Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Reign of the Reptiles – part 2

Who’d like some more Rosewarne? In my last post on The Reign of the Reptiles, looking predominantly at illustrations depicting contemporaneous animals in prehistoric landscapes, I mentioned that there were also a great many illustrations of individual animals isolated against white backgrounds, and that I’d consider a follow-up post if anyone actually read that far and wanted to see them. Well, someone did! BrianL left the following comment:

The smaller illustrations in The Reign of the Reptiles, like the Dimorphodon are certainly worth sharing and discussing too. I remember a striking, somewhat creepy Cynognathus, a beautiful Longisquama and a very flamingo-like Pterodaustro.

I’m afraid to say that there is no somewhat creepy Cynognathus, at least in this edition (I did go looking for it), but here’s that very flamingo-like Pterodaustro for you! As an aside, it’s rather awkward that The Reign of the Reptiles seems to be attracting an unusually high amount of attention, as it exposes that when it comes to non-dinosaurs I don’t really know what I’m talking about. You expect me to care about pterosaur palaeoart as well? Never mind – onward.

Pterodaustro is famous for being an apparently filter-feeding pterosaur, inviting inevitable comparisons with certain modern-day wading birds that are related to grebes. Such comparisons have resulted in a great many illustrations in which the animal is depicted as being pinker than Lady Penelope’s Rolls Royce. One does wonder how plausible this really is, although really the idea of a pink pterosaur is surely far too cool to be fully discounted (and where are all the toys of it?). Rosewarne’s illustration goes as far as to give the animal a ‘beak’ that transitions from white to black, exactly like certain flamingo species (such as the Chilean flamingo Phoenicopterus chilensis). From what I can gather, Rosewarne’s reconstruction is a bit of a ‘generic pterosaur’ in form and doesn’t show off some of the animal’s more unusual features outside of, you know, the honking great head with pseudo-baleen in it. It was 1990, though, and there’s no denying that it’s very striking (hence my use of it as the featured image).

Another to file under ‘It was 1990’ is Rosewarne’s take on Quetzalcoatlus, which for the time really isn’t all that bad. We’d progressed rapidly beyond the ‘toothy nightmare demon’ at this point, and have arrived upon an animal with a long beak and relatively long neck and legs; so, not too far removed from how it’s now understood. It is completely lacking a head crest, though, at a time when the humble Sibbick-style nubbin was all the fashion. As a result, its head is very stork-like, while the very attractive countershading gives it the appearance of a large seabird. Unsurprisingly, Benton describes it as “likely” that the animal skimmed low over the sea and snatched fish “from just under the surface”. You know, default pterosaur behaviour.

And now, time for that “beautiful Longisquama” that BrianL mentioned! And it’s beautiful indeed, featuring some stunning Mysterious Dorsal Scales that graduate from dark green, to yellow, to red, to black. Quite apart from the gorgeous colouration, the scaly hide of the animal is also superbly painted, appearing almost tangibly rough and spiky. Incidentally, if anyone corners you in the pub and starts babbling on about how Longisquama surely holds the key to the origin of birds, that’s your cue to run very far away very quickly.

Triassic non-dinosaurs are further represented by Ornithosuchus, a pseudosuchian that Benton (writing in 1990, bear in mind) posits as being “very close to the origin of the pterosaurs and dinosaurs”. This might explain the approach Rosewarne has taken in giving this animal a rather smooth, sleek appearance, aside from a few rows of squared-off dorsal scales, of course. The reconstruction of the hind limbs and slimmed-down appearance of the tail absolutely scream ‘Dino Renaissance theropod dinosaur’, and the trademark torso seam puts in an appearance (as seen on Rosewarne’s theropods and Postosuchus in the previous post). The Paulian feature scales outlining the orbit are present here, too. You’ll note, though, that the shape of the head does quite carefully follow the real animal’s skull, indicating that Rosewarne had some decent reference material available and paid attention to it. (And if anyone points out in the comments that this has been obviously copied from someone else’s illustration, I’ll cry.)

I love phytosaurs, me, and I think they’re criminally under-represented in popular palaeo-media. Modern crocodilians are such (if you’ll pardon the word) iconic animals, and yet here’s another group of animals that did everything that they do millions of years beforehand – before it was cool. In any case, here we have Rosewarne’s Parasuchus, and it’s a very decent illustration of a phytosaur. I might have preferred a little more variation and patterning in its colouration, but this’ll do. I’m just happy to see my crater-nosed Triassic friends make an appearance. Look at how many TEETH there are!

Going further back in time, and here’s Dimetrodon. It seems peculiar nowadays to feature non-mammalian synapsids in a book all about ‘reptiles’, but those were the times, man. It remains interesting how long phylogenetic thinking took to impact popular books after it became widespread in the scientific community. As to which of the many species this is supposed to be, my default assumption is always D. grandis, but this might actually be D. limbatus. Whatever the case, it looks to have a slightly undersized head to my very inexpert eye. That’s not to say, of course, that this isn’t a very beautifully painted illustration, for that it surely is; I’m particularly fond of all the fine detail that’s been put into the animal’s flanks and that might not even be noticed at first glance. Sadly there’s no Sphenacodon in this book, which is Dimetrodon after you’ve snipped its sail off with a pair of scissors.

We’ve been traveling back in time from the Cretaceous, to the Triassic, to the Permian, but I probably shouldn’t ignore the quite substantial chapter on marine reptiles, so here’s a Late Cretaceous mosasaur. It’s quite fascinating how depictions of mosasaurs have rapidly evolved in quite a short timespan; for decades following their discovery, they were consistently depicted as highly serpentine beasts, before it was realised that they were even more highly adapted for aquatic life than anyone had imagined. Hence, Rosewarne’s 1990 Plotosaurus is very much in the classic sneaky snaky mosasaur mould, all the more unfortunate because Plotosaurus was one of the most highly-derived and ichthyosaur-like mosasaurs of all. Still, a really lovely painting with plenty of admirable touches, from the animal’s attractive skin patