Palaeontology in Public: Meet the editor
Posted on 21st January, 2025
Today we are excited to publish Palaeontology in Public, edited by Dr Chris Manias. This exciting new book considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. In so doing, it explores how these public dimensions have been crucial to the development of palaeontology, and indeed how they conditioned wider views of science, nature, the environment, time and the world.
We are grateful to Chris for taking the time to answer a few questions about his work, making the book as accessible as possible, and what he’s learnt from editing this new collection.
Tell us more about your background and experience in this field
I’m a historian of science specialising in the history and cultural role of palaeontology and related fields. As well as working on Palaeontology in Public, I’ve recently written another book about the history of mammal palaeontology in the nineteenth century, looking at why scientists and public audiences in this period were so interested in fossil mammals, and what this tells us about global connections and understandings of nature and the environment in this period. I’m currently working on a new project, looking at how palaeontologists and geologists engaged with the crises of the 1920s and 1930s, and have recently been awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to work on this (detailed here, p. 9).
What do you enjoy most about your work?
As an academic employed by a university, my work is very varied, which makes it both fun and unexpected, but does also mean juggling a large number of different things! I particularly like talking to people from differing backgrounds about the cultural role of nature, deep time and evolution. People can approach these issues from very different perspectives, and so it can be a really useful meeting ground to think about different ways seeing the world, its history, and its current condition.
How did you work with the contributors to this book to ensure their voices were heard and their work is presented in the best possible light?
As this project grew out of a pre-existing network, we had a lot of activity to develop the book, making sure that everyone got their work presented well, and that they could all contribute to making the book as coherent as possible. All the contributors knew each other already, or were introduced to each other early in the process, so they could keep up to date with how the other chapters were developing. We also had a number of ways that authors could get feedback on their chapters. Each author led a session on their chapter at the Popularizing Palaeontology online meetings, which meant they could showcase their work and get feedback. I also made sure that each chapter was read over in depth by myself and at least one other book contributor (ideally one from a different field) so they had another perspective on it. And we had a small in-person workshop once the whole draft manuscript was ready, where we could talk about the book and all the comments in the round. I hope this was successful in making sure that all authors got heard, and that the book became a coherent collection of related case studies.
How did you balance the need for academic rigour with the aim to make this book accessible and engaging to a broader audience?
We are lucky with this book, in that we are dealing with topics which have a great deal of public appeal and an audience already: the role of dinosaurs, human ancestors, and prehistoric mammals in popular culture. The structure of the book, looking at particular case studies, like changing views of Spinosaurus, the animated ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ from the 1910s, and the place of human evolution in museum and media culture, provides a series of engaging episodes which fit together into a single arc.
The book also deals with an area where there is a lot of sophisticated and complex academic work, especially around science popularization, the reconstruction of prehistoric animals, and building new perspectives on the history of palaeontology (especially as connected to changes in understanding the world and nature, and processes like scientific change, the history of the media, and colonialism). So the subject of palaeontology in public culture can act as a bridge between the wide public audience interested in palaeontology, and these more specialist academic fields.
The fact that the book is interdisciplinary, and the chapters were written by authors from different fields (and in some cases written co-written by scientists and humanities scholars), also helped make the book accessible. Given that palaeontologists are not trained in history of science, and historians of science are not trained in palaeontology, authors needed to make sure that what they were saying was absolutely clear to non-specialists when drafting and presenting their works. So this also, I think, helped with making it accessible and engaging, while still keeping things on a high intellectual level.
What advice would you give to aspiring editors, and what do you think are the key skills and attributes required?
Edited collections take a long time to put together, especially as you will be working with a large number of authors, all of whom have other commitments and projects. Some will invariably be able to devote more time to their chapters than others, and contributors will also be working at different rates and rhythms. So you do need to be able to work with people’s schedules, while making sure that things move forward at a rate that works for everyone. A combination of flexibility, alongside awareness of when things need to be pushed along (and an ability to work out how best to do that) is particularly important.
Surprise us with something unexpected you encountered in your work on this book
I especially liked the chapters which took the case studies beyond the traditional European and North American framework that a lot of the history of palaeontology has been written around. This included Irina Podgorny’s chapter on the relation between glyptodons, art and literature in twentieth-century Argentina, Zichuan Qin and Lukas Rieppel’s discussion of the role of dinosaurs in China, and the highlighting of the role of African and Asian research in palaeontology and human evolutionary studies in several chapters. These are things that the academic literature is starting to focus on, and tells the history of palaeontology in a new light.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing academic book publishing today, and how do you see the industry evolving in the future?
The move to open access is a really important one. Incidentally, a major reason I wanted this book to be published by UCL Press is that I really like the model of open access publishing that you support, where the digital download is freely available, but it is still possible to buy the book as a well-produced printed edition. Open access presents big opportunities in terms of reaching new and expanded audiences, but also of course comes with challenges. It doesn’t fit with the for-profit model of academic publishing that has developed (very unhealthily in my view), and so there is the potential for conflict there, or for quite exploitative models of authors paying large sums of money to have articles published in open access. Also my field – History – is one where large single-authored books are the gold standard, which is a format that doesn’t fit very well with open access formats as currently envisioned. So this is going to require negotiation and new ways of working all round, which might hopefully dismantle some of the more problematic structures that have developed around for-profit academic publishing.
About the author
Chris Manias is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science & Technology at King’s College London.