Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Animals

Vintage Dinosaur Art

I’ve found another very old dinosaur book! This one was released in 1946, and it’s a short but sweet one. The author and illustrator is one Hilary Stebbing, a stalwart of children’s literature of the mid-20th century. It’s rare to find dinosaur art from the 1940’s, a quiet time for palaeontology for obvious reasons, so kudos to Stebbing for getting this book out!

I always like to give some biographical information or historical context when reviewing a book like this, but when it comes to Hilary Stebbing Iā€™m afraid Iā€™m drawing a blank. All I know is that she lived from 1915 to 1998, might have been British and illustrated a lot of these picture books in the Puffin series, released around wartime. Her family runs an instagram account dedicated to her work, which can be found here.

I rather like the design of the cover, with names of animals and time periods surrounding the central image. Stegosaurus, incidentally, doesn’t get an appearance in the book proper, so this is all the Stego we’re getting. As Marc noted, it does indeed look rather like the old Invicta Stegosaurus toy. Of course, the book precedes the toy by a few decades, so I wonder if it’s a coincidence? I love the drawing, by the way; it’s obviously Knight-inspired but more smooth and slick than the gnarly, knobbly lizard from the old master. Stebbing’s scalation is a lot more subtle and easy on the eyes.

The first dino to appear in the book prober is good old Spiky McStabbythumbs. As you can see, Stebbing erroneously places it in the Jurassic, a mistake she makes more often. It’s a fairly typical early Iguanodon while not really looking all that much like any other artist’s Iguanodon in particular (it actually seems more modern than, say, the near-vertical beasts of Burian and Parker) but, again, it has a toy-like quality to it. This illustration is not at all dissimilar to some plastic toys I used to own, down to the shape of the tail. It’s a pretty lovable Iguanodon all the same, with a look of resigned exasperation on its face. Oh well, time to eat some more plants and stab some more theropods, I guess.

Usually it’s Stegosaurus that is on the recieving end of early-20th-century-brain-size-obsessed-anthropocentrism (now THERE’s a trope if ever there was one). Now poor old Triceratops draws the short straw – though its smug mug seems to suggest it’s more with it than it’s given credit for. Leave it to pre-renaissance palaeontologists to look at the animal with the largest and most spectacular skull in the world and take away that gosh, its brain is so small. The size of a kitten’s, in fact – that’s an odd comparison, isn’t it? (I’ve never seen a kitten’s brain in person so I’ve no idea how big that would be.) The illustration isn’t one of Stebbing’s best, showing a mostly shapeless beast whose right horn seems to grow directly out of its frill.

This, though. I love everything about this! It’s a two-page spread that didn’t quite fit on my scanner but you get the general idea. The outline of the sauropod, the wonderfully clean shading, the friendly eye. And the simple but beautifully realized environment; the reeds, the trees, the pebbles, the fish. Stebbing is at her best in the full colour spreads, when she can really make the animal pop. When it looks this nice, I don’t even mind the scientific inaccuracies anymore. Sure, the Diplodocus is wading, but did you notice the bulk of its weight is still held well above the water? Was any serious researcher ever really committed to the idea that sauropods were aquatic?

“Archaeornis” here is pretty interesting. I wonder what series of events led to Stebbing misnaming Archaeopteryx like that? Was it a common mistake at the time? It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe where “Archaeornis” indeed became this animal’s name, but if I Google “Archaeornis”, I only find a Final Fantasy enemy. I guess it’s a riddle for the ages. As for the illustration: If I had to guess, I’d say Stebbing based herself on some old Knight sketches. Of course, it’s in classic wing-spreading Archaeopteryx mode, with even four claws on one hand, wild! I do love the elegant fern background, and the awesome schematic comparison between pterosaur, bat and bird wings. I would like to see more of that in modern dinosaur books!

The Pteranodon ain’t half bad for its time, actually. It’s got a toothless beak with that slight upcurve and it’s skinny without being skeletal – none of this is a given for old pterosaur art. Stebbing did her homework for this one. Again; I love the background. So deceptively simple, yet extremely effective and evocative. Bit of a shame Stebbing wasn’t to know how fuzzy pterosaurs really were, because, as it turns out, she’s really good at drawing fuzzy things (read on).


Dinosaurs are not the main focus of this book; rather, it’s about extinct animals as a whole. Stebbing even chose to not make a full-on Tyrannosaurus reconstruction, something that would be unthinkable now (though she does draw a rather nice T. rex skeleton). The sea reptiles are even featured before the dinosaurs are. They are servicable illustrations, the ichtyosaur being particularly cute, with all those wee pups swimming around.

I love, love Stebbing’s take on the big floofers of the Pleistocene. They are just incredibly pleasing to look at, so fluffy and round. Megatherium‘s face looks like that of an aardvark, or mabe a classic depiction of a Chinese fox spirit. The mammoth is especially delightful, its shape and fur texture reminding me of an especially chubby gorilla.

