The Forgotten Ones

Contact Info

Email: joe@joerothenberg.com

Social Media

Substack: @joetatochips

Instagram: @joetatochips

Synopsis

Discover prehistory’s most least-known creatures!

It’s time to bury your shovel, get out your divining rod, and unearth the prehistoric species that—for one reason or another—never found their way into a natural history museum.

From liquid mammoths to detonating ferrets, compostable tortoises to cephalopodcasts, paleontologists’ jawbones will be on the floor as prehistory’s secrets are revealed!

If you thought the species we know about are cool, wait until you meet…The Forgotten Ones.

About the Book

Publication Date: June 30, 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9919322-0-2

Genre: Humor, Natural History

Age Range: 10+

Price: $25

60 pages. Full color. 8x8”.

Available Formats: Currently only available in print from the author’s online shop.

Links

Purchase Link (Author’s Shop)

Google Books

ISBN Search

Author Q&A

Q: Where did the idea for this book come from?

A: I think the idea was starting to form after I visited a natural history museum and thought, “yeah, but these are just the dinosaurs we know about.” Then I started to think, maybe there were boneless dinosaurs, and other ancient creatures, and there could be all kinds of reasons why news of a given species would never make it the millions and millions of years it would take to reach us.

For the longest time, we didn’t know that dinosaurs had feathers, and we just sort of lucked into finding evidence of that. What else might we be missing out on?

Q: What do you hope readers will get out of reading The Forgotten Ones?

A: First, I hope they’ll laugh. It’s a book full of big swings from shamelessly silly wordplay to esoteric, heady nonsense and unexpected pop culture references. There are loads of visual gags, too, so I hope readers take a moment to look closer at the illustrations.

Aside from that, I hope it stokes interest in how scientists actually do make discoveries about the prehistoric world. Isn’t it amazing that we can learn so much about the distant past just by analyzing what remains? At various points, the book pokes fun at how fossils are made, how they survive to the present, how scientists discover them, how scientists interpret them, and how the public receives them. So even though my book focuses on the improbable side of things, I hope readers will come away thinking more about that process, even if it’s just a little.

Q: Will your books ever be available on Amazon?

A: Probably. I’m a one-man show, and that’s a rabbit hole I haven’t started to go down yet. In the meantime, my books are available from my online shop which is powered by Squarespace and is safe and effective. I ship orders myself, usually within 2-3 business days.

About the Author

Joe Rothenberg is a cartoonist and animator from central Texas. His lifelong obsession with comics turned professional at age 13 when he created a comic called "Insanity Fair" for his local newspaper, earning a whopping $3 per comic. After majoring in animation and building a steady career as an animator, he returned to comics, now online, and over time built up a library of hilariously offbeat book collections from his 4 main series: Joetatochips, Tall Problems, Castle Winkeldorf, and The Forgotten Ones.