for the sculptors. However, these are almost unknown to the public. The only dinosaur book he illustrated was Dinosaurs, published in 1972 by the National Geographic Society. However, the entire book and with it Matternes's illustrations are in thrall to the so-called modern consensus as defined by S. J. Gould (see p. 57 in Book I.) Since Matternes has devoted very little of his career to dinosaurs, his work is not appreciated as it really deserves.

Since the mid-1960s Matternes has been very successful and innovative in reconstructing the ancestry of man (and primate evolution in general), and until the mid-1990s he was a world leader in this field, working with the greatest capacities of paleoanthropology (including all three Leakeys and Donald Johanson). He was a personal friend of Diane Fossey, whom he visited twice in Africa. In the early 1980s his reconstructions of Neanderthals (Shanidar I) helped establish a new view of the human species.

He also produced major paintings on paleoanthropological themes in the early 1990s for natural history museums in New York (AMNH) and Gunma Prefecture, Japan. His status as a doyen of the field was confirmed in the new millennium when he was successively approached to create the first official reconstructions of the newly discovered hominid species Australopithecus garhi, Ardipithecus ramidus or Homo sapiens idaltu.

Matternes's Cenozoic mammal paintings were created as so-called menageriebilder for expository didactic reasons, but the artist was able to compose and paint them in such a way that they look extremely natural in terms of paleoecological relationships. Burian may not have become acquainted with these paintings until the 1970s, or perhaps not at all. What he did know very well, on the other hand, were the American's excellent reconstructions of East African australopithecines from F. Clark Howell's 1965 book Early Man, for the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon section of which Burian's earlier paintings were used. The book was therefore in his home, and at least two of Matternes' motifs later inspired scenes for Josef Kleibl's Menschen der Urzeit (1975).

The real revolution in paleoart was started by Robert T. Bakker (1945) with his drawings of dinosaurs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and from this time onwards we can truly speak of a new era of the whole discipline that followed the classical, Knight-Burian era. The transitional element between the two eras was (apart from Burian's final decade) the work of Canadian Eleanor Kish (1924-2014), and the new era fully developed from the late 1970s onwards with the work of a strong generation of artists born after the war, led by William Stout (1949), John Sibbick (1949), Mark Hallett (1947), Douglas Henderson (1949), Gregory S. Paul (1954), John Gurche (1951) and Jan Sovák (1953), the generation from which the visuality of the film and later the Jurassic Park phenomenon, which in a broader sense defined the current "postmodern" era of paleoart, emerged. 

Mammoths on the Marsh (Black Mammoth). Oil painting from 1954 from Burian's free artistic work.

THEME: Journey to the Beginning of Time, Godzilla and co. (pp. 266-267)

Karel Zeman's film Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), about four boy heroes travelling up a mystical river against the current of time into the depths of prehistory, is his most important and famous work of art, inspired by, among other things, the work of Zdeněk Burian.

Zeman had been coming up with the idea for a similar film since the second half of the 1940s. From Zlín he knew well Willis H. O'Brien's films The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), where O'Brien was the main animator. He was also greatly influenced by Disney's Fantasia (1940), especially the fight scene between a large theropod and a stegosaurus. In 1948, Zeman created a trick scene for the dream sequence of the main character in Červená ještěrka (1948), depicting a duel between two dinosaurs. It is already loosely inspired by Burian's pen-drawing for Zavátý život (see p. 437 in Book I).

For his first feature-length film, Zeman had originally wanted to realise the Vernean idea of a journey to the moon, but in the early 1950s, perhaps in the spirit of the times, which emphasised the educational aspect in art, he moved organically to the realisation of another Vernean theme, a kind of variation on Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It was the emphasis on the artistic-educational dimension of the film, which allowed for the smooth approval and financing of the film in communist Czechoslovakia, that prompted the filmmakers to enlist a scientific advisor in paleontology for the project. As early as 1951, Zeman had already met Josef Augusta, whose books, especially Divy prasvěta, he knew well. He and Augusta hit it off, and his influence on the film was considerable. In the passages with the chronicler-narrator Peter, we obviously perceive Augusta's sublime writing. Under his influence, the didactic and popular-scientific aspect of the film played an important role, even at the expense of the adventurous and fantasy element, which certainly required some difficult concessions on Zeman's part.

Burian's influence on the visual aspect of the film is indirect. It led through Augusta and Augusta's books. Zeman himself was influenced by the aforementioned Divy prasvěta and Zavátý život. Zeman's animation team then worked with other Burian's paintings, i.e. illustrations for other sets of Augusta's stories from the late 1940s, but also with brand new school paintings at the time. These, for example, influenced the form of the brontosaurus or the dead stegosaurus. A small plaster model of it later made its way to the Faculty of Science of Charles University with Augusta and is still on display there (restored by Petr Modlitba) in the Chlupáč Museum of Earth History.

Some parts of the storyboard are directly based on Burian's drawings and paintings. And then, of course, the actual puppets and sets – from mammoths and woolly rhinos to dinosaurs and a Carboniferous swamp. In the case of the latter, it is interesting that the originally planned naosaur scene, for which a puppet was also created, is ultimately absent from the film (Kopecký 2021). This is because the film was being made at the same time that Augusta was gradually figuring out what was actually going on with the naosaur/edaphosaur/dimetrodon (see pp. 170-171 in Book I).

Zeman himself mentioned the painter directly as an inspiration several times, explicitly in an interview for Zápisník (1966): "I was interested in Augusta's and Burian's books about prehistoric nature and especially about prehistoric animals. I wanted to make a scientific and popular film for young people, in which Zdeněk Burian's illustrations and designs would come to life. This was a task that directly encouraged experimentation." 

Panthera spelaea. Oil from 1968, created by Burian for a private commission by paleontologist Josef Beneš.

However, Burian was directly involved in the subsequent promotion of the film. For two film programmes intended for foreign markets he created an impressive gouache with a ceratosaurus, which the main characters observe from the thickets (see p. 410 in Book I). These Burian painted based on real actors from a specific shot in the film. Another booklet is then accompanied by two schematized drawings, highly uncharacteristic for Burian, in the style of cave paintings of prehistoric hunters, accompanied by a stylized drawing of a ceratosaurus (see p. 410 in Book I), which shows his signature. And Burian has also created a geochronological scheme in the form of steps leading down into the deeper past with animals typical of the geological periods, along with notes in the style of the diary of the film's child heroes. What is striking about this diagram is the presence in the film of an unused naosaur (see above) and the strange "hairs" on the back of a sauropod, which coincide with current knowledge of keratin growths on the dorsal line of these creatures. However, the name of Zdeněk Burian is not mentioned in the bibliography of these materials.

With its unique combination of the popular science element with Zeman's innovative trick art and his ingenious imagery, the film was a huge success at home and abroad. It was also released in the USA (with a changed beginning and ending), not only in cinemas but later on television, and thus influenced generations of not only European (and Japanese) but also American children, including Steven Spielberg. We can also speculate that Burian's images influenced some of the prehistoric visions of another American special effect creator, Ray Harryhausen, or animators James Danforth and David W. Allen. 

Burian's connection with the famous Japanese Godzilla film series lies in the existence of two photographs that appear in different places in publications and documents relating to these films. Their source and the date they were taken have not yet been traced. The photographs show Godzilla's lead modeler Teizo Toshimitsu sketching the monster's form. The Japanese artist has one of the language versions of the first international book of the Augusta-Burian duo (Prehistoric Animals) unfolded in front of him on the page with the gouache of the iguanodon from 1941 (see p. 439 in Book I). The photos explicitly indicate that Toshimitsu was inspired by Burian's iguanodon, among others, for the form of the monster.

The problem is that the first Godzilla film premiered in 1954 and Prehistoric Animals was not released until 1956. So the photo is backwards-arranged, with Toshimitsu showing off (presumably for a documentary on the making of the film) what inspired it. Just as Burian and Augusta demonstrated for Czechoslovak Film Weekly in 1957 that they were in the process of creating a 1950 image of an iguanodon. But what then inspired the Japanese before the actual film? It's possible that he got hold of a copy of Divy prasvěta, where the same gouache was reproduced for the first time. Even closer to Godzilla's likeness is the aforementioned 1950 iguanodon. But it was not printed for the first time until 1954 in Augusta's Z pradějin tvorstva, and it is highly unlikely that a reproduction of it would have reached Japan before that date. It is possible, however, that Toshimitsu in the photographs is authentically sketching a later version of the monster for the subsequent films in the series. The whole matter remains unresolved to this day. 

Proconsul africanus. Oil painting from 1963 created as a basis for an unrelieved school teaching board.

THEME: Zdeněk V. Špinar and other expert advisors (pp. 446-447)

From the mid-1930s onwards, Burian collaborated on palaeothemes basically only with Josef Augusta. Rather rarely, other specialists were invited, e.g. Ferdinand Prantl for the images from the Early Paleozoic, František Němejc for the palaeobotanical scenes, and leading Czech anthropologists and archaeologists for the images of human development in the early 1950s (see the chapter Journey from Prehistory, Book I).

After Augusta's sudden death in February 1968, there was naturally (not only) a social demand to continue such a unique collaboration between scientist and artist. Augusta's place was thus soon taken over by two main successors. One of them was Vratislav Mazák, who is the subject of a separate chapter in Book III. The other was Zdeněk Vlastimil Špinar (1916-1995), Augusta's student and his successor as chief vertebrate palaeontologist at Charles University.

