You all know about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. In my lifetime, these went from the poster children of outdated, stodgy views of ponderous swamp dinosaurs, to being the most celebrated monuments of early dinosaur art around. And they are not alone. I’ve made it my mission to visit as many historic, unique dinosaur models in Europe as I can find, such as Boudewijn Bollee’s dinosaurs of Artis in Amsterdam and the dinosaurs of Chorzów Zoo in Poland. This spring, I…
While John Sibbick Normanpedia knock-offs were pretty ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the illustrations in this book just might be unique in combining classic Sibbickisms with a more John McLoughlin-like, monochrome, stipply style. A rather obscure little volume very kindly sent over from the States by Herman Diaz, The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs was published in 1990 by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Audubon Society, written by Joseph K Slap (great name), and illustrated by Elaine…
It might be hard to believe these days, but the Jurassic Park franchise was once used as a force for palaeontological education. The Jurassic Park Institute website, a kid-friendly hub for dinosaur edutainment, went online in 2001 to coincide with the release of the infamously divisive Jurassic Park 3. This site was a mainstay for my generation of dinosaur lovers, hosting a huge array of articles, activities, and games. Arguably the biggest draw of the site was the Dinopedia. This…
By the popular request of a single commenter, here’s yet more All About Dinosaurs, written by Rupert Oliver, illustrated by Bernard Long, and first published in 1983 (with this edition arriving in 1990). I conveniently forgot that said commenter (Andreas Johansson) enthusiastically responded to the promise of more non-dinosaurs that I might have made, and have instead mostly scanned a number of further dinosaur illustrations by Long. Hurrah! We’ll start with this Corythosaurus, for it actually serves as the frontispiece for the…
It feels like we’re doing this a lot now, but Marc, Gemma and Natee are once again reviewing a new television show with CGI dinosaurs! This time, the title is simply The Dinosaurs, a four-part miniseries on Netflix narrated by that fellow from Driving Miss Redemption of the Seven Penguins. Also, Marc has an in-depth chat with Dougal Dixon, the maestro of speculative evolution and the writer of half of all of our dinosaur books. He speaks enthousiastically about his…
Imagine, if you will, that I’m reciting all of this to you in the absolute gravelliest of tones – a voice that’s like a multi-tonne load cascading from a dumper truck that’s just returned from the deepest pits of an enormous quarry site. And I’ve been pouring neat whisky on my breakfast cereal and gargling small shards of flinty rock after brushing my teeth with sand. For many years, the empaahrr of the CG dahnosaur documentahries was thought to have…
Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…
You know, I’ve only done one Vintage Dinosaur Art project in the entire year of 2025? Granted, it was the mammoth, three part project on Marie Hubrecht at the Lyceum, the results of which are used in her biography, but still. It’s time to crank it up a notch, and the best way to pick up the pace is to scale back the size of the projects. Let’s do a cute children’s book. Dennis Nolan (1945-2022) was a painter in…
Last month I reviewed A Guide to Earth History, our first foray into the world of Maurice Wilson’s illustrations in quite some time. At the end of said article, I asked readers (we still have them!) to let me know where I might find more Wilson excellence, and Alexander Guridov duly answered – by sending me scans of Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles, first published “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY)” in 1954, with this second…
Zoos and dinosaurs. I have written a lot about Dutch zoos and dinosaurs on these pages. Most zoos in my home country have some degree of dinosaur presence, in the shape of permanent or temporary model exhibitions, interesting homemade sculptures, themed playgrounds or psychedelic light sculptures. But there was one zoo that had a full blown small natural history museum – complete with mounted dinosaur skeletons – as part of its permanent collection, fully integrated with the zoo and featuring…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.