Vintage Dinosaur Art: My Super Book of Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Had you been out looking for a children’s dinosaur book in the United States back in 1971 (and why wouldn’t you have been? What else could you possibly do without the internet?), you may well have happened upon a brand new, fresh-off-the-presses copy of My Super Book of Dinosaurs. Published by Educational Reading Service USA of Mahwah, New Jersey – a name I’d love to hear pronounced with the local accent – this is about as generic as an early ’70s dinosaur book gets, and the author and illustrator sadly go uncredited. But hey, there’s always fun to be had should one care to take a look. (This was another one emailed to me by Charles Leon, by the way – thanks Charles!)

I actually rather like the cover design – the red grabs your attention, and the primordial scene suckers you in. Here we have the usual tail-dragging, upright theropods, volcanic geography, and a familiar-looking Stegosaurus. It seems that the artist was a big fan of the How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs – this isn’t the last time they, ahem, were obviously inspired by Kenyon Shannon’s work for that book.

On to the endpapers, and although Rexy would dearly love to give Triceratops an affectionate pat on the frill, the miserable old ceratopsian clearly doesn’t relish the prospect. I do like the artist’s use of broad brushstrokes and vibrant colours, which give all the creatures a chunky, very solid feel and at least make them interesting to look at. They also fill each scene with suitably lush foliage, although generically tropical, of course. The Triceratops here somewhat resembles Charles Knight’s in his ‘T. rex v Triceratops‘ painting, as well as another of Shannon’s illustrations (which also resembled Knight’s). However, the artist at least embellishes it with strange, rectangular nodules and thick skin folds on the shoulders. It looks suitably toughened, and might just about be strange enough to count as prescient for 1971.

The book is the usual ramble through a series of prehistoric animal profiles, although they don’t appear to be in any particular order. Stegosaurus pops up early on, looking unsually lean ‘n’ mean for an illustration of this period. Contemporary illustrations tended to portray the animal as a slothful, tail-dragging dullard, but here it stands purposefully, seemingly braced, with its tail lifted clear of the ground. The dramatically shaded head helps, of course – and those spikes. Yikes, the spikes. Of course, the text still notes that “it is believed that the Stegosaurus had two brains,” which was a popular silly trope at the time.

If Stegosaurus looks unusually badass here, then Ankylosaurus just looks…weird. Plain weird. Of course, there is plenty of precedent for this. Many contemporary illustrations tended to depict the animal as a kind of angry pineapple, with no legs (just feet), no neck and very little tail. More importantly, this particular illustration is quite clearly based on another that appeared in the How and Why Wonder Book, although it’s less of a direct copy this time. In fact, this one is actually an improvement if anything, although it remains deeply strange. The “Palaeoscincus” style mish-mash of characteristics is one thing, but never mind that – I just love the enormous spheroid cudgel stuck on the end of the tail.

This Triceratops looks very familiar too – it’s not from the How and Why Wonder Book, but we’ve definitely seen it before somewhere, and it’s driving me nuts. When compared with the earlier example, this one is notably more rotund and disproportionate, with a hugely long, fat, dragging tail and a body like a football. At least we get a very nifty and striking colour palette on this spread. Amusingly, the skeletal drawing (based on the famous mount in the AMNH) makes it clear that the huge hump has been invented by the artist (or the original artist, at least). Maybe it’s a camel-like, fatty hump.

It’s perhaps not too surprising that my favourite spread in this book involves Tyrannosaurus, but it’s just so wonderfully odd that I can’t help but love it. How did the individual on the right end up fully inverted in this fight, with its legs in the air, like it was walking on the ceiling? The cross-hatched scales are a little crude, but at least there’s a wonderful, swirling chaos about the scene, with the odd detail (like dead tree branches) just being discernible. It’s also perhaps notable that Rexy is depicted as green with an orange head; it’s a colour scheme that’s popped up a number of times over the decades (with a few minor variations), and it’d be interesting to trace its history.

Oh, and for all that the earlier Triceratops skeleton really wasn’t all that bad, this illustration of a T. rex skull looks alarmingly derpy.