Špinar was born on 4 April 1916 in Čáslav and from his grammar school years he had a strong interest in natural history, especially ornithology. He was also an enthusiastic Scout and Woodcraft Indian, earning the patrol name Ran, was led in the Čáslav troop by Miloš Forman's father, and later became one of the heroes of Rudolf Švábenický's 1946 boyhood novel Seminolové. In December 1936, under unique circumstances, he met Ernest Thompson Seton, who came to Prague and, among other things, visited the clubhouse of Jaroslav Foglar's troop on a moored boat at the Rudolfinum. Špinar had Seton sign a copy of his Rolf in the Woods. After the war, he was the leader of the troop in Čáslav and was very active in the Scout organization. He was one of the first to use the teepees in Czechoslovakia. With Burian, he was later not only connected by paleontology itself, but also by a general love of nature, Scout and Tramp movement romance and admiration for American Indian culture (in Špinar's case, especially the Seminole tribe), and Špinar later had several paintings with Indian motifs painted by Burian.

After graduating from high school in 1935, Špinar started studying natural history and chemistry at Charles University in Prague. In the first year he did not yet branch out, it seemed that he would focus on birds. It was crucial for him that the geologist Radim Kettner (who was also an active Scout) invited him to join his team for summer geological research in Slovakia in 1936. From then on, Špinar concentrated on the field at the crossroads of geology and biology, i.e. paleontology. He was unable to pass the Rigorous Examination because the Nazis closed the Czech universities just before the defence of his thesis. The following six years of academic inactivity traumatised Špinar, an extremely energetic young scientist.

After the war, he threw himself full force into research, in 1947 he travelled to Tunisia, began studying Stegocephalia in the Boskovice Furrow with Augusta, corresponded with the most prominent figures of the time (e.g. A. S. Romer from Harvard University) in connection with their research, and in 1952 was habilitated as an associate professor on the basis of his thesis Revision of Some Moravian Discosauriscids. Soon thereafter he switched to the Tertiary frogs of the North Bohemian Bechlejovice (see p. 60), and for the rest of his life he devoted himself scientifically to them. It was no coincidence that he later chose a frog for the coat of arms of his house in Prysk. He called himself and similarly oriented colleagues from the world a frogman, ignoring the negative connotations of the word.

Špinar, besides being a top scientist (his citation index was above average by today's standards), who was not only world-class in the field of palaeoherpetology, was also an excellent teacher who, with his experience as a scout leader, was able to activate and motivate his students. Oldřich Fejfar, in the 1999 documentary The Frogman, recalls the summer excursions with the „podsada“ tents and teepees: "Those excursions, that was the best thing ever, because he could apply that scouting experience there, and those excursions, you can't forget those, they were an experience. It wasn't just geology there, it was nature itself being presented, at a very deep level."

In addition to countless scientific papers, Špinar published several still-formative college textbooks on fossil vertebrates as well as invertebrates. All of this demonstrated Špinar's vast range. He was never a member of the Communist Party and as a man with a Scouting background, he was only allowed to travel to the West during the Prague Spring period. In West Germany, he tried to find the holotype of the genus Palaeobatrachus (Roček, 2016), which he failed to do (It was later discovered that it had been destroyed during the war).

Špinar had known Burian from visits when Augusta sent him as his liaison before the war (see p. 214 in Book I). After Augusta's death he took over the role of chief advisor, and author of the text of the forthcoming book Life before Man. Shortly thereafter, he and Burian collaborated on paintings for the forthcoming encyclopedia of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and their magnum opus was paintings for the college textbook Vertebrate Paleontology (Paleontologie obratlovců). A few years later, they were still working together on the last two paintings for the upcoming school educational film of Kratký Film Company (see p. 553 in Book I and p. 526-527 in this book). 

Gigantopithecus blacki. Oil painting from 1974 painted for the book by Vratislav Mazák Jak vznikl člověk. Today owned by the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Špinar's daughter from his first marriage died tragically in 1965. Both his daughter from his second marriage, Jaroslava-Jája (see p. 26 in Book I), and his second wife, Marie, often visited Burian and Špinar in his studio, as did his two expatriate sons who lived in Udine, their native Italy. Through them, Špinar provided Burian with many Western goods. And for one of them, Burian painted a picture of Indians hunting buffalos. He also planned a painting of Pleistocene bison for him (see p. 312). A year before his death, Špinar published his last publication, The Great Dinosaurs, written with the well-known Canadian paleontologist P. J. Currie and lavishly illustrated by Jan Sovák. Špinar is buried in Prysk, North Bohemia, and his cross bears his scout patrol name Ran in addition to his civic name.

In 1968, the radio editor Josef Kleibl (1931-2022), known mainly for his popular science programme Meteor, collaborated with Burian on the book Journey to Adam (Cesta za Adamem). For this book, they selected corresponding images from Burian's earlier work (see the chapter Journey from Prehistory, Book I). At the same politically liberal time, Kleibl, like Mazák, sent letters to the painter from Paris, where, among other things, he was fascinated by a large-scale reproduction of Burian's painting in the famous natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes. At the end of 1973, he returned to collaborating with the painter when he received an offer from Artia Publishing House to create a picture book on human evolution within a very tight deadline of five months. The paintings were professionally consulted by Kleibl's friend Vratislav Mazák.

A year later, the anthropologist and ethnologist Josef Wolf (1927-2012) began collaborating with the painter on another major book by Artia – under the same title as Kleibl's book, Menschen der Urzeit, but this time for adult readers. Wolf‘s holistic approach to anthropology enabled Burian to return to topics that had excited him strongly in the past, namely archaeological prehistory (Bronze and Iron Age) and, above all, the indigenous peoples of the present. Josef Wolf was the greatest capacity for these in Czechoslovakia (together with Jan Jelínek, whose conception was, however, quite different). Some time later, a conflict arose between the painter and the scientist when Wolf claimed an excessive share of the authorship of the paintings for the book, which was opposed not only by the painter but also very uncompromisingly by Vratislav Mazák (see THEME: Vratislav Mazák, Book III).

In 1977, the painter created several gouache reconstructions of mostly Cenozoic mammals for the book Prehistoric Animals and Plants, with Josef Beneš (1927-2001). This long-time paleontologist at the National Museum (see William Stout's introductory memoir and p. 432), a specialist in Pleistocene mammals (especially of the Bohemian Karst), was, among other things, a regular contributor to the ABC magazine. After the Velvet Revolution he produced two more books on prehistory with the illustrator Zdeněk Berger.

In the same year, 1977, Burian began to collaborate with Bořivoj Záruba (1939) on the book Die Welt der ausgestorbenen Tiere (Prehistoric Life on Earth), where, similarly to Kleibl's book, Burian created a number of smaller paintings of a more illustrative nature. Many other pictures of a similar nature were contributed (as in Wolf's book) by the painter‘s personal friend, the artist Vladimír Krb. The book took some time and some of the pictures were later created by Gustav Krum. Since the end of his studies, Bořivoj Záruba connected his life with the National Museum, participated, among others, in the Maghreb 74 expedition to Algeria, and devoted a large part of his professional career to the popularisation of palaeontology, mainly in the form of books, with paintings by Zdeněk Burian and later Jan Sovák.

The Path to Human

Book 3 is identical in structure and concept to Books 1 and 2 and follows on from them completely. The chapter Fantasy within the Boundaries of Science deals with Burian's illustrations for fictional stories about prehistory, primarily those penned by Eduard Štorch (The Mammoth Hunters) and Semjon Karatov (Fast-Footed Jar), as well as classic science fiction stories with prehistoric motifs (V. A. Obruchev – Plutonia and A.C. Doyle – The Lost World) and Burian's illustrations with cryptozoological motifs. (This chapter is translated into English in its entirety below.) The chapter Early Species of the Genus Homo and Erectoids (pp. 74-177) covers Burian's reconstructions of Homo habilis and other early human species, discusses the confusion in the reconstruction of the OH 6 and OH 9 finds, provides a clear overview of all the painter's depictions of Javanese and Chinese erectoids, and concludes with European and African Heidelbergs. The topic School Pictures is translated in its entirety below. In the chapter Neanderthals (pp. 190-323), after mentioning Burian's free paintings on this theme, three stages are discussed in which the painter approached this species of man in a fundamentally different way. Burian's pathetic-melancholic approach to Neanderthals is discussed. After a theme devoted to the painter's collaboration with the Czechoslovak publishing house Artia, the largest chapter of the book is devoted to Cro-Magnons (pp. 334-543), with an emphasis on the painter's unofficial cycle celebrating their lives, entitled "The Cro-Magnon Epic" in reference to Alfons Mucha's famous cycle. The final topic on expert advisor Vratislav Mazák is also translated below.

Burian's illustration from 1953 for Eduard Štorch's book The Mammoth Hunters.

