The clearance and thrift books I got int he past couple of weeks:
Bonus: book-loving kitty
Opened book in the middle is Wildlife of the Oceans, 1979 Chanticleer Press. The scientific illustrations at the end were what really sold me, but it's full of very nice photos and paintings.
Also found Volume 1 of that NMNH Illustrated Library of Nature, with bonus table of contents for the entire set. I found out that 13 and 14 contain the section on Prehistoric Life, so I trolled Amazon to see if I can find cheap copies of them. I've kinda started to get attached to this series.
A Family of Dinosaurs, Troll Associates 1989. The cover looks totally unremarkable but it turns out to have been illustrated by John Bindon, who's done a lot of widely published and recognizable dinosaur images. I rather like the loose pen and ink drawings in this book, glad I found it in the pile of lame childrens' books at Goodwill.
Below: fold-out page from the Spiderwick book. I don't know anything about the actual fiction series, but it has REALLY nice illustrations, and if you obsess over animals and morphology you'll probably find a lot of interesting zoological references by picking over some of the designs. I'm not really a big fan of anthropoid creatures in general, but the artist (Tony deTerlizzi) makes pixies, nixies, goblins and giants appealling even to me by throwing in all those strange bestial details.
Did proper Equids have such even toes? I thought Hyraco- was more a proto-equid... (I could jump off from this image to the post on Walton Ford I was planning on making, but I think I'll save that for when I have time to also get into Gould, etc. and antique zoological illustration in general)
____ Remember this post I made last month? I found a fully-developed takedown of the entire book, on a site I've actually read before (but lost the bookmark for when my last computer died.)