Chris Manias (ed.), Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time London: UCL Press, 2025. Pp. 364. ISBN 978-1-80008-583-1. £30.00 (paperback).

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