Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs – Death and Discovery

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a book from 1993’s Dinosaur Dynasty series (written by Dougal Dixon, published by Highlights for Children in the US and Watts in the UK) for the first time since 2013. Well, here’s another one! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy of A Closer Look for sale outside the US, so here’s Death and Discovery, which predictably is rather lighter on the life reconstructions. But there’s still good stuff to be had, although not courtesy of Steve Kirk this time…

That said, Kirk does still provide the cover art, as is customary. Given the title, you might expect something reflecting death, extinction, fossils, excavation, or museum displays. Instead, we have a trio of lovely hadrosaur heads, which is very welcome as far as I’m concerned, especially as it provides Kirk another opportunity to show off his penchant for stunning saurian skin patterns. The Corythosaurus, with its striped crest and banded neck, is especially exquisite. The Parasaurolophus also gets to have a big red horn, like a pompadour. Elvis! Oh, and his skill at painting keratinous bits is quite commendable, as ever.

As the title might suggest, Death and Discovery deals with matters related to how dinosaurs died, were fossilised, discovered millions of years later, excavated, prepped, reconstructed, and restored to ‘life’. This is a process initially explained through the tale of how a herd of Iguanodon ended up in a coal mine of Belgium, sadly dying and being petrified millions of years before trappist beers had even been invented. What tragic misfortune. In any case, the first illustration in this story is of our hapless hadrosauriforms getting caught in a thunderstorm that no doubt led to a flash flood and a watery grave. It’s competently executed, with lovely ripples on the water and beautifully painted lightning, but while the dinosaurs aren’t bad they aren’t anything to write home about. It perhaps doesn’t help that they suffer by comparison with Kirk and Jim Robins’ work in the series. One suspects that the artist, Chris Forsey, wasn’t a dinosaur specialist. (One also wonders if he’s this Chris Forsey. Fantastic artist if so, that website is very distracting)

Forsey also provides an illustration of the Iguanodon mass grave, where most animals have been reduced to skeletons, except for an individual in the background that appears to have suffered a particularly miserable, protracted demise. And possibly had the flesh on its tail chewed off while it was still alive. Maybe. Mists waft over the scene of desolation, as two rather freaky-looking pterosaurs (that to me resemble pre-crest reconstructions of Pterodactylus) survey all the bones. I’d have preferred the skeletons to be a little less ‘clean’, but that might have been a bit much for a kids’ book. I mean, a lot of kids would have loved it, but then I also saw a child start crying at a zoo recently when he realised that a pair of ground hornbills had been given whole (dead) chicks to eat. Some details of the animals’ skeletons are a bit off, but it’s not bad at all, all-in-all.

Naturally, there are plenty of illustrations of People Doing Things, like stumbling upon fossils by accident, mining, digging fossils out of the ground, examining fossils etc. While fine and dandy, Vintage Dinosaur Art doesn’t typically concern illustrations of people or extant animals, except where it’s funny, of course. Nonetheless, I was quite taken with this illustration of a preparator by LITC favourite Jim Robins. It’s just so beautifully executed, the endless fine lines on the skull combining with the careful paintwork to create the perfect impression of its form and complexity. Note also the contrast between the intricate texture of the skull and the much smoother appearance of the preparator. There’s also a photo of a preparator, because two preparators are better than one, obviously.

Jim also contributes a series of illustrations that take us through the stages of reconstructing a dinosaur, in this case, Allosaurus. The pronated, curled-up forelimbs point to a Greg Paul influence that’s by no means a bad thing in 1993; the skeleton as a whole shows careful attention to detail and otherwise stands up very well to this day. Very nice. Er, I don’t have much else to say, so I’ll draw your attention to the photo of the main hall in London’s Natural History Museum as it was back when. By the time of my first visit the current dinosaur gallery had already (although only just) opened, so I sadly never got to see ‘Dippy’ and their peculiar Triceratops model side-by-side like this. Visitors at the time this book was published would, likewise, have been denied such a sight.

Once you’ve reconstructed your dinosaur’s skeleton, you’ll naturally want to slap a load of muscles on it. You might also want to give some consideration to internal organs, although they’re necessarily a little speculative; here, the conflicting ideas regarding ‘warm-blooded’ versus ‘cold-blooded’ dinosaurs are mentioned. I’ll always applaud anyone who gives dinosaurian guts a go, especially when executed with any level of detail.

And here’s what we’ve all been waiting for – a life reconstruction of Allosaurus by Jim Robins from 1993, right around the time he also produced work for Dinosaurs! magazine. The Greg Paul influence is especially strong here, what with the feature scales descending fore and aft of the orbit, almost outlining it, and the curled-up forelimbs. Still, again, I’d rather than this than something based on a 1985 John Sibbick piece, which was essentially the alternative option in the early ’90s. Jim also demonstrates the same careful attention to detail and skill in shading as demonstrated elsewhere, as well as providing the animal with a very striking striped hide.

You’ll note that “big meat-eating dinosaurs may have had some form of lips,” and that “evidence of this is the row of little holes along the edge of the jawbone”. Hardly controversial, and most of the creatures in That Movie from 1993 had fulsome lips, but it doesn’t half excite some people for some reason.

Oh, and if you’re wondering who sculpted that hatchling on the right-hand page, I’m not sure. Answers on a postcard.

You know how I mentioned a Paul-Sibbick dichotomy in terms of palaeoart influences around this time? Well, here’s something on the Sibbicky side. This lunching Allosaurus by Denys Ovenden is certainly vaguer in form than Jim’s more Paul-inspired effort, and sports a very Sibbick-like skin texture, along with horns that curl over to form eye-ridges a la the Normanpedia Allosaurus. It’s not bad, but it does look like something from the previous decade. I do appreciate the attention to detail in that the thumb claw is notably larger than the others, though.

And finally…DINAMATION! Who doesn’t love a bit of Dinamation? In 1993, the company was at the peak of its powers, and we are here given a glimpse both at a completed museum exhibit and a Dinamation workshop. My visit to a Dinamation exhibition in Brighton circa 1996 is a core childhood memory, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned a number of times; I distinctly remember a rather ugly Allosaurus exactly like the one in the photo, and a similar-looking T. rex too, except I remember it being full-size, or something close to that. The background behind them is very intriguing – it appears to combine elements of different 1980s illustrations of Camptosaurus and Muttaburrasaurus, of all things, and I wish I could see more of it. I also feel like I should retrieve and re-scan that book I reviewed back in 2012.

Coming up next time: A Closer Look, I hope! But on Sunday, I’m off to Poland for a week.