Charles R. Knight was a finicky artist. Regardless of whether he was drawing a bison for a now-extinct version of the 10 dollar bill or sculpting an elephant, he refused to work from photographs or films. Everything he needed to interpret organisms could be found through observation, and, situated as he was in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, the New York Zoological Park provided ample inspiration.

Though Knight is best known for his restorations of prehistoric life – his dinosaur murals at Chicago’s Field Museum are arguably the finest ever composed – he could not have reconstructed primeval creatures so wondrously without instruction from the anatomy and attitudes of living animals. (I almost wrote “primeval monsters”