The Resurrectionist — Gary K. Wolf

Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages -- and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia's esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world's most celebrated mythological beasts -- mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs -- were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind?
 
The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black's magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray's Anatomy for mythological beasts -- dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus -- all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.