About the Book

Frederic A. Lucas directed the American Museum of Natural History, and Animals of the Past was the museum's own plain-English guide to paleontology — first written in 1901 and revised through this sixth edition of 1922.

Lucas explains how fossils form, resurrects the sea-serpents of the Kansas chalk, the birds with teeth, the giant Moa and the dinosaurs — and closes with the great question: why do animals become extinct?

The plates include Charles R. Knight's celebrated restorations, made under Lucas's direction, which fixed how the whole 20th century imagined dinosaurs.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1922 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.