Our Continent


 UPDATED Does anyone remember the book Our Continent, published by the National Geographic Society, back in the seventies. As a young child, I saw it advertised, and actually found a copy at local library! It was far too often checked out, though. My fifth grade teach mentioned he had a copy of this, among other valuable books, at home. But this I couldn't get, so I begged my dad to order it for me. And he did. 



Its a great book on the natural history of the North American continent, and continent featuring art by Czek paleoartist Zdenke Burian, including the one with a tryannosaurus after two trachodons. It also featured two panoramic paintings of prehistoric mammals, one in the Eocene and other in the Miocence by Jay Matternes. It was the first time I encountered those gorgeous works, and they left me stunned. 

I'd seen the Burian artwork in his Life Through the Ages book, also at the local library, which I checked out many times. It was in Our Continent, however, that I first learned of the great North American short-faced bear, that according to the text, "native in origin, would dwarf the Kodiak bears of the present." 



I'll have more to ay about "shorties" in a future, but though there was a small illo of one in the book, the accompanying Burian painting was one I recalled vividly, having encountered it in Life Before Man (see above). It showed a sweep of vast, northern taiga, (most likely Eurasian tiaga, though it could be North American) with a winding river, that eventually led to the bear in the foreground, which might as well have had a spotlight on him. This was not a short-face, but clearly a Eurasian cave bear from the general build. The painting truly gives the impression of the vast, loney world that existed for thousands of years across Eurasia and the Americans, befret of any cicvilization, and or even Cro-Magnons Neanderthals, until the last few thousand years. So late in the Plesticene, there were people, but only a few scattered tribes living in these vast virgin reaches. 

Here are a few more great paintings from the book, but Zdenek Burian and Jay Matternes:


Note that it refers to Tyrannosaurus as "the clumsy tyrant." Falsehoods regarding dinosaurs were still prevalant in those days, but it does say elsewhere that dinosaurs have been stereotyped as slow and dimwitted, but today we know better. 



Diatryma, now called Gastornis, was otfen depicted as predatory, and I remember this book as saying that it "might have lived like the elephant, endlessly stuffing its beak with grass. It is now known that they were herbivores from study of its bones. 


The great entelodont Archeotherium


Ancient Clovis hunters attack an American camel




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