Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Corridor of Life

The palaeontologist Dr William Elgin Swinton (W E Swinton to you) is perhaps best known, in the context of popular books about dinosaurs at least, for works published by the Natural History Museum (or the British Museum (Natural History) as it then properly was) that featured artwork by Neave Parker. I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time. However, it’d be very unfair to jump to conclusions about Swinton based on just the one book, and The Corridor of Life (published in 1948 by Jonathan Cape) is a much livelier and more readable affair which is light on ‘dinosaurs were killed by their overactive pituitary glands’-type silliness. And there are charming illustrations by Erna Pinner, to boot.

Pinner was an accomplished natural history illustrator, although perhaps not a dinosaur specialist, as is evident in the amount of, er, borrowing from other artists here. In some cases, this is actually credited – Charles Knight, Margaret Colbert, C Brown Kelly and various institutions are credited as the sources for specific illustrations. However, anyone who knows a bit about old-school palaeoart will recognise a few more that got unacknowledged.

My copy of the book lacks the dust jacket, but it features the above illustration of Triceratops that also appears as the frontispiece. The individual in the background is definitely based on Knight’s work, and the one in the foreground certainly looks familiar, although I can’t pin it down exactly. In any case, Pinner’s charmingly stylised art manages to achieve quite a lot with very carefully and sparingly used shading and stippling, an approach that very much suits the rather thin paper that they ended up being reproduced on. Sure, these Triceratops look a bit like they’re marooned on a desert island, but then crowding the piece with foliage would probably have resulted in a horrible mess.

The book features a mixture of full-page illustrations and smaller, supplementary pieces that sit alongside the text. What with this book being about the history of all (ahem, animal) life, Megalosaurus here doesn’t turn up until page 135. He’s a pretty generic-looking large theropod for the most part, although there are hints of the tall neural spines that appear in some older reconstructions of the animal, and it seems to have an indeterminate number of fingers. Hey, at least he’s not a hunchback! Eat your heart out, Neave Parker.

For his part, Swinton describes the Mesozoic as “the age of reptiles. Not poor crawling things like snakes, or dull objects like turtles, but great creatures that might add pride to any ancestry.” Perhaps a little cruel to extant sauropsids, there, but at least the mighty dinosaurs get their due. (The others just need to remember their place on The Great Chain of Being, I guess.)

A discussion of the theropods leads from, er, Plateosaurus, to Megalosaurus, and so naturally on to Tyrannosaurus, which as Swinton describes

“…must have been a terrifying creature in life…Its head was over four feet long and was slightly compressed from side to side. The jaws had formidable teeth sometimes six inches long and an inch wide. The power of these jaws and the strength of the teeth must have made Tyrannosaurus a match for any contemporary.”

Even Swinton was on the T. rex hype train, even if he does go on to mention the animals’ silly tiny brains. Pinner’s illustration clearly cribs from Knight, and in particular his work depicting two T. rex fighting. Even if the animals look like they have rather different skulls, you’ve still got to love that technique. And the inclusion of a smoking volcano. Gotta have that volcano.

One of my favourite illustrations is the above piece depicting Diplodocus, the “largest known land animal” (remember, longest doesn’t equal largest, kids). It has an almost art deco, vintage travel poster feel about it. There’s very little in the way of detailing here, but so much is conveyed through judicious shading and simple linework that perfectly suits the format. They also have adorably dopey-looking ultra-simplified faces.

Iguanodon naturally makes an appearance too, and resembles one of those post-Dollo models that one occasionally sees in museums, with their tripodal poses, flexed elbows and stab-happy thumbs pointing skywards. In this case, it does mean that the animal has suitably robust-looking forelimbs (rather than the unduly puny ones that appeared on many reconstructions in the mid-20th century) and lacks the Parker-style dewlap that became ubiquitous for a while. It also has a very grumpy-looking face, which is only fitting for the ornithopod version of a knife-wielding, steroid-abusing maniac.

Naturally, Iguanodon leads to the hadrosaurs, which “became ‘helmeted’, developing a grotesque series of bony cock’s-combs, crests and great spikes on the skull.” Given Swinton’s dim view of dinosaur cranial ornamentation here and in other books, I’d love to have asked him what he thought of deer’s antlers. Now they are freaky –  solid bone that extends from the head like a tree branch and the animal sheds and regrows them! But I digress. Pinner provides a perfectly serviceable illustration of a very Knightian “Trachodon“, with a grotesquely helmeted reptile sailing by in the background. It’s a little strange that Pinner sees fit to stick very pointy-looking claws on the feet of so many of these animals, given that they had blunted, hoof-like toe claws in reality, and Knight painted them as such. Perhaps it’s based on Pinner’s observations of lizards.

After the ornithopods, Swinton moves on to thyreophorans, with poor old Stegosaurus described as “one of the most ridiculous aesthetically”. At least it can’t possibly be described as a “dull object”, I suppose. Pinner’s illustration owes a lot to Knight and, of course, Marsh’s skeletal reconstruction. However, it’s notably very skinny for a Stegosaurus of this period, or indeed any period. What with its protruding hip bones, withered-looking forelimbs and sunken belly, poor old Steggy appears to be starving to death. That’ll teach you for evolving all those unsightly lumps and bumps and spikes all over the place! No wonder you’re extinct.

I do love the speckled hide of this Stegosaurus, and aside from appearing to be in need of a square meal, it’s notable that this Stegosaurus has unusually large tail spikes that occupy about half of its tail. I’m wondering if this is because it’s based on reconstructions of certain Stegosaurus species with 8 tail spikes, but with the number of spikes reduced. Then again, it could just as well be that the artist didn’t have the best reference material to work with.

One of the most interesting thyreophoran reconstructions in this book is of Polacanthus, although I might just be saying that because it’s an “Isle-of-Wight dinosaur”. Mostly, I’m wondering where the individual in the foreground might have been copied from, and whether the truncated tail was present in the original (it might just be like that here because the artist mucked up). Again, Pinner uses minimal detailing to excellent effect, giving the impression of bumpy, armoured skin, the sacral shield, and the vicious-looking spines on the animal’s back.

Connoisseurs of vintage pancake-ankylosaurs (pancakylosaurs?) will be reassured to learn that Pinner provides an illustration of Scolosaurus, complete with classic stumpy limbs and even stumpier tail (a misinterpretation of an incomplete fossil, I’ve been told). Nothing too remarkable about this one – it’s just always lovely to see the old fellow.

And finally…Swinton obviously wrote this book in the shadow of the Second Small Disagreement of 1939-45, in which he served in the Navy. In his foreword, Swinton quite poignantly notes that “in few periods of the world’s history has it seemed more necessary than now that we should get back to the basis of things, to follow the trend of life’s progress, and to determine our part in its future direction.” What’s more, and for all that he espouses a few very oudated ideas (that are good fun to have a giggle at with the benefit of hindsight), I do also appreciate Swinton’s intro:

“The purpose of the following pages is to give some simple account of the long history of living things. If conditions under which animals and men and women live had always been the same there would be little need for such a story, and yet thousands of people are quite content to remain ignorant of the fact that change is ever a natural process. For many hundreds of years the description of the creation of the earth and the seas, and the almost immediate colonization of them by a widespread and diversified series of plants, animals and even of man, was generally accepted and the need to examine it closely, or to question it, did not therefore arise. Modern science has innumerable proofs that this simple theory is not literally accurate.”

It’s perhaps a little dispiriting that, 76 years later, this paragraph could still apply to our present situation. So it goes.

And hey, that Archaeopteryx looks silly (and a tiny bit Quentin Blake).