National Museum of Natural History / Visions of Lost Worlds: The Paleoart of Jay Matternes

The murals of Jay Matternes adorned the walls of the museum for over fifty years. This volume presents those works and the detailed preparatory drawings that went into these influential works of paleoart.

  • Cover features a Matternes mural of a Wyoming rainforest populated with animals from the early to middle Eocene period.
  • The chapter for each era begins with text and a mural detail. A detail from the Late Pleistocene focuses on the musk ox.
  • Spread showing details from the Late Pliocene mural featuring birds like mallards, grebes, pelicans, storks, and cormorants.
  • Spread showing details from the Middle-Late Miocene mural that features the shovel-tusked elephant and a prepatory drawing.
  • ”Opener shows the Early-Middle Eocene mural of the Wyoming rainforest featuring animals from the period like the uintathere.
  • Identification of plants and animals in the the Early-Middle Eocene mural of the Wyoming rainforest.
  • Prepatory drawings for an animal shown in the Early-Middle Eocene mural
  • Prepatory drawings for plants shown in the Late Triassic diorama