Not wanting the last post of the year to be a vanilla Vintage Dinosaur Art post featuring some filler art from 20 years ago presented a conundrum. What else am I supposed to do these days? A few different ideas came to mind – a bit of personal reflection, a review of a museum or other attraction that I’d failed to post about, or a humorous comparison of ‘expert reacts’ videos regarding dinosaur media. In the end, I decided to just mash everything together. It’s been one of those years (again)…
Firstly, the images of so-so dinosaur robots that you’re seeing are from Hamerton Zoo Park, located in Cambridgeshire in England. As is becoming increasingly common for lesser-known zoos, they installed a whole load of ’em a few years back in a bid to increase their kiddy appeal. The park has a wonderful collection of birds and specialises in Australian animals that are seldom seen in UK zoos, but that’s probably not enough to reel in the lucrative mums-‘n’-tots demographic. So, rubbery dinosaurs it is. Unusually, the dinosaurs are an upcharge – they’re only visible if you pay a small fee to ride in a tiny land train to an otherwise inaccessible area. Obviously, Agata and I did this without any hesitation.
One of the largest and most impressive robots is, naturally, Tyrannosaurus. It’s a middling effort with ’90s-throwback waggly arms and homodont dentition, but at least the stripy paintjob is really snazzy. Other efforts include a slighty malformed Triceratops, the obligatory confronting pachycephalosaurs, upsetting scaly ‘raptors’, and a Dilophosaurus that’s realistically large, but has a frill anyway. Shame. Disappointingly, the Jurassic Park theme isn’t played through the onboard speakers while riding, but a passenger on our train rectified this by playing it on their phone. Excellent.
So, there was that. Agata and I also visited the Manchester Museum earlier in the year and grabbed some photos of April the Tenontosaurus, Yet Another Stan and a Papo T. rex that they inexplicably had on display; that probably deserves a post in itself. A few years ago, I’d definitely have got around to that at the time. I should apologise for how quiet the blog still is, although I feel like we’ve had a few decent hits this year, from The World’s Wonderful Creatures, to Tony Gibbons’ horrors, right up to Gemma’s superb recent post on Hubrecht at the Lyceum. The podcast has also gone from strength to strength, even if we’ve unfortunately had to go on another short hiatus. For our three listeners though, don’t worry, it’ll definitely be back – the interview for the next episode is already in the bag.
The three podcasters also gave a talk at this year’s TetZooCon that was so bad it killed the whole event. Only kidding – the announcement that this year’s TetZooCon was to be the last was made well in advance of our little presentation. Our talk was actually quite well received, being described as “actually cohesive”, which is more than I’d dared hope for. The whole thing was included on an episode of the podcast, and the show notes include relevant images, although there’s no video, so you’ll have to imagine me flapping my hands around like a lunatic. TetZooCon is being succeeded by DinoCon, which I’m a little apprehensive about for at least a couple of reasons, but I guess we’ll wait and see how that goes. At least there’ll always be memories of making friends at TZC, capped with finally being part of a talk as an embarrassingly underqualified individual. Cheers Darren, John et al.
The final TetZooCon contributed to the sense of this year being one in which significant things ended, for me personally in any case, as my dad died of cancer in May. He was naturally quite sick in the months leading up to that, and in the aftermath I had to deal with a lot of the ‘sadmin’ that people must always face in these situations – calling utility companies and insurance companies and the funeral home and arranging appointments and all of that – while also trying to get my ducks in a row for a house purchase. Fortunately, that did end up happening, and now I live together with Agata in a house in which we’re actually allowed to nail things to the walls. We’ve filled the place with animal models and bones and put antlers and palaeoart on the walls, so at least a lovely new thing has started there.
So, I’ll give those as reasons I haven’t posted as much as I’d have liked, and I hope you’ll forgive a little self indulgence. I did promise something about reaction videos at the start, so I should get to that. A month ago, Dave Hone (for it is he) featured in another video on the Insider YouTube channel, entitled Paleontologist Rates 14 Dinosaur Attacks in the “Jurassic Park” movies. It’s his second Jurassic Park/World rating/reaction video for the channel (well, the first one featured some other movies too, but was very Jurassic heavy), and is the superior one in my opinion.
In it, Dave goes much further than the typical critiques of the creatures’ overall appearances and discusses aspects of biomechanics and behaviour that tie in very well with his latest book. I particularly appreciated him mentioning how the Gallimimus don’t run in an appropriately birdlike (or, one should say, theropod-like) fashion, which is something that I’d never really noticed before; the legs don’t swing in towards the midline during a stride, perhaps because they were modeled after ILM employees titting about in a car park (as Dave points out). He also praises the Lost World Stegosaurus (in spite of its exaggerated size), righteously dismisses the JW movies as inferior, and less righteously reiterates that Jurassic Park 3 is his favourite. He always says that it’s due to the lack of annoying children, but seems to forget the extremely annoying characters played by William H Macy and, especially, Téa Leoni. He may be plain wrong on that front, but otherwise it’s a very watchable and entertaining video that goes beyond the usual ‘they didn’t have bunny hands’ tropes. I’d recommend it and rate it 5 Hones out of 5.

I should definitely use this scale again in future.
Also, the use of old illustrations from the ’90s Orbis magazine series (you know the one) made me smile.
That’s all from me for now – 2025 is looking a bit frightening on many fronts, but I hope things work out well for all of you and we can all continue to have fun here together. Happy New Year. We might get married, but we might wait until we can do so in the shadow of the Rutland Cetiosaurus.
4 Comments
Gemma Hazeborg
December 30, 2024 at 4:26 pmThank you for a lovely piece, Marc. I’ll see you again in 2025!
budeagle
January 5, 2025 at 9:40 pmI haven’t caught up on the last several podcasts of yours but wanted to say I binged them a couple years ago during a bad time in my life and they helped me get through a few hours when my brain needed a distraction and I appreciate that, Natee especially made book references I loved and it makes sense he’s an illustrator. You blokes seem a bit disheartened at least here in your posts and I do not see comments anything like several years ago but I for one still check in. I’m a humble layman not in the loop of paleontology as science but I love books and illustration. I’m sure you’ll dig up some gems of old paleoart. I have some books I wish I could send you but I’m on a different continent. Wishing you all the best in your other endeavors and here as well.
T
Marc Vincent
January 7, 2025 at 2:36 pmThank you – me seeming a bit disheartened probably has a lot to do with the bereavement I suffered last year, and the fact that I was reflecting on things. Appreciate your support! I would caution that I am the only “bloke” on the podcasting team, though!
Must say, I’m so happy that listening to the podcast helped you in a tough time as e.g. reading work by the likes of Darren Naish helped me through tough times in the recent past. Happy we can provide the same service.
budeagle
January 9, 2025 at 12:06 amNothing personal meant by the use of bloke, where I am everyone generally uses “you’uns” or “folks” to refer to all and sundry but I feared the regionalism would make me seem silly.
I had a complicated pregnancy with emergency surgery and it was very difficult to keep distracted while stuck in the hospital and some other bad stuff happened in the following year, but the bright side is I now have a little one who loves dinosaurs too and finally justification for accruing all these books, and have an excuse to pick up dino toys too. In tough times, learning about the natural world never fails to uplift me just a little and this blog was one of a few nice resources. We have some old VHS documentaries about dinosaurs and thanks to my perusal of the blog I always recognize David Norman when he shows up in a program to talk about iguanodon 🙂
T