Imagination within the boundaries of science – Burian's prehistoric motifs in fiction (p. 12-55)

The starting point for Burian's lifelong fascination with prehistory was the Kotouč hill in Štramberk, a limestone cluster of Mesozoic coral reefs, and the Šipka cave located on it, where Neanderthals lived in the Middle Paleolithic. From his boyhood, Burian was excited not only by the research aspect of the matter, but mainly by the artistic and emotional aspect, hidden both in the aesthetic aspect of fossils (in the case of Štramberk, mainly ammonites), but mainly in the mysterious haze of ideas about the lives of prehistoric people. When the painter later recalled what went through his mind as a little boy playing in Šipka, it was not just a dry description, but words with a strong emotional tone: "When the twilight light, falling through the collapsed ceiling of the cave, began to blur the contours of the fallen boulders, I saw them huddling in shreds of fur in the dark corridors, illuminated by a constantly maintained fire, I saw their eyes flashing with eternal hunger and other green glowing eyes behind the wall of boulders at the entrance against the backdrop of a dark winter night. I saw how the tribe, armed with stones and sticks, succumbed in an unequal battle with a pack of cave hyenas and lost their new settlement! I saw the last of the tribe and his bloody trail leading through the snowy forest away from the scene of the terrible battle..." (Burian, 1958)

This vivid childhood imagination accompanied Burian throughout his life and was a constant inspiration in his titanic work on the theme of the evolution of life and man. The emotional aspect of prehistory excited many artists around the world at that time (and still excites them today), including Czech painters Jaroslav Panuška and Jan Konůpek, and writers R. R. Hofmeister and Eduard Štorch. It was no coincidence that Burian's first depiction of prehistoric worlds belonged to Štorch's stories. Their original illustrators were Panuška and Konůpek, but Konůpek in particular was much more suited to accompanying Hofmeister's stories, with whom Konůpek was more in tune in his somewhat mystical view of ancient times. Štorch's stories were completely free of this element, and Burian, on the contrary, was very much in tune with him in that Štorch, in addition to the scientific and adventurous aspects of prehistory, also emphasized the pedagogical and educational dimension.

Based on Burian's first illustrations for Štorch, he was also noticed by paleontologist Josef Augusta, for whose popularizing work the "fictional" aspect was essential. Most of his texts are either a mixture of popular scientific essays with fictional passages or fall directly into the genre of short stories. A significant part of the success of the Augusta-Burian duo lay in their ability to imaginatively combine popular educational elements with adventurous narratives in their reconstructions.

For much of his career, Burian created not only reconstructive and popularizing works on prehistory, but also classic illustrations for fictional stories set in prehistoric times.

Burian's illustration from 1967 for Semyon Karatov's book Fast-Footed Jar.

Prehistoric fiction

Burian's first creative encounter with Štorch took place in connection with his most famous book, Lovci mamutů (The Mammoth Hunters), in 1932, when, as the main illustrator of Malý čtenář (Little Reader) magazine, he accompanied an excerpt consisting of several chapters of the book, published under the title "Lovci sobů a mamutů" (Reindeer and Mammoth Hunters). He first illustrated it as a full-length book in 1937 and returned to it many times after the war (most significantly in 1951 and 1953), which is why the book can be considered (along with Kipling's The Jungle Books) the painter's illustrative "opus magnum."

He created a color cover and four gouaches for the text in Malý čtenář. It is worth noting that he used this technique, in which he later achieved legendary success, only very rarely to illustrate Štorch. The scene in which he captured the attack of a saber-toothed tiger in gouache could already hint at the great future that awaited Burian in the field of depicting prehistory.

The painter apparently did not consult the writer about his ideas inspired by his reading, and he almost certainly did not consult anthropology experts about the appearance of prehistoric people. He probably sought inspiration mainly in popular educational literature of the time. Burian's prehistoric heroes are conceived as "common prehistoric people," as at that time there was not much distinction in the broader consciousness between H. erectus, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnons. They are "diluvial apemen" in the style of Kupka's iconic illustration of prehistoric man from 1909. In accordance with the text, Burian gave them Cro-Magnon-type stone tools, but physiognomically they have strongly ape-like protruding jaws, receding foreheads, small brains, and even a big toe that is separated from the other toes. However, Štorch wrote about the Cro-Magnons of the Moravian and Bohemian Gravettian (known as Pavlovian), and as we now know, they were physically identical to modern humans. Even woolly mammoths are far from the mammoths that Burian later perfectly depicted on many occasions, and with a little exaggeration, we can describe them as a kind of "composite mammoth-mastodons."

Homo erectus erectus (A small portrait of Pithecanthropus), oil painting from 1950.

Burian returned to The Mammoth Hunters for the second time in 1937. At the beginning of the year, the Toužimský&Moravec publishing house signed a contract with Štorch for the fifth, significantly revised edition of the then widely popular book, and they proposed their biggest star as the illustrator (they literally write to Štorch: "... we managed to convince Burian [for the book]..."). By March, Burian had already completed the commission. It consisted of a set of fifty-one illustrations on seventeen sheets. Their execution and quality reveal that the painter took great care in creating them, clearly considering the commission to be highly prestigious. This is evidenced, among other things, by the fact that he used three different techniques: pen and ink, pencil, and, in six cases, for the first time in his work, the so-called false woodcut, also known as negative/reverse drawing. In later years, he perfected this technique, especially in the aforementioned The Jungle Books. Although these pseudo-engravings gradually disappeared from post-war editions of The Mammoth Hunters for various reasons, in terms of emotional charge, they are among the most impressive in the entire corpus.

Štorch saw these sheets before the book was printed and liked the illustrations very much, but he wrote directly on the accompanying letter from the publisher what he was not satisfied with. His biggest reservations were about the false woodcut depicting a scene of nighttime observation of a cave bear (see THEME: The Beginnings of the Augusta–Burian Collaboration, Book 1). And Burian did indeed mistakenly depicted the bear as a giant sloth, as evidenced by newly published letters from Štorch to publishers Toužimský and Moravec (Prokop, 2024). In one of these letters (dated March 20, 1937), he writes: "The painter made a mistake here. That's not a bear, it's a megatherium or a mylodon! The head is not that of a bear (teeth), nor is the tail (bears are almost tailless!), nor are the claws on the hind legs. They would criticize us for this." A few months later, he wrote: "I'm glad we'll have the right bear; the one with the tail was unacceptable." Burian probably modified the animal directly on the original negative drawing, but we don't know for sure, as the original is currently unavailable. In his letter responding to these objections, Burian also points out that he did not dare to tackle the scene with the lemming, as he could not find any visual references for it. He writes: "... I ended up in the same situation as some time ago, when I was supposed to write a biography of a sable [Bianki's story "Askýr" for the magazine Širým světem from 1932] ... and since I don't like to do such things from pure imagination, I decided to leave it out." This is followed by Burian's later famous statement, "Better no picture than a misleading one."

Homo erectus erectus (Pithecanthropus and Nature), oil painting from 1958.

In addition to the oil painting that was used as the cover of this edition, there is another one in which Burian varied the cover from Malý čtenář. As suggested by numerous post-war variations on this motif (see p. 366-371), the painter found the depiction of the moment when a group of people react to the arrival of a herd of mammoths very appealing. The mixture of excitement, joy, and horror contained in the exclamation: "The mammoths are coming!" However, Štorch found this cover too emotionally charged, so it was replaced with a scene featuring Kopčem in a tree with a mammoth.

Burian imbued this collection with the best of his illustrative approach. Pure action-packed adventure is complemented by a lesson, which is fully in line with the nature of the text. It was precisely this ability to evoke ancient or distant worlds through his exceptional imagination and to combine a thrilling story with knowledge that ranked Štorch, along with Verne and Kipling, among the painter's favorite writers. The painter also loved the author of The Mammoth Hunters because (as he wrote after the writer's death for Zlatý máj magazine in a very personal and reflective text entitled "How I illustrated Štorch"): "... Štorch knows how to sweeten the illustrator's work with a multitude of beautiful human types and diverse characters, descriptions of wild landscapes, ..., strange costumes, weapons and dwellings, happy and tragic events... everything I like to draw..."

Štorch's text from 1937 is rawer and harsher than later post-war editions. Štorch himself cited Seton's stories, the book Indian Boyhood by Ch. A. Eastman-Ohiyesa, Hofmeister's stories from prehistoric times, and the series by the "Austrian Štorch" Alois Tlučhoř (Sonnleitner) called Children of the Caves (this "prehistoric" story, however, takes place in the Alps in the 17th century; Burian created the cover for it in 1976 for a German publishing house). Among the works that Štorch does not mention directly but which clearly influenced him, it is worth mentioning the novel The Quest for Fire by J.-H. Rosny, still known today mainly thanks to J.-J. Annoud's 1981 film adaptation.

Homo (cf. erectus) olduvaiensis, oil painting from 1972, originally named Homo habilis, a stone tool was modified in 1978.

In order to achieve an emotional effect, the painter sometimes exaggerates, modifies, or embellishes reality in these illustrations—examples include the aforementioned scene with the night bear, but also Veverčák on a giant musk ox or the attack of a rhinoceros or mammoth. We find many motifs here that Burian later returned to repeatedly in his "professional" paleoart (in collaboration with Augusta), especially in the famous series that we could call the "Cro-Magnon Epic," a collection of oil paintings (see p. 354) accompanying Augusta's publication Prehistoric Man (1960). In addition to the aforementioned motif "Mammoths Are Coming!", it is primarily Burian's great life theme – prehistoric artist captured in moments of creative struggle.

Burian illustrated the edition published by Toužimský&Moravec also using only his archive and his knowledge at the time, and once again he depicted the prehistoric heroes of the book in a "ape-human" style, although to a much lesser extent than in 1932. Despite the physiognomic inaccuracies, his illustrations caught the attention of the scientific community, and this famous fifth edition of The Mammoth Hunters was reviewed, among others, by Josef Augusta, then an associate professor at the Faculty of Science of Charles University, in the magazine Vesmír (Universe) (1937). Soon after, the paleontologist began collaborating with the painter on the book Divy prasvěta (Wonders of the Prehistoric World) (see THEME: The Beginnings of the Augusta–Burian Collaboration, Book I).

