#Paleostream 3, Sketches of Prehistoric Life

Drawing prehistory with an audience

Since February 2018, Joschua Knüppe has been sitting down in front of a camera, opening a blank canvas, and asking the people watching what he should draw. Someone names an animal. Someone else argues about its color. A third person wants it doing something it has never been shown doing. An hour or two later there's a finished sketch of a creature that has been dead for a hundred million years, and a few hundred people saw it happen.

That's #Paleostream. Two books have already collected the best of it. This is the third, and it's the biggest.

What's in the book

The foreword is by Ray Troll, who has spent a career painting quirky ancient fish and knows a prolific artist when he sees one. Darren Naish wrote the foreword to book 1 and C. M. Kosemen the one to book 2.

What's new this time

The earlier books were sketch collections, two pictures to a page with a caption. This one keeps that and adds something the first two didn't have.

Feature pages. More than two dozen animals get a spread of their own. A full-page painting on the left, and on the right a page of writing about where the picture came from, with a pen-and-ink drawing beside it. Sometimes the story is a stream guest, like Michael Deak talking through ground sloth skin and hair while Joschua drew Eremotherium. Sometimes it's a photograph that set the whole picture off, as with Amphicotylus. Sometimes it's the science, and what the stream decided to do with it.

Ink drawings. Joschua's pen-and-ink work has never been in a Paleostream book before. It's on every feature page.

Guest writers. Six of the texts are by Levi van der Veen and Iacovos Le Du. A couple of them are short fiction told from the animal's side.

From Joschua

When, on the 27th of February 2018, I sat down to start streaming for the very first time I didn't expect much of it. It was mostly meant as a proof of concept and a way for me to practice digital art more.

Now in 2026 I am sitting here with a weekly schedule, more than 4,000 artworks and a large Discord server which has become a major hub for the discourse about paleontology, paleoart and related matters. Besides making me better in the ways of digital art I have learned to love the constant exchange of ideas and the friendships that have grown in and around this community over the years.

The output of these thousands of hours of drawing live already channeled into two publications, documenting how my work improved in various ways.

When you open this new book I want you to read it not as an educational volume, but one of exploration. I see paleoart not just as a tool to convey fossil data to a broader public but maybe more importantly a vessel to travel into lost worlds that exist in a constant shift, blurred by time and brought into focus by the imagination of the artist. I hope to transport you into vistas of possibility that communicate the incredible fun and enjoyment I had while working on these pieces.

The trilogy, together

If you've never owned the first two books, or you own them and they've been read to pieces, this campaign is the first time all three have been offered as a set. Books 1 and 2 are being reprinted in hardcover to match book 3, and the three of them come in a slipcase made for the set. The set is hardcover only.

About the rewards

Add book 1 or book 2 in hardcover to any pledge for $35 each. An extra signed bookplate and the ebook will be available in the pledge manager after the campaign.

Joschua lives in Germany and the books ship from Kentucky, so signing is done with bookplates. He signs them at his desk, mails them over, and they go into the books before they go to you.

How this gets made

The book is finished. Cover, interior, every caption. It's been laid out and proofed, and the print files are ready. What the campaign pays for is the print run and the slipcases.

When the campaign ends and the funds arrive, the order goes in, and the whole run ships to us in Lexington, Kentucky, where we pack and mail every order ourselves. Shipping is charged at cost through the pledge manager after the campaign, so what you pledge here is the price of the books.

Printing takes about three weeks and the sea crossing to Kentucky another four to six, so we expect to start mailing books in February 2027. If something slips, we'll say so in an update.

Who's behind it

Joschua Knüppe is a paleoartist based in Ibbenbüren, Germany. He has worked professionally since 2014 and started #Paleostream in 2018. He's the author and artist of all three books and laid this one out himself.

I'm Nick Garland. My company, 252MYA, is the editor and publisher of this book. Our team also runs Pteros.com and EarthArchives.org, and much of Joschua's work can be licensed through Paleostock.com.

Thank you for reading this far. If you've never watched a stream, this book is a good place to start.