I guess I wouldn’t call Hilary Stebbing’s work a towering achievement of technical palaeoart, but as stylized, almost comic illustrations for children I found these pictures to be quite nice. Extinct Animals is a rare, fun time capsule into a time and place when such pictures were not common.

Let’s end on something pure and wonderful. This glyptodont. That will be all.

Next up from me: How about some Wayne Barlowe?

You Might Also Like

13 Comments

  • Reply
    Joan Turmelle
    June 17, 2020 at 10:55 am

    “Archaeornis” was a name used for the Berlin Archaeopteryx specimen back in 1917, before it was realized that the fossil belonged to the same genus. Interestingly, the name Archaeornis appears in Watson & Zallinger’s 1960 ‘Dinosaurs and other Prehistoric Reptiles’, but the text does make the suggestion that the two animals are the same.

  • Reply
    Steven J. Thompson
    June 17, 2020 at 11:51 am

    As with many 19th and early 20th century fossil discoveries, Archaeopteryx was over-split, with near-identical fossils being assigned to different genera. One specimen was described as Archaeornis, treated as a different genus from the earlier-known and named Archaeopteryx. So this wasn’t a mistake by the standards of the time.

    • Reply
      Dino Dad Reviews
      June 19, 2020 at 9:37 am

      Huh, Archaeopteryx seems like such a monolith, I’ve never heard about it being over-split before!

      • Reply
        Niels Hazeborg
        June 19, 2020 at 9:54 am

        Often with these long-running genera it’s the other way around even, you get wastebasket taxa that are overlumped like Megalosaurus.

        • Reply
          paleocharley
          November 25, 2020 at 3:36 am

          I remember reading (many years ago) that the Archaeornis name was a result of the political tuff between London & Berlin about the acquisition of the first specimen ((London) and the second (Berlin). I think there’s a detailed discussion in one of Colbert’s books (probably 1961).

  • Reply
    jonathan keay
    June 17, 2020 at 5:26 pm

    Wayne Barlowe? Yes Please! šŸ™‚

  • Reply
    Timur Sivgin
    June 18, 2020 at 11:49 am

    Interesting how the Triceratops has three-clawed hands instead of the typical elephant-feet.

    As for how rigorous people were with the aquatic sauropod-hypothesis, in the 20s W.D. Matthew went as far as claiming that sauropods were viviparous like ichthyosaurs, so they never had to leave the water. But otherwise, most people at the time still thought sauropods could leave the water when they needed to, either to change ponds or to lay eggs.

  • Reply
    bicka
    June 18, 2020 at 2:54 pm

    The plesiosaurus has to be my favorite. I love its shifty expression as it scarfs down the fish, like it’s sneaking a snack in the middle of the night.

  • Reply
    Tyler Greenfield
    June 18, 2020 at 11:52 pm

    Archaeornis was named by Petronievecs in Petronievecs & Woodward (1917). The type species is Archaeopteryx siemensii named by Dames (1897), of which the Berlin specimen is the holotype. Given the recent splitting of Solnhofen avialans (i.e. Ostromia and Alcmonavis) it wouldn’t surprise me if Archaeornis is resurrected in the near future.

    https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044107224677&view=1up&seq=16
    https://sci-hub.tw/https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1917.tb02045.x

  • Reply
    Dino Dad Reviews
    June 19, 2020 at 9:38 am

    I love the comparative anatomy sketches in the Archaeopteryx illustration! Come to think of it, I can’t think of ANY popular paleo book that featured anything like this prior to the Dinosaur Rennaissance. Is this the only one????

    • Reply
      paleocharley
      November 25, 2020 at 3:50 am

      I can recall a couple instances, but no specific sources offhand. (Possibly Zim- reviewed on this blog a few years ago .I was the original contributor, but the drive the scan is on is packed away, along with most of my other material.) It was much more common to show the shark-ichthyosaur-dolphin similarity.

      One illustration that I have been searching for is one that showed the crocodilian connection. It had phytosaurs, temnospondyl amphibians, champsosaurs, (and a couple of others) compared to true/modern crocodilians. I remembered it being in one of Colbert’s “textbooks”, but I haven’t been able to find it. Anyone able to help me on that?

  • Reply
    Andreas Johansson
    June 22, 2020 at 2:36 pm

    Regarding aquatic saurpods, Own supposed that Cetiosaurs was a marine predator that munched on plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. This was of course based on incomplete remains that didn’t reveal the overall shape of the animal.

    • Reply
      paleocharley
      November 25, 2020 at 4:01 am

      Owen believed Cetiosaurus was something like a marine crocodile for quite awhile. (It was not included in his original Dinosauria.)

      Carroll Fenton pushed the TOTALLY aquatic sauropod idea quite a bit. Reading some of his passages, it seems like he was reluctant to even admit that they came out to lay eggs. His rationale involved that they had cartilage in their knees that couldn’t support their weight or some such.

    Leave a Reply to bickaCancel reply

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.