Shortly after the war, in 1946, the sixth, abridged edition of the book was published by the State Publishing House. This time, the author chose Ondřej Sekora as the illustrator. The following seventh edition was to be published again by Toužimský&Moravec, and Štorch, after some hesitation, decided to return to Burian. Sekora never forgave Burian for this. Burian added two illustrations to the original collection, one of which was a pen-and-ink drawing of a lemming hunt. After the war, Štorch sent the painter materials on these rodents. In the new drawings, the painter depicts the heroes of the book correctly as anatomically modern humans for the first time. He significantly modified one of the original pencil drawings, as Štorch was dissatisfied with the exaggerated size of the musk ox in the fifth edition. Burian redrew Veverčák riding on it, reducing its size to make their proportions more realistic. Unfortunately, the result is one of the painter's least successful drawings ever, and it is no wonder that it was not used in any subsequent editions. For the tenth edition in 1953, Burian depicted the same scene for the third time. Although it does not have much in common with the first rough action scene, it is a successful, delicately drawn children's illustration.

Night, oil painting from 1950 from Burian's free artistic work.

For the ninth edition in 1951, published by the State Publishing House for Children's Books (SNDK), Štorch once again, and in fact permanently, chose Burian's illustrations (at that time, public attacks against Burian, led by Ondřej Sekora, then an employee of the SNDK, were also reaching their peak). However, the illustrations underwent a number of changes, with several being slightly modified; for example, the painter added a higher, hairier forehead to the mammoths in two of the original drawings. Some pseudo-engravings were omitted, specifically the scene with the creation of venus and the night bear; Burian wrote "bad drawing with a bear" on the tracings – it is difficult to say whether he meant bad in a professional paleontological sense or in an artistic sense.

The collection is complemented by five new colored plates, including a new cover, which is another variation on the popular motif "The Mammoths Are Coming!" The other four again depict action scenes that subtly educate the reader. Burian writes to Štorch: "... I included the main types of animals... and from the landscape... I did what could be done in four illustrations." The fight with the rhinoceros replaces the original "wide-angle" pen-and-ink drawing, and the fall of the horses is an extremely successful variation on the original gouache from Malý čtenář. The interior illustrations now remain in only two techniques, pen-and-ink drawing and colored chalk, and the result is more coherent. However, Burian was deeply disappointed with the printing. Based on this experience, to which must be added a certain arbitrariness in the graphic design of the book and attacks from Ondřej Sekora and others, Burian refuses to continue working with the SNDK. In one of his letters to Štorch, he complains: "... these 'experts' made small pen-and-ink drawings large and large ones small..."

Burian's illustration from 1941 for Josef Augusta's book Buried Life.

In the second half of 1952, however, the situation changed, partly due to personnel changes at the SNDK, and Burian finally decided to participate in the preparation of the tenth anniversary edition of Lovci mamutů. Štorch certainly cared deeply about it and literally bombarded Burian with requests for various changes and adjustments. Štorch's requests focused on two things, in his words: "more [diluvial] nature" and secondly, "[more] child characters and less roughness!" Štorch received a number of complimentary responses from his friends about the edition with Sekora's illustrations, and from then on he edited the entire text of the book to make it more accessible to younger children, and he also pushed the painter to do the same. Once again, the painter brilliantly complied. For example, with the hunting of lemmings, created earlier for the seventh edition, or with a number of childishly cute drawings that now conclude the chapters in the tenth edition. Štorch also wanted to "childify" false woodcut depicting Kopčem with an engraving of a bison. Burian softened Kopčem’s features in new negative drawing, yet Štorch commented on the new illustration in the book: "Not childlike!"

The reinforcement of natural motifs with features of the Arctic tundra is also unmistakable in the chapter-end illustrations. For the first time, the book also featured a drawing of the snow-covered Macocha Abyss, which Štorch had long wanted to include. A total of three new colored chalk drawings were created. One became the new cover, and this depiction of Kopčem with a mammoth is perhaps even more successful than the original pre-war version. (Kopčem, of course, already fully has the features of a contemporary European.) Incidentally, the cover of the ninth edition is supplemented with an additional figure and inserted inside the book. The "Indian" Nunuk from the original pencil drawing has been redrawn in a more impressive color version (here, in addition, with many dwarf trees, as Štorch desired in his correspondence). The chalk drawing with the motif "Mammoths are coming!" and the scene with the rhino hunt were not used in subsequent editions, probably due to the absence of the originals.

The thirteenth edition in 1957 is interesting for its new cover with a mammoth in color negative drawing technique, which launched the entire series of Štorch books in a uniform design. The fourteenth edition of the book (1959) was supplemented with an chapter-end piece featuring a cave lion, which had already been created for the tenth anniversary edition but was only included in the book now, and then, above all, with a new, more refined version of Veverčák with a sculpture of a bison head. Also interesting in this edition is the cover, for which Burian used a detail from one of the most important paintings of his free work, Mammoths in the Swamp from 1954 (see pp. 390–391, Book II). Burian also created new covers in 1964 and for the East German edition of 1958.

Unpublished Burian's illustration from 1945 for Josef Augusta's book Hunters of Cave Bears.

Štorch attempted to describe the life of the Moravian Gravettian people based on archaeological facts, which, however, reflect the state of knowledge in the first half of the 20th century (and partly also the fact that Štorch was an amateur archaeologist). Today's archaeology sees them quite differently, as people who led a rather complex way of life (for more, see p. 355). The same applies to the illustrations. In line with Štorch and the state of science at the time, Burian generally saw the people of that era as more primitive than they actually were.

The story takes place about 30,000 years ago, geologically in the late Pleistocene, archaeologically in the Late Paleolithic. In the landscape, the painter tried to emphasize the so-called mammoth steppe, but in a somewhat shifted form, as a mixture of tundra and taiga. The animals depicted in the book were mainly those discussed in the chapter Zdeněk Burian's Work – Quaternary in Book II. These included the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear and lion, steppe horse, musk ox, Pleistocene bison, but also, although not discussed in Book II, the cave hyena (see also p. 429), which was fundamental to Burian's childhood initiation experience from Šipka cave and which he depicted here in the style of the recent African striped hyena.

And also a representative of the subfamily Machairodontidae, the so-called saber-toothed tiger. As already mentioned in note 1 on p. 432 in Book II, given the time and place of the story, it could only be the genus Homotherium, although visually the animal in the pen-and-ink drawing and the original gouache resembles more a machairodont or smilodon.

All of Štorch's other stories from ancient times are set in the Neolithic or even younger periods and therefore do not fall within the scope of prehistory as defined in the chapter Journey from Prehistory in Book I. In 1955, Burian illustrated Štorch's short story The First People, which was first published in 1908. Almost half a century later, it was published with additional explanations in the magazine Ohníček, and Burian supplemented it with a cover and five illustrations. In it, Štorch introduces young readers to the discovery and mastery of fire by ancient people in a simplified form. The story is set in the Middle Paleolithic period, the time of European erectoids, perhaps Homo heidelbergensis. The painter adapted the appearance of the heroes depicted to this period. Without the support of a scientific advisor, he conceived them somewhat naively, in the style of some of his free works on the theme of prehistoric man (see p. 205) or drawings from Poulík's book (see p. 528 in Book II). This is mainly evidenced by the colored drawing on the cover with an exploding volcano and spreading fire in the background, and then the drawing of a prehistoric man captivated by a rainbow after rain. These erectoids (archaic humans) are adapted to children's perception and at the same time still have a somewhat outdated, "Kupka-esque" character, e.g., their big toes are slightly splayed, but even here, with this highly unscientific text, Burian clearly asked himself entirely professional questions (mainly in the conception of fur-hair, see p. 216) and tried to approach the subject seriously in this case as well.

Burian's illustration from 1957 for Josef Augusta's book Hunters of Cave Bears.

Two years later, Burian also illustrated Rudyard Kipling's short story How the First Letter Was Written for Ohníček magazine. Although the author sets the story in the Neolithic period, it is completely unscientific and could be interpreted more as a story from the Paleolithic or Mesolithic period. In 1945, Burian created the cover for Karel Sellner's book Poslední (The Last), also set in the late Paleolithic or Mesolithic period. The novel deals with a tribe of Cro-Magnon hunters and gatherers confronted by the arrival of the first farmers, but still with memories of the last Neanderthals. The cover extends over the spine of the book, and part of the image on the back depicts a majestic prehistoric warrior with almost Frazetta-Conan-esque features. His head is not visible in the picture, but given the inaccessibility of the original painting, it is impossible to say whether this was an interesting intention on the part of the painter or just an unfortunate idea on the part of the book designer. Either way, this cover is a great example of Burian's portrait mastery.

A fundamental title set in the Stone Age for Burian was in 1966 the book by the mysterious Russian author Semjon Karatov, Rychlonohý Džar (The swift-footed Jar, the painter worked with the title Bystronohý Džar when creating his illustrations). Compared to The Mammoth Hunters, the story is much less derived from real archaeological contexts and falls more into the fantasy genre, similar to Rosny's The Quest for Fire. It features not only saber-toothed tigers, but also a band of primitive apemen etc. In any case, this set of illustrations is among Burian's most successful, including the graphically impressive cover reminiscent of the comic book artists of the time. The painter created the illustrations at the same time as the gouaches for the first Tarzan story for Pionýr magazine, and certain connecting elements can be found in his approach to both subjects. The majestic drawing of Džar in front of the mammoth herd leader reminds us of the famous scene from Annaud's film adaptation of Rosny's novel.

In 1978, the painter accompanied another important title, Bohumír Fiala's novel Mamuti táhnou do bažin (Mammoths Move to the Swamps), with numerous pen drawings. The author follows on from Štorch and tells a story based on expert facts. He set it in the late Paleolithic period, when mammoths were disappearing from the European landscape and the first domesticated dogs were appearing. With his pen drawings in this book, Burian successfully and organically follows up on his illustrations for Štorch's books and Augusta's Cro-Magnon stories.

In the aforementioned Ohníček magazine, Burian returned to prehistory in 1972 with two colored pen-and-ink drawings featuring a woolly rhinoceros in A. Danancher's story "Trâa's First Big Hunt," taken from the French magazine Vaillant/Pif. And in 1978–79, he accompanied Jaroslav Tichý's series Stories from the Depths of Time for Pionýr magazine with a series of color gouaches. Burian painted a total of eleven gouaches, and the cover of the issue with the first part features a previously unpublished painting, which the painter may have created in the 1950s in connection with The Mammoth Hunters. The hero of Tichý's story, Užovka, a member of the Neanderthals, encounters the emerging Cro-Magnons and learns about their way of life. Burian depicts the young Neanderthal in a new, "non-animalistic" spirit (see also p. 216).

The frontispiece to the second volume of the Slovak encyclopedia Vesmír – Zem – človek (Universe – Earth – Human, 1961), where the painter schematically depicts the Paleozoic era in the lower left quadrant, with orthoceras shells on the sea floor, above them the Mesozoic era with a diplodocus (with front legs elegantly positioned in a mammalian manner) and the essential element of fictionalized prehistory – an erupting volcano, then in the lower right a kind of primitive ape-man, again in the ancient "Kupka" conception of a figure half hunched, half upright, and above it, as a symbol of the historical era, (perhaps) a Slavic fortress. The original frontispiece to the first volume, depicting Burian's somewhat stylized scene from space, was later divided into two halves, and the left half (with the galaxy in the background) later served Burian as the basis for an allegorical scene with a prehistoric man and an astronaut. This was created as part of the painter's free work, probably only a few years later.

Homo sapiens sapiens (Big Portrait of Prehistoric Man), oil painting from 1952.

Science fiction

Burian explored many prehistoric motifs and creatures in titles that fall into the science fiction genre. Burian's first mammoth appeared four years before Malý čtenář magazine on the cover of Karel Hloucha's Zakletá země (The Enchanted Land, 1928), in which the author tells a Verne-esque story about an expedition to the Russian Arctic that encounters a tribe of prehistoric people and mammoths. Burian's first mammoth is very well conceived, as a tall animal with an high forehead, and in comparison, the mammoths in Malý čtenář seem like a step backwards.

A more famous novel about an expedition to the Russian Arctic, where a prehistoric world is found (with the same sources of inspiration in the form of Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Doyle's The Lost World), is Plutonia by V. A. Obruchev. Burian illustrated it for the first time in a lesser-known version in 1955 for the Slovak publishing house Smena. For this, he created a two-part cover, again over the spine, depicting a Neanderthal with a club and, on the opposite diagonal half, a ceratosaurus, which Burian interpreted quite "freely" with its growths on the spinal line. And, of course, an erupting volcano in the background, where we can also see the glowing core of the Earth. The entire prehistoric world in the novel is located inside the hollow Earth, which researchers reached through an opening on an island somewhere north of Chukchi Peninsula. The original of this cover was later divided into two halves for unclear reasons. Burian later modified the lower half by painting over the flint tips on the club, for reasons unknown. Perhaps he wanted to create a more official version of the Neanderthal, possibly on the advice of Vratislav Mazák, given that, according to the scientific understanding at the time, Neanderthals were not capable of attaching stone tools to wood. The original upper part of the cover with the ceratosaurus is now considered lost. In 1980, Burian created a literal variation of the same theme for the cover of Ohníček magazine in connection with an article on his 75th birthday. On the binding of the book there is the stegosaurus discussed in Book I (see p. 395 in Book I) and, on the endpapers, the edaphosaurus, also discussed and reproduced in the first volume (see p. 171, Book I) and the as yet unmentioned diplodocus, which, thanks to the magical technique of reverse drawing, is one of Burian's most impressive diplodocuses (based on an oil painting from 1952).

In the better-known Czech edition a year later (1956), the painter depicted only a hominid with a club and a volcano and a red "sun" in the background on the cover. The features of prehistoric man are a mixture of how Burian depicted both H. erectus (pithecanthropus) and Neanderthals at the time (unlike the Slovak cover, which shows purely Neanderthal), and the same is evident in two illustrations in the book. In pen and ink drawings and color gouaches, the painter depicted various prehistoric animals – on the endpapers, for example, a mammoth drawn with just a few lines, yet very impressive. In the book itself, we find pen-and-ink drawings of a ground sloth (described in the book as a giant anteater), whose enormous size is highlighted in comparison with human figures, as well as a panoramic scene with Tertiary fauna, a resting brontotherium, a triceratops, a woolly rhinoceros, a cave bear, a plesiosaur, and a pterosaur (in this type of text, it is often difficult to determine the specific species within a given group), and most impressively, a portrait of an irritated "saber-toothed tiger." The painter also supplemented the book with six color gouaches, two of which (with a stegosaurus and brontosaurs) have already been reproduced in Book I (pp. 410 and 414). Another legendary illustration is a mammoth killed by Russian researchers (again with a clear comparison of size). Burian returned to the book once more in 1970, when he created a new pen-and-ink drawing for the cover of the KOD edition, depicting a Russian hunter in a clash with a triceratops.

One of Obruchev's models was undoubtedly, as already mentioned, A. C. Doyle's The Lost World. The origin of Burian's illustrations for this book is quite complicated and has already been partially discussed in Book I on p. 361. Five oil paintings are known to exist, and the question remains whether they were created in the late 1940s (when the book was not published due to nationalization), as suggested by the painting technique and Burian's note on the back of one of the oil paintings, which mentions the year 1949, or in 1960, when they were perhaps created to accompany Augusta's book Prehistoric Reptiles and Birds (1961), where only two were ultimately reproduced, perhaps due to a partial change in the book's concept. This variant is supported by the fact that the only animal depicted in the paintings is always a pterosaur, as well as the confident conception of a pterodactyl, which the painter certainly did not have at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. The individual in the oil painting from the meeting of the Zoological Institute and the same individual above the Atlantic in the following oil painting are particularly convincing. (The creature in the oil painting with the stolen roast is not a classic pterodactyl, it is conceived somewhat more freely.)

In the last decade of his life, Burian also illustrated two classic short stories by Ray Bradbury. Both illustrations of a tyrannosaurus for the story "The Sound of Thunder," about a group of hunters-tourists traveling in a time machine to the Mesozoic era, have already been mentioned and reproduced in Book I. Shortly before his death, Burian created two impressive color gouaches for another classic of world science fiction, Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn," about a sea monster lured by the foghorns of a remote lighthouse. Here, of course, it is not a specific prehistoric animal, but a fantastic creature resembling a prehistoric lizard. Such illustrations include the cover for Troška's Rozkazy z éteru (Orders from the Ether, 1939), where the painter achieves the effect of a bizarre prehistoric lizard by enlarging and modifying the head of a classic iguana, making the image reminiscent of the practices of Hollywood filmmakers in various sci-fi films from the 1930s to the 1960s, where dinosaurs are portrayed by various contemporary reptiles, most often monitor lizards, crocodiles, and iguanas, often with pasted or otherwise added growths. Burian also painted a bizarre giant pterosaur above Rio de Janeiro on one of the legendary covers for the stories about Amazona-Octobriana, but this also has no basis in any real pterosaur (or even in physical reality).

Burian also encountered various dinosauroid creatures and depicted them brilliantly in various science fiction stories set on other planets, especially in two parts of Vladimír Babula's trilogy Planeta tří sluncí (Planet of Three Suns) and Přátelé z Hadonoše (Friends from Serpentarius), where he introduces us to the fauna on the planet Quarta in the Alpha Centauri triple star system. Some of his drawings show inspiration from duck-billed and theropod dinosaurs or Mesozoic marine reptiles. The result was illustrations that were among the best in the science fiction genre of that period (even though they accompanied ideologically biased text).

Vlastislav Toman's stories about Malý bůh (The Little God) are among the classics of Czech science fiction. However, before they took on their legendary comic book form, Zdeněk Burian illustrated several of these stories in the 1960s in the magazine Pionýr. In one illustration, we see a reptilian-looking quadrupedal monster. Among the fantastic creatures from other planets inspired by prehistoric mammals, it is necessary to mention the creature from the story Zoo (Pionýr, 1966), also penned by Vlastislav Toman. The monster looks as if it has just crawled out of the Tertiary swamps.

And when talking about fantasy or fairy-tale creatures that have some connection to dinosaurs, we cannot leave out dragons. In Jungian thinking, dragons in our unconscious are a reflection of the terror experienced by our small Mesozoic mammalian ancestors. Burian himself claimed that he was unable to fantasize in a fairy-tale manner, à la Jiří Trnka, and that he always had to be anchored in reality in some way, and it was precisely in dragons that he could find this support in contemporary or prehistoric reptiles. As far as we know, he depicted dragons a total of four times during his lifetime. The first time was in a story from Western European legends (A. Jenne: From the Darkness of the Ages, 1927) with a classic, heavily built crocodile-like dragon, the second time in ancient myths (Myths and Fairy Tales of Classical Antiquity, 1933), in a story about the Golden Fleece, where the dragon appears quite bizarre with its mixture of different elements. The third time, again more traditionally as a serpentine crocodile, in Fairy Tales by Božena Němcová (1940) and finally, most traditionally, in a scene of a duel with St. George in a drawing for his grandson Jiří in 1960.

Cave Bear Hunt, oil painting from 1958.

