Prehistoric lion illustration

Art illustration - { Prehistoric Animals }

Since we've already looked at everything that's more important, let us now turn to the Cenozoic mammals of the wonderful Private Lives of Animals book on extinct beasties. And where better to begin than with a ground sloth with hair so wonderfully painted, you'll want to reach through the screen and run your fingers through it? (Just watch out for fleas and dandruff.) As you will already be well aware, it's obligatory to restore Megatherium standing upright against a tree, with its hands…

Lion sitting on rock overlooking a valley

L is for lion.

Figures of four species of titanothere by E.S. Christman, for publication in The titanotheres of ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska, by Henry Fairfield Osborn; Washington D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey (1929, pg 711)

About 100 thousand years ago the Italian fauna was much more diversified than the present one: we had animals still existing today, such as hippos, leopards, lions, hyenas and moose; we had endemic dwarf elephants, inhabitants of the European Pleistocene megafauna such as cave bears and lions, the Megaloceros, the steppe bison and the mammoth, as well as various types of rhinoceros. Diversity that with the end of the ice ages and with the arrival of mankind has gradually decreased more and…

animal illustrations

Artist’s possible interpretations of the cave lion (Panthera spelaea). It probably evolved in Europe less than 600,000 years ago and became extinct about 13,000 years ago. The species was genetically distinct from the modern lion living in Africa and Asia. (Velizar Simeonovski)

A mish-mash of fossil animals from different periods, from Johnson's Natural History (Goodrich, 1859). HD scan extracted from archive.org