In the 1860s, the Prague gas works informed the zoologist Antonín Frič about fossil finds in coal from the Nýřany region. This laid the groundwork for his internationally acknowledged studies in vertebrate paleontology. Yet the Bohemian coal industry was more than a mere source of fossils. It also played an instrumental role in the textual and visual popularization of geology Frič undertook as a national project of popular science. In his widely read 1869 introduction Small Geology, he included geological profiles and landscape sketches of those areas that fostered the rise of Bohemian industrialization – and even a poem titled King Coal by Jan Krejčí, the “father of Czech geology”. Frič commissioned landscape painter Antonín Levý with the production of a series of six visual reconstructions titled Geological Images of Prehistory in the Czech Lands, which were published as an album in Czech and German in 1874 and displayed at the Bohemian Museum. Unlike the atlas by Frič’s Austrian predecessors, geologist Franz Unger and painter Josef Kuwasseg (see contribution by Patrick Stoffel), these images were not what Frič calls “cosmopolitan,” placeless landscapes of an exotic past but an attempt to show the formation of coal with its flora and fauna in a “series of localized images” at the very places where it would later be mined. The aim of this contribution is to rediscover Frič as a forgotten Czech pioneer of paleoart and as an exponent of a national popular science.