Cryptozoological fantasies

The creatures of fantasy or mythological worlds derived from real prehistoric creatures are related to a discipline on the fragile border between science and pseudoscience called cryptozoology. It deals with creatures that are said to have survived from prehistoric times to the present day and is logically associated with remote, exotic regions, the mythology of their indigenous peoples, and thus also with the adventures of travelers and globetrotters. Burian often touched on this theme and dealt with several so-called cryptids in his work.

The very first prehistoric creature he ever depicted is closely related to this theme. Two years before the mammoth for the cover of Zakletá země (The Enchanted Land) (which could also belong in this subchapter, as sci-fi motifs intertwine with cryptozoology, for example in the novel The Lost World), he painted for G. Gasenko's short story "Mořská obluda" (The Sea Monster, Širým světem magazine, 1926), a creature resembling a surviving giant plesiosaur encountered in the North Atlantic by the crew of the American ship Caledonia. For another novel by Karel Hloucha, Modří mravenci (Blue Ants, 1931), set in what was then the Belgian Congo, he depicted a so-called water elephant in an impressive night scene, referred to in the novel as chimpelvi, also known as ndgoko na maiji. According to cryptozoologists, this could be a surviving gomphotherid mastodon. However, Burian greatly oversized the animal for a stronger visual effect. For the cover of Malý čtenář (Little Reader) magazine in 1933 he created a scene with fishermen observing giant sea serpents.

In 1936, in the novel V zemi otrávených šípů (In the Land of Poisoned Arrows) by Czech globetrotter and journalist Buhumil Pospíšil, one of the gouache illustrations depicted a giant ape named Mba Ta Talagit, living in the interior of Papua New Guinea. The writer was responding to the unprecedented popularity of the film King Kong (1933), and Burian conceived the creature and the entire scene in a similar spirit. And in 1943, in the last year of the magazine Širým světem, at a time when Burian was publishing practically nowhere else, he created an illustration for the article "The Nameless Beast," which describes the hunt for a creature resembling a member of Homo erectus (or perhaps Homo floresiensis?) in the jungles of Borneo. At that time, Burian had not yet professionally reconstructed Pithecanthropus, yet this gouache is very similar to the concept he had been working on since the early 1950s.

Rudolf Luskač's book Závoj zeleného ticha (The Veil of Green Silence, 1966) is also full of references to prehistory, in three different chapters. The main character (the author's alter ego) discovers a cave in Siberia with engravings of prehistoric hunters, and in another part of the book he tries to hunt down the Siberian variant of the "snowman" called golub-javan (elsewhere also known as almas, described from Altai, Pamir, and Tianshan), which Burian again conceived as an erectoid, already very confidently in the mid-1960s. His experience with the theme of early hominids can also be seen in the illustrations for Vladimír Henzl's book The Adventures of Dr. Haig (1967), which deals with an expedition in search of the Himalayan Yeti.

The third prehistoric motif in Luskač's book is the discovery of a frozen mammoth. The painter dealt with this theme in the 1960s both in Augusta's publications (Berezovka mammoth – see p. 356 in Book II) and, for example, in one of the legendary paintings for Souček's Velké otazníky (Big Questions, 1967), with a perfectly preserved mammoth discovered by a frightened Siberian native with his hunting dog. The crystal-clear ice must, of course, be perceived as artistic license. Burian encountered the idea of surviving mammoths not only in Hloucha's Zakletá země (The Enchanted Land), but also in Pionýr magazine (1965) in Jack London's short story "A Relic of the Pliocene", which, of course, is not set in Siberia, but on the border between Alaska and Canada. Here, London describes an encounter with a real mammoth through the words of an old trapper.

But let's return to Velké otazniky. In Book II, on p. 281, there is a reproduction of a picture of a so-called elephant bird observed by two native hunters; in this case, however, the encounters of the first inhabitants of Madagascar with these creatures have been proven. Another iconic image in Souček's book is the scene of an attack by a giant squid, which is not a reference to prehistoric creatures, but is a supremely cryptozoological matter. With this oil painting, Burian loosely followed up on another of his legendary paintings – a gouache of a squid attacking the Nautilus from Verne's book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

For Souček's book, Burian also drew an impressive pen-and-ink drawing of a mysterious East African feline beast, the mngwa, attacking a native soldier. The painter came across another cryptic beast from the same geographical area in connection with the aforementioned globetrotter Bohumil Pospíšil. In 1935, Pospíšil wrote a short story entitled "The Mysterious Predator" for the magazine Malý čtenář. In it, he writes about a mysterious beast called the chernosit from East Africa. In 1972, as part of his series Dálky v českých očích (Faraway places through Czech eyes) for Pionýrská stezka (Pioneer Trail) magazine, journalist Jan Fencl wrote a profile of Bohumil Pospíšil. In it, he claims that the traveler wrote about the chernosit beast from Kenya based on his own experiences. In the early 1970s, very little was known about Pospíšil, and Fencl had no idea that Pospíšil had never visited Africa and had written the article for Malý čtenář based on second-hand accounts. The editors of Malý čtenář also confused the name of the cryptid when they replaced the letter m with rn (which Fencl also adopted), and so the beast is in fact a chemosit, known from the mythology of East African tribes. Burian combined this mysterious beast with a portrait of a globetrotter on the cover of Pionýrská stezka, accompanying Fencl's article.

In 1976, publicist Oldřich Kašpar retold a legend from the mythology of the Iroquois Seneca tribe for Ohníček magazine under the title "Why the Seneca Like Dogs," about a terrifying animal that Kašpar transcribes as Nm-Nm-Kch. This is apparently a cryptid known in English transcription as Nyah-Gwaheh, translated as bald bear. However, Burian could not obtain any description of this creature from the text of the story, so he conceived the animal as a strange felid.

The tribe of apes that took in little Tarzan in one of the most famous stories of the adventure genre are actually cryptids related to the yeti or North American bigfoot. Burroughs gives them the name Mangani and describes them as creatures somewhere between a gorilla and a chimpanzee in size, but more advanced than both species of apes. In any case, they are different from gorillas, which the tribe calls Bolgani. There are interpretations that this tribe could have been a surviving population of Australopithecus etc. Burian must have been aware of the writer's distinctions, but he approached the creatures somewhat inconsistently. In a few gouaches, he really depicted them as a more advanced form of apes (hominids), but in most of them he depicted them as classic gorillas, especially in the illustration of Tarzan as a toddler in front of his adoptive family, where the tribe leader Kerchak is depicted as a reference to Burian's 1964 oil painting Old Male Gorilla (see p. 500 in Book II).

Burian became world famous for his paleontological reconstructions created under the supervision of expert advisors, but he encountered prehistoric motifs in a broader sense throughout his life and career as an adventure illustrator. After all, these two worlds are connected; a significant part of the charm of his classic paleoart is an aspect that we could call narrative, fictional.

Burian's illustration from 1957 for Josef Augusta's book An den Lagerfeuern der Altsteinzeit.

THEME: School pictures

From the mid-19th century until the advent of digital technologies, one of the most important teaching aids in school systems, not only in Central Europe, were school pictures (also known as school teaching boards or school posters), which, in the form of large-format hanging prints in classrooms and corridors of educational institutions, fulfilled not only a pedagogical-didactic role when used directly in teaching, but also a decorative and aesthetic role. Ideally, their creators harmoniously fulfilled the requirements of both these functions.

In the Czech lands, works by Austrian and German authors were mostly adopted for natural science topics. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the general enthusiasm for the new republic led to a boom in the creation of original works of this type. Burian's classmate and friend from his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vladimír Stříbrný (born, like Burian, in 1905), contributed to historical motifs, as did the later well-known illustrator of adventure literature, Václav Junek. Zoological motifs were dominated by Stanislav Lolek, an established painter of Bohemian and Moravian landscapes and animals, Slovenian painter Josip Marija Gorup, and painter František Xaver Procházka, a close collaborator of Jiří Janda, founder of the Prague Zoo and expert author of zoological motifs for these school pictures. In the mid-1930s, a series of ten paintings with prehistoric motifs was published in Brno under the expert guidance of archaeologist Karel Absolon and paleontologist Alois Stehlík. Seven of these paintings were created by the Austrian painter Franz Roubal (see p. 264, and p. 19 in Book II).

Burian became involved in the didactic and educational popularization as early as 1924, when he began collaborating with geographer Stanislav Nikolau, for whom he illustrated travelogues and adventure stories in the magazine Širým světem (Through the Wide World). This mainly involved a series of colour supplements entitled Země a lidé (Earth and People), in which Burian captured the ethnic and geomorphological diversity of our planet in a unique way over a period of almost twenty years through a series of oil paintings of a portrait-ethnographic and landscape-ethnographic nature. Four of these paintings (three portrait ones and one landscape one) were approved for printing as school pictures by the Ministry of Education in the second half of the 1920s and gradually found their way into Czech and Slovak schools in the 1930s.

After 1948, Burian followed up on these paintings with a landscape-pedological series of thirteen paintings entitled Krajina a půdní typ (Landscape and Soil Type). For the first eight of these, he collaborated with the legendary Czech pedologist Jaroslav Spirhanzl-Duriš, for whom he had already illustrated two stories from the Caucasus and Central Asia published in the magazine Širým světem before the war. These eight paintings depict both a selected type of landscape and, in a cross-section at the bottom of the painting, the soil composition typical of that landscape. In the first four paintings from 1951, he depicted four types of soil (and the landscapes associated with them) typical of the Czech lands – black soil (here specifically in the Podřipsko region), brown soil, podzolic soil, and alluvial soil (fluvisol). In the next four paintings from 1953, he depicted soils that were exotic to Bohemia – solonetz soil (in the eastern Hungarian wilderness), lateritic soil (in Madagascar), tundra soil, and desert soil. The paintings perfectly combine a well-thought-out didactic composition with a supremely aesthetic effect. The first four paintings are also Burian's specific tribute to the Czech landscape with its inseparable connection between natural and human elements (the so-called anthropocene landscape).