Although My Super Book of Dinosaurs doesn’t even tack the usual ‘andotherprehistoricanimals’ on to its title, we’re treated to a few of them anyway. This inevitably leads to Dimetrodon. The artist should be commended for placing the animal in a lush, forested setting – poor Dimetrodon was so often relegated to a boringly empty desert expanse, probably because, like, it’s just a big lizard or something innit? Unfortunately, there are a few fudges; the head isn’t great and that right forelimb is up to some interesting things, like detaching from the body and crawling off on its own. As for the sail, there are about 300 Dimetrodon species, so one of them probably had a sail like this. I don’t know, go and consult Wikipedia.

Happily, the less predictable Tanystropheus is included to, resembling a lizard that’s had some amusing stuff done to it in Photoshop. In fact, I’m quite sure that this colour scheme has been lifted directly from a modern lizard – if any of you herpetology types out there can identify it, I might well send you a wee prize. The artist can be commended for not having the neck do a lot of crazy bendy things; Tanystropheus‘ neck famously consisted of surprisingly few vertebrae.

And finally – it’s good old Iguanodon. This illustration is quite clearly based on the one in the How and Why Wonder Book, although the artist here at least expands on the background, creating a lovely panoramic spread featuring varying foliage and topography, incidental sauropods, and pterosaurs that definitely aren’t Pteranodon, honest. That, and the lovely warm colour palette, are almost enough to make me forget that I’m sitting in a drafty flat in the mind-numbingly grey English winter – I can picture myself by that lovely subtropical lakeside, soaking up the rays, taking in the sights and hoping that that giant reptile will leave me well alone. Bliss.

That illustration of a hand doesn’t half look funny though – the thumb spike’s been reduced to a long fingernail! Look out, Iguanodon might give you a nasty scratch. At least he’d be good at finding the end of the Sellotape.

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15 Comments

  • Reply
    Ruben Guzman-Gutierrez
    January 10, 2018 at 3:36 pm

    The Triceratops illustration is very similar to the one used for the cover of an edition of Barry Cox’s Prehistoric Animals

  • Reply
    Patrx
    January 10, 2018 at 4:32 pm

    I feel like the green-bodied, orange-headed Tyrannosaurus trope may have originally been inspired by the common agama; the males look a lot like that. Not sure about the Tanystropheus, but it does remind me of some kind of salamander.

  • Reply
    Thomas Diehl
    January 11, 2018 at 6:15 am

    I recently saw that T rex pairing framed by a friend of mine, an artist making decorations from old books, and was convinced she had arranged that for the frame. Now I know better. It looks so photoshopped. Ahead of its time, I guess.

    The Iguanodon painting is just beautiful.

    Incidentally, I think there are more than one artist involved. Tanystropheus and the Rex fight just look jarring next to pictures like the Dimetrodon- albeit in completely different ways.

    Tanystropheus: Not a direct lift but maybe inspired by some Plestiodon species?

  • Reply
    horrabin
    January 11, 2018 at 1:50 pm

    Not sure who started the orange head t-rex trope, but I always assumed they were going for a collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris) look.

  • Reply
    Andrew Pearson
    January 11, 2018 at 9:19 pm

    The Tanystropheus colour scheme looks like a psychedelic Zigzag velvet gecko (Oedura rhombifer) that we have in Queensland.
    (https://www.sciencesource.com/archive/-SS2298662.html)

  • Reply
    Gary Campbell
    January 12, 2018 at 12:32 am

    The Triceratops that’s bugging you comes from Prehistoric Animals by Barry Cox (1969), a rather lacklustre tome that you reviewed in 2015! https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/vintage-dinosaur-art-prehistoric.html Though if this book is from 1971, Prehistoric Animals plagiarised My Super Book of Dinosaurs. Or have both books sourced it from somewhere else?

  • Reply
    Stevo Darkly
    January 13, 2018 at 6:04 am

    The troublesome illustration of the Triceratops also appeared on the cover of _Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals_ by Alfred Leutscher. That was also published in 1971. But if _Prehistoric Animals_ by Barry Cox was from 1969, then the 1971 _My Super Book of Dinosaurs_ could have indeed taken inspiration from that illustration.

    • Reply
      Gary Campbell
      January 14, 2018 at 10:20 pm

      Yes, I got that mixed up. And that would make more sense, since Super Book seems to be copying willy-nilly from other sources.

  • Reply
    animecharley
    January 16, 2018 at 10:03 pm

    The fighting rexes is a copy of Charley Harpers’s “Battle of the Tyrant Kings” which, I believe, appeared in The Golden Book of Biology (1967). The coloring is more intense and as a whole, the drawing is less stylized than Harper’s, but it’s a virtual photocopy- even the toes and the position of the tails are exactly the same. Plus, the dead Triceratops which the rex on the left is stumbling over has been removed (also the ornithomimosaur getting the hell away from the crime scene).

  • Reply
    Andreas Johansson
    January 20, 2018 at 1:11 pm

    What’s up with Stegosaurus having six tail spines in the colour picture, but only four in the detail?

  • Reply
    Cissy
    July 6, 2018 at 11:23 am

    When I was 7, in 1972 my parents and I moved to from France to the states, near NY (Tarrytown)for 3 years, there I went to school and started speaking English, among my books, there was this “My super book of dinosaurs”.
    This book, I have read all my childhood, back in France I would read it once every month…and unfortunately; lost it…
    2018, summer, hot, ill, I was sleeping and thinking about this book, I remembered it was all red, and i remembered that it was MY book, as the cover said, it was not my brothers, no one else but me, and it kind of became very precious to me..
    Looking for it for the first time on the internet, I just stepped back into my past, just 46 years backward.
    My drawing will improve now, and I will put one of the landscapes in my next comic.
    Thank u

  • Reply
    Stuart Smith
    November 13, 2020 at 10:39 pm

    Hey -i still have this BOOK -found it in my Attic preserved for 48 years !!-I got it in the 4th grade about the time I was kinda starting to lose some interest in Dinos!!! I just scanned some photos of it -BUT the Author here is alOT beter at doing it than I am!! . I always liked the Pastel-postmodern 60,s -70,s LOOK feel of this book –GLAD YOU SAVED these!!!

  • Reply
    CJ Smith
    August 2, 2021 at 5:33 am

    Greetings all, I have taken on the task of repurchasing all my childhood books that have been lost over the course of my 50 plus years of living. I am writing this today due to one of the books that I cannot find is a hardcover dinosaur book and, of course, it is one that I do not know the name of. So I came here to provide a description and perhaps come away with a book title. This is what I CAN remember: It was definitely an illustrated hardcover with a thin, clear, plastic laminate over the cover that I peeled off and one one of the pages (perhaps a two page spread) was an underwater ichthyosaurus and a plesiosaur (If someone has that book and posted/emailed/texted me a picture of that page(s)… I would be able to identify it immediately and then my hunt for the book could begin. Other drawing included T-Rex battling … hmm… (sorry this was a long time ago – over 40 years since I last flipped through the pages) perhaps an anklyosaurus or some kind of dinosaur with a thagomizer (Spiked tail). I want to add that the book had pterodactyls and maybe Pteranodons (Which the 7 year old me called pterodactadons, lol) as well. (my memory is my strong suit, guys I work with call me Jeopardy-Man, due to my always wanting to watch that show and USUALLY I do not forget things… sadly the title of the book I seek is one such example of my simply being human. I have used Google a good deal and yet I do not recognize any of the artwork that I have found thus far but, about that, I want to say that I have found art where the sky is colored blue all the way through out the background but, my memory tells me that my book they focused on the dinosaurs and their surroundings so that anything outside of the main focus was not colored/shaded, etc. and appeared white in color. Lastly, I was born in ’66 and I probably acquired this as early as ’71 and as late as ’75. If it was a hand-me-down – it could have come from my grandmother’s home, then the copyright could have easily preceded the stated dates by ten years, since I was the third form the youngest of 17 grandchildren. My search continues and I definitely appreciate any help that anyone can supply.

    Stay Safe.
    CJ

  • Reply
    derek Ehrhardt
    February 12, 2024 at 12:01 pm

    Hi. I’m looking for a book that would have been in elementary schools in the US in the early 80’s that taught to draw dinosaurs step by step. Any idea what this would have been?

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