The practice of paleontology has an aesthetic as well as an epistemic dimension. Paleontology has distinctively aesthetic aims, such as cultivating sense of place and developing a better aesthetic appreciation of fossils. Scientific cognitivists in environmental aesthetics argue that scientific knowledge deepens and enhances our appreciation of nature. Drawing on that tradition, this essay argues that knowledge of something’s history makes a difference to how we engage with it aesthetically. This means that investigation of the deep past can contribute to aesthetic aims. Conversely, the epistemic successes of paleontology and the earth sciences owe a great deal to aesthetic practices ranging from fossil preparation, to paleo art, to the production of geological field sketches. 

This was my first book. It was crazy ambitious, and I didn't really know what I was doing when I wrote it. My views have evolved a fair amount since then. (The two books above better reflect my current views.) There are some themes in this first book that still inform my thinking, though.

I still think that our inability to directly manipulate the unobservable past does have epistemic consequences. I still lean pessimistic when it comes to questions about how much we can know about dinosaurs and other things in the deep past. And I'm still very skeptical about realist views of the deep past.  

Here is a review of the book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.