An artist I love, creating a spec-bio project envisioning a more modern take on the "lost world" trope? Obviously, I enjoyed Project: Tepui quite a lot! The gimmick is fairly simple, but fun: an inter-government expedition into one of the last unmapped regions of South America goes missing at the start of World War II. As a result, political willpower and budgets are focused elsewhere, so rather than mount a search and rescue, the expedition is instead covered up and forgotten about... until a cigar tin with some polaroids and notebooks washes up on an Amazonian river bank decades later.

It's a fun gimmick, because it lets Frazer only fill in the details that they are interested in; the rest is shrouded in the mists of time. I also really enjoyed the fact that the "reconstructions" can have a slightly painterly feel, because each is accompanied by a grainy, black and white "photograph". The book even starts with an "editor's note" from the fictional editor, explaining the process of extrapolating colours and patterns from poor, old, photographic evidence (processes that directly mimic the real-world techniques of colourisation).

And of course, those "reconstructions" are beautifully rendered, with some really interesting little details. Because this isn't a palaeoart project, but an alt-history case of spec-bio, these are not the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, but rather derived relicts that have survived (and evolved) for another 65 million years. Again, this gives the artist license to try out some more speculative ideas in terms of colouration, body shape, etc.

Here lies one of my few critiques of the book: the natural history is weak, at best. For starters, there are species present from just about every time period, right back to the Permian. Even if we allow for a plateau that magically protected a small pocket of species from the K/T extinction, there is zero possibility that such a plateau could have persisted across hundreds of millions of years and multiple mass extinctions. So, sorry stegosaurs, dimorphodons, and synapsids, there are some cool ideas here, but you make no sense and I wish you weren't included. (An issue other "lost world" projects routinely fall into.)

Similarly, I wish that the species shown were more logical in terms of geographic distribution. I think there's fair scope for several lineages of dinosaurs, and even convergent forms within them, but animals like Diprotodon? An Australian marsupial? In South America? Or what about the semi-aquatic mosasaur? How did the ancestors of a deep-sea reptile end up on an elevated plateau in the middle of a continent? And if you're going to trap animals on a high plateau, you can't then have pterosaurs, who would just fly back down again!

Equally, whilst some of the animals are arguably overly speculative in terms of feathers, fatty deposits, frills, etc. others are strangely shrink-wrapped. Ornithomimids and (some) dromeosaurs have visible wishbones, which just seems incredibly unlikely. So, even from a "modern palaeoart" perspective, the book is a little all over the place.

Which is a shame, because when it gets it right, the results are marvellous! Amongst some personal favourites are the arboreal dromeosaurs, Arboraptor sicarius, which are beautifully drawn and patterned; the deep-jungle ceratopsian, Monoclonius maraldii, whose fern "hat" and rich colours feel both realistic and whimsical at the same time; and the almost Star Wars like design of the derived Parasaurolophus species.

The result is a mixed bag from a palaeontology and spec-bio perspective, but still a clever idea and a stack of interesting creature designs that are just a huge amount of fun to flick through and analyse.