Zdeněk Michael František Burian (11 February 1905 – 1 July 1981) was a Czech painter, book illustrator and palaeoartist.

Burian's artwork played a central role in the development of palaeontological reconstruction and he is regarded as one of the most influential palaeoartists of all time.

His illustrations of the novel The Mammoth Hunters (1937) by Eduard Štorch gained the attention of the Czech palaeontologist Josef Augusta, who collaborated with Burian as a scientific advisor.

Many of his paintings have reached an iconic status; they were extensively copied by later artists and influenced conceptions of dinosaurs and how they were depicted in popular culture.

Zdeněk Michael František Burian was born on 11 February 1905 in the town of Kopřivnice, then part of Moravia in Austria-Hungary.

[2] The first book to be illustrated by Burian, a Czech edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, was released in 1921.

[5] He collaborated with numerous publishers and illustrated Czech releases of the works of authors such as Jules Verne, Karl May,[2] Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, and Daniel Defoe.

[3] Burian also illustrated books by Czech authors, such as Jaroslav Foglar, as well as explorers and travellers, such as Emil Holub, Alberto Vojtěch Frič, and Enrique Stanko Vráz [cs].

This painting, along with others, was published in the early 1940s in serials written by Augusta, called The Wonders of the Prehistoric World (Divy prasvěta).

[8] The American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould assessed Prehistoric Animals as one of the three most influential books on prehistory published in the twentieth century.

[6] In some cases, Burian was the first to paint certain ideas about the behaviours of prehistoric life, such as scenes with pterosaurs feeding their young.

Under the advice of these researchers, Burian was able to incorporate new discoveries into his paintings, such as including pycnofibres on pterosaurs.

[6] Paintings produced by Burian after 1968 have sometimes been described as more "flat and uninteresting" than his previous work; he was during this time requested by publishers to portray animals in this way and to showcase them as individual figures rather than as part of a group.

[8] Many of the books published during this period nevertheless also reused many of the paintings and illustrations Burian had produced during the preceding time with Augusta, sometimes in slightly updated versions.

[2] He very rarely used the "overcrowded" format common in some historical palaeoart; this style pushed together several animal species into a confined landscape in order to be able to depict all of them.

Many palaeoartists before (including Knight) and after Burian were highly "zoocentric", paying little attention to plants and relegating them either to simplistic renditions in the background or omitting them entirely.

He died on 1 July 1981 at the Na Františku hospital in Prague due to complications after surgery on the abdominal aorta.

[1] Although he never achieved quite the same level of international recognition, Burian is sometimes regarded as a European counterpart to Charles R. Knight and he is widely seen as another master in the field.

[13][14][15][16] Particular palaeoartistic paintings by Burian that reached an iconic status and became widespread in the second half of the twentieth century include his Tyrannosaurus with Trachodon (1938), Brachiosaurus (1941), Iguanodon (1950), Brontosaurus (1950), and Tarbosaurus (1970).

Already in 1955, his designs served as the basis of the dinosaurs depicted in the Czech stop-motion film Journey to the Beginning of Time.

[3] The first validly described dinosaur found in the Czech Republic was in 2017 named Burianosaurus augustai in honour of both Burian and Josef Augusta.

[12] In addition to the volumes listed below, some of Burian's palaeoart was featured along work by several other 'classic' palaeoartists in the 2017 art book Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past by Zoë Lescaze.