Like it or not, vertebrate palaeontology – especially dinosaur palaeontology – has long been among the most high-profile and popular of sciences. Palaeontologists who just want to be left in peace to find their missing intercostal clavicles are frequently called upon to mingle with museum administrators, patrons and members of the public. Books about palaeontology are often bestsellers. Movies featuring rampaging dinosaurs become blockbusters. Exhibits about dinosaurs or other large, extinct monsters attract long lines of museumgoers. Dinosaurs on cereal boxes, T-shirts and televisions are an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Indeed, as some scholars have argued, it is impossible to separate the dinosaur as a scientific object from the nearly ubiquitous cultural icon that dinosaurs have become. At the same time, funding for vertebrate palaeontology is notoriously precarious. And the status of palaeontology within and among the other biological and geological sciences is somewhat marginal. Palaeontologists gripe that they have no place at the ‘high table’ of evolutionary biology. Nobel laureate physicist Luis Alvarez – co-author with his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, of the end-of-the-Cretaceous bolide impact hypothesis as an explanation for the extinction of dinosaurs – once dismissed palaeontologists as stamp collectors rather than scientists. How is one to make sense of this strange ambivalence?

Palaeontology in Public, edited by Chris Manias, is a collection of case studies that explore the tight connections between the science of palaeontology and popular culture over the last two centuries. These case studies were written by scholars with a wide range of backgrounds (including historians, artists, literature scholars, science communicators and, of course, palaeontologists) at a wide variety of institutions. Each author had the opportunity to host a meeting of the Popularizing Palaeontology: Current and Historical Perspectives network – a lively online forum – in order to showcase their work and solicit useful feedback. Once the volume was ready in draft, it was carefully workshopped to turn the individual contributions into a coherent whole. The purpose of the volume is to explore how the popularity of palaeontology has shaped the development of the discipline itself, and how this, in turn, has helped condition popular views of deep time and extinct life.

The contributed chapters are many and varied. A chapter by Richard Fallon and David Hone compares the bestselling palaeontological fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Michael Crichton Jurassic Park. Victoria Coule contributes a delightful article on the story of Gertie, the world’s first animated dinosaur movie star. Another contribution by Will Tattersdill and Mark Witton examines the meteoric rise in popularity of spinosaurus. Once an incomplete and poorly understood jumble of bones from Egypt (which were ultimately destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Munich in 1944), spinosaurus is now considered one of the largest and most iconic of the theropod dinosaurs, all despite ongoing and contentious debates about what the animal must have looked like in life. Ilja Nieuwland adds a chapter on the long and twisted history of naosaurus, a genus of pelycosaur now recognized as a chimera – a composite animal consisting of the body of edaphosaurus and the skull of dimetrodon. Nieuwland’s take on scientific nationalism, personal ambition and the too-dominant role of certain larger-than-life personalities in vertebrate palaeontology makes for a fascinating cautionary tale on potential pitfalls in the historical sciences. Another chapter by Elsa Panciroli and Chris Manias explains how small, rat-like Mesozoic mammals living in the shadows of the dinosaurs played a role in debates about progress, hierarchy and biodiversity in the natural world. Several excellent chapters look beyond the traditional European and North American contexts, including Irina Podgorny’s contribution on the mash-up of glyptodon fossils, art and literature in twentieth-century Argentina; Joe Cain’s account of George Gaylord Simpson and Anne Roe’s strategic ‘pivot’ during fossil-mammal fieldwork in Venezuela; and Zichuan Qin and Lukas Rieppel’s examination of palaeontology in China, with special emphasis on the impact of the discovery of feathered dinosaurs. A pair of chapters, one by Oliver Hochadel and the other by Chris Manias, Rebecca Wragg Sykes and Lydia Pyne, deals with fossil human remains.

The volume ends with an interesting and useful concluding chapter by editor Chris Manias that highlights several fruitful future directions for history of palaeontology research. These include the so-called dinosaur renaissance; the history of invertebrate palaeontology, palaeobotany and other relatively neglected subfields of palaeontology; the history of palaeontology outside Europe and North America; and the history of palaeo-art.

Palaeontology in Public is an excellent, well-illustrated, and highly entertaining contribution to a large and growing literature on the history of palaeontology and the public fascination for dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. It should be considered essential reading for historians of science, for vertebrate palaeontologists and for their graduate students. Yet, as an eminently readable open-access book, it will also be of interest to anyone with a passion for fossils.