In the 1954 publication by the State Pedagogical Publishing House (SPN) School Picture, Its Meaning and Use, the following is written about these and Burian's paleontological school pictures: "In the aforementioned works, Zdeněk Burian proved himself to be an outstanding illustrator who subordinates himself to the given theme and treats it quite expressively. In particular, he perfectly considers the possibilities of print reproduction and is inventive in his technique of depicting landscapes and figures. In his pictorial reconstructions, he is able to follow the conceptual framework given to him, and his depictions have the exotic charm of distant times and places. This clearly demonstrates the scope of his artistic format for the aforementioned tasks of school teaching pictures, which is extremely quick, malleable, and flexible."

Between 1956 and 1958, Burian painted the last five pictures on the given theme, this time without cross-sections of the soil profile, focusing purely on the type of landscape, and under the expert guidance of new advisors Jan Nedvídek and František Kahoun – Arctis (from the Vilkitsky Strait in the Russian Arctic), tropical rainforest (from the foothills of Mount Cameroon), savannah (from northern Cameroon south of Lake Chad), sea coast (near the Cliffs of Dover), and taiga (from the Ob River basin). The latter painting, which John Sibbick also admires in the foreword to this book, was also reproduced in Špinar's book Life before Man, where it was used as a shot of the Ice Age landscape, even though it is, of course, the present-day taiga. This is clearly demonstrated by one small detail in the painting, which was pointed out to Špinar by one of his Swedish colleagues after the book's first publication. A close look at the painting (and its reproduction in the book) reveals a fishing boat with a small mast in the middle right of the picture, which is of course amusing for a prehistoric taiga. Špinar subsequently contacted the publisher, and in subsequent editions of the book (including later Czech versions), the boat has been retouched.

Cro-Magnons Chasing Horses, picture from 1954 for exposition Forests and Hunting in Prehistoric Times.

Burian's most famous school pictures are, naturally, those depicting prehistoric landscapes and creatures. Burian began working on them in 1949, a critical year for him, when Czechoslovak publishing houses were nationalized by communists in March and the painter's commissions fell to a minimum. It was precisely this state-guaranteed collaboration with Josef Augusta that saved his livelihood and, in a broader sense, the meaning of his artistic work. In addition to working on portraits from the series About Man, between 1949 and 1951 the painter focused most of his attention on school pictures (and another SPN project, a set of teaching sheets about Neanderthals), and on the aforementioned oil paintings of Czech soil types. As already mentioned in the chapter Journey from Prehistory in Book I, the paintings reveal enormous concentration and dedication to the subject. Their quality places them among the painter's "golden fund." During these years, the core of the entire series, fourteen paintings, was created. In 1953 and 1954, four more were added, and in 1957 a new version of the Carboniferous forest (without the meganeura, pp. 138–139 in Book I). This painting was the last to be printed as a school teaching chart in 1959. During the 1950s, most of the paintings were published in a second edition, and several of them in a third edition (the last in 1960 and 1961). A 1962 edition of Půda pouštní (Desert Soil) is known to exist. Since then, no school pictures with Burian's motifs have been published (except for a completely new series from the 1980s, see below), even though Burian and Augusta continued to create paintings under new contracts. Between 1960 and 1967, i.e. until Augusta's death, they created another eighteen (or even more, see below) paintings.

The suspension of implementation was probably related to the separation of the Teaching Aids department from SPN. This department became an independent entity on January 1, 1963. However, the main reason is indicated in a letter from Teaching Aids, National Enterprise to Burian from 1969, commenting on the contracts for the 2nd and 3rd editions of five pictures from the Landscape and Soil Type series signed in September 1962: "Due to the well-known difficulties in the printing industry (lack of printing capacity – editor's note), it was not possible to produce these titles and there is no hope of their production in the near future. For this reason, our company is withdrawing from the contracts and considers them invalid." To which Burian added a laconic comment: "Shame."  The Czech public only had the opportunity to see the school pictures painted in the 1960s (and only some of them) two years after the painter's death, with the first Czech edition of Špinar's title Velká kniha o pravěku (Life before Man) and Záruba's book Svět vymřelých zvířat (Prehistoric Life on Earth) (both published in 1983). The others appeared only in books from the 1990s.

Until this decline, i.e. until the early 1960s, the entire school painting project was very successful, even on an international scale. The paintings were also noticed abroad. In 1959, a contract was signed between the painter and SPN for the publication of ten pictures for Poland (Wydawnictwa geologiczne, Warsaw). It has been proven that they were also published in former East Germany (Volk und Wissen – Volkseigener Verlag, Berlin), Bulgaria (Prosveta, Sofia), and even Sweden (Gunnar Saietz A.-B., Stockholm). In 1961, SPN prepared a representative catalog offering paintings from the Landscape and Soil Type series in German, English, and Russian.

In 1971, the national enterprise Učební pomůcky (Teaching Aids) was renamed Komenium, n. e. At that time, an inventory of Burian's paintings for this institution was carried out. The accompanying list contains a total of 44 items (not including oil paintings for soil types). Today, 36 of these paintings are in the collections of Safari Park Dvůr Králové, one, Carboniferous Forest from 1957 (pp. 138–139 in Book I), is now in the collections of the Moravian Museum (it probably ended up there by mistake when Burian, after returning from reproduction for Life before Man, did not realize that it actually belonged to Komenium). A later discovered undated handwritten version of this list and a contract with Učební pomůcky from 1967 indicate that the Lower Devonian and Middle Devonian landscape (pp. 100–101 and 102–103 in Book I) were created in parallel for the needs of the school picture project and as a reconstruction for by Artia publishing house planned (and, due to Augusta's death, unrealized) title Dějiny pralesů (History of Forests). These two pictures are therefore also found today in the collections of the Moravian Museum.

Five paintings remain that are not currently held by any state institution. One of them, Rhamphorhynchus, is known from a black-and-white photograph from Burian's archive and from a photograph from the mid-1990s taken in an unspecified living room, perhaps somewhere in Ostrava. Its current fate is unknown (for more information, see pp. 343 and 360 in Book I). Four paintings remain – Styracosaurus, Edaphosaurus, Tylosaurus, and Naosaurus. The creation of these paintings is documented also in the Minimum Inventory of Teaching Aids for General Education Schools, published by SPN in 1958, with a list (the so-called standard) of implemented and planned school aids, where, for example, Rhamphorhynchus and Tylosaurus are explicitly mentioned under the codes Bo II 26 and Bo II 28. To this day, we have no information about the appearance of these four paintings or their location. It has been suggested that these paintings may have been lost in the premises of the Faculty of Science of Charles University in Albertov, Prague in the chaos that followed the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which violently interrupted the 23rd International Geological Congress, which was just beginning and on the occasion of which Burian's originals were hung in the premises of the institution, as suggested in the chapter "In the Footsteps of Ordinary Life" in the book The Forgotten World of Zdeněk Burian. A letter from Dr. Loukotka to the painter dated October 10, 1968, is known, in which he writes: "You are certainly aware that the congress was interrupted for understandable reasons as a result of unjustifiable aggression. For these reasons, we did not display all of your originals in order to prevent any possible losses." However, the theory that the paintings disappeared on this occasion does not seem very plausible.

It is more likely that not all of the paintings were transferred from Komenium to the East Bohemian Zoo in Dvůr Králové (now Safari Park) in the early 1980s (where the paintings were first loaned for a long period and later purchased when Komenium was liquidated, see p. 556 in Book II). Some remained at Komenium's Prague headquarters, perhaps because they were used to decorate certain rooms. This is also confirmed by a letter from Komenium to Artia from 1975 (i.e., before the paintings were transferred to Dvůr Králové), which states that "a number of paintings by the academic painter Z. Burian decorate various office rooms of the Komenium national enterprise..." Eyewitnesses confirm that the originals of Burian's paintings were still on the walls of Komenium's headquarters in Letná, Prague (where the institution moved from Old Town Square after the Velvet Revolutionin 1989) in the early 1990s. The national enterprise was dissolved by a decision of the Minister of School and Physical Education on April 2, 1993, and its liquidation took place in the following years... And this is where the trail of four Burian oil paintings on canvas depicting prehistoric reptiles, measuring approximately 63 x 95 cm, from the 1960s ends for now.

The whole saga of Burian's school pictures came to an end in 1989, when six of Burian's reconstructions of human ancestors, created for other purposes in the 1970s, were published secondarily as school teaching charts. Vratislav Mazák was the expert guarantor of this series, as he was of the primary creation of all these paintings. However, he did not live to see them realized. Although they were approved in 1982, they were not printed until seven years later. The last two portraits from the Mazák period are also printed here in large format – Australopithecus africanus 1980 (p. 551, Book II) and Neanderthal from the same year (p. 323). Other images included Ramapithecus (p. 511, Book II), H. habilis (p. 77), H. erectus (p. 133), and H. sapiens sapiens (p. 533). However, the publication of these images was merely a swan song, as they were only used in schools for the next few years. With the advent of digital technologies (and symbolically with the liquidation of Komenium at the same time), the role of wall teaching pictures in education came to an end. After many years, however, they have gained a new and interesting function: in addition to becoming collector's items, they are often used in many Czech households as aesthetic and decorative elements with a retro-nostalgic touch.

Burian's illustration from 1957 for Josef Augusta's book An den Lagerfeuern der Altsteinzeit.

THEME: The Personality of Vratislav Mazák

The expert advisor with whom Burian established the closest personal relationship was undoubtedly Vratislav Mazák. Not only was he the scientific supervisor of more than a hundred of the painter's works, mainly from the last decade of his life, but he also began the systematic cataloguing of the painter's work (which remains the basis for researchers to this day; in this trilogy, for example, we use the names of the paintings recorded by Mazák) and, last but not least, he was the painter's personal friend and his great apologist during the Normalization period in Czechoslovakia of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Vratislav Mazák was born on June 22, 1937, in Kutná Hora (his younger sister was named Drahomíra; his parents named their children after St. Wenceslas's parents). He attended high school in Hradec Králové and after graduating studied (between 1955 and 1960) zoology at the Faculty of Science of Charles University. He then worked as an assistant professor at the department of zoology there for another ten years.

Mazák was very different from the typical Czech zoologist of his time. His focus was not on small mammals of Central European fauna, but rather on large mammals from exotic lands. He was not at all a field-type natural scientist; he preferred to research the collections of scientific institutions, read scientific literature, and correspond intensively with experts from around the world (he was exceptionally linguistically gifted, able to write and speak four world languages – English, French, Russian, and partially German). He was, so to speak, a cabinet-type zoologist, which sometimes led to his colleagues teasing him about being a "salon scientist" or "coffeehouse loafer."

His interest in aesthetically attractive exotic animals was also related to his artistic talent. He was a skilled draftsman (and painter), and he accompanied many of his books and popular articles with his own drawings. This combination of artistry and a passion for exotic creatures also led to his fascination with the work of Zdeněk Burian. He first visited him sometime in the first half of the 1960s. At that time, the main link between their debates was a passion for large felines, especially tigers. This resulted in their first joint painting, originally titled Lord of the Siberian Taiga, later renamed Ussuri Tiger, which the painter created in 1966, a year after his "model," a huge specimen of an Ussuri tiger named Amur, died at the Prague Zoo. The painter placed the animal from the zoo in the landscape of its natural habitat, thus creating a kind of reconstruction, similar to his paleoart.

At that time, Vratislav Mazák gradually replaced Petr Sadecký, who had emigrated in early 1967, as Burian's "adopted son." There were huge differences between the two young men, especially in their characters (and the moral profile associated with them). Sadecký was a restless art historian and publicist, while Mazák was a thoughtful scientist-systematist. However, they had a lot in common: both were extremely intelligent, talented, and energetic, and both devoted enormous effort to understanding, promoting, and defending Burian's work.

Thanks to his extraordinary correspondence contacts, Mazák managed to arrange several study stays (e.g., in the USSR and England), the most important of which was originally a three-year internship at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris. From France, he sent enthusiastic letters to the painter (similar to Josef Kleibl at the same time – see p. 447 in Book II). However, his stay was interrupted after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. During that year in France, however, he managed to undertake a three-month study expedition to Scandinavia, briefly even beyond the Arctic Circle. Later, when he wrote in an article about how Burian deeply feels nature and knows how to empathize with the landscape, he described that "I saw this for myself when I found myself far away in the northern Scandinavian tundra in 1967. I had never before had the opportunity to admire the gray and desolate beauty of the tundra, and yet it seemed so familiar to me. I knew the beauty of this 'empty' and harsh space from the canvases of Master Burian."

In 1970, Mazák began systematically cataloging Burian's work, creating his legendary "card index," a handwritten card catalog. Each card contained the title of the painting, a detailed description of the scene, and information about the year of creation, technique, substrate, dimensions, form and position of the signature, where the painting had been reproduced, and the current owner. Mazák continued to add to this card index until his death.

During the 1960s, he became acquainted through correspondence with his most important foreign colleague and friend, the Anglo-Australian zoologist and paleoanthropologist Colin P. Groves. Together, in 1967, they described a new subspecies of the Central Asian wild ass, the kulan (Asinus hemionus kulan). A year later, based solely on his study of literature and skeletal materials, the Mazák himself described a new subspecies of tiger – the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), which he named in honor of the work and literary oeuvre of British hunter and tiger conservationist Jim Corbett.

With Mazák‘s admiration for Zdeněk Burian's paleoart, with his general interest in aspects of evolution and influenced by C. P. Groves, he also became deeply interested in paleontology and paleoanthropology. As early as 1970, he was the main guarantor of corrections to older Burian reconstructions selected for Artia's Encyklopedie pravěku/Life before Man (the so-called second period of major corrections – see the chapter Journey from Prehistory in Book I). To this purpose, he always provided Burian with detailed, handwritten and hand-drawn materials. They also created several images, mainly of Cenozoic mammals, for this title together. This was followed by Mazák's unofficial position as supervisor of images for Grzimek's Tierleben and the creation of very original and modern reconstructions of prehistoric primates and human ancestors for Mazák's series of popular articles in Živa magazine (mainly in 1971 and 1972). This became the focus of their collaboration in the 1970s, culminating in the books Jak vznikl člověk – Sága rodu Homo (How Man Was Created – The Saga of the Homo Genus, 1977) and Prehistoric Man (1980). The monumental finale of their collaboration came at the end of the painter's life with the preparation of the concept and expert supervision of paintings for the East Bohemian Zoo in Dvůr Králové nad Labem.

Burian's paleoart from the Mazák period, in contrast to the narrative-illustrative concept of the Augustanian period, is characterized by greater "seriousness" and academicism in the broader sense of the word. The individuals are placed in the landscape in so-called ideal poses and impress the viewer primarily with their "persona." Here, perhaps even more than in the Augustanian period, Burian's phenomenal talent as a portrait painter came into play.

Unlike Josef Augusta or Zdeněk Špinar, who demanded a 50% share in the copyright for reconstructions, Mazák always strictly refused any contribution as an expert advisor on the creation of individual paintings. He claimed, and even wrote explicitly in several essays and articles, for example in 1981 in the catalog of an exhibition at the Špála Gallery, that: "In this context, I reject the word 'co-authorship' with complete conviction! I believe that every expert who has worked or is working with Burian is essentially only a guarantor that no 'false model' has penetrated Burian's studio."

Burial in Fireplace, oil painting from 1958.

In the 1970s, Mazák was also the painter's main apologist, in the best sense of the word. Especially after the Octobriana affair in 1972, Mazák's activities were thoroughly fundamental. He advocated several times for the painter to be awarded a state prize. The most important were letters to the Minister of Culture in 1974 and to the Union of Czech Visual Artists in 1977. As part of this defense, it was necessary to emphasize the painter's artistic and social engagement during the complicated years of Normalization in Czechoslovakia. One aspect of Mazák's commendable efforts was his attempts to find (somewhat artificial) creative phases in the painter's work. These culminated in the so-called third phase with two cycles of paintings, mainly from the first half of the 1960s, to which Mazák (together with the painter) gave the politically engaged titles The Subjugated and Indictment.

Between 1970 and 1982, the scientist worked in the zoological department of the National Museum. This was the peak of his scientific career as a zoologist and paleoanthropologist. In 1975, together with C. P. Groves, he described a new species of human – Homo ergaster, see p. 95. Together with his colleague from the museum, Vladimír Hanák, he wrote his most commercially successful popular science book, Welt der Säugetiere in Farbe, which was published by Artia in 1979 not only in German but also in many other languages (except Czech, see p. 324) in a huge print run.

Shortly after Burian's death, Mazák changed jobs for reasons that are not well known and left for the Regional Hygiene and Epidemiology Station for the Central Bohemian Region. There, among other things, he devoted himself to developing a product against pharaoh ants. His purely scientific research as a zoologist had already ended at that time, and he was mainly involved in popularizing natural science. He updated his Saga of the Homo Genus for its second edition and prepared for publication another volume of the Animals of the World series dedicated to cetaceans. These animals (along with Melville's famous novel Moby Dick) were another of his great passions in life. These also included locomotives (as Mazák's colleague from the National Museum, Vladimír Hanák, wrote – "again, 'big animals'!"). He had a huge and perfectly organized collection of his own photographs, drawings, and models of these iron leviathans.

Vratislav Mazák had a very close, almost family-like relationship with Zdeněk Burian (his children called the painter "uncle"), and the strange interpersonal relationships surrounding the painter shortly before and after his death must have been difficult for him. In a letter to researcher Prokop in 1986, he wrote about these people: "...Most of the others are not 'Burianologists', but rather 'Burianomaniacs'. Everyone wants to have more than the other. And yet they can't even properly assess what they are collecting and why they are collecting it. To a certain extent, this also encapsulates the complexity of Burian's personality. His work is simply appealing in its essence, its spontaneity, regardless of whether it is an outstanding work, just a good one, or even quite poor. Within Burian lay a hidden genius, just as sometimes a completely self-assured dilettante. And it is precisely this contradiction in his work that is so appealing. It is a work that is not easy to understand and decipher. Perhaps its meaning and artistic context are ultimately completely different from what any of us currently think."

During those years, the consequences of Mazák's enormous work commitment combined with poor lifestyle choices, minimal rest, and heavy smoking began to manifest themselves—he fell ill with a terminal disease at that time. With great effort, he managed to prepare both of the above-mentioned books for publication, and with his new life partner, he established a strong friendship with Burian's late student Juraj Gullár, but on November 9, 1987, at the age of fifty, he succumbed to his illness. Czech zoology and paleoanthropology thus lost one of its most prominent figures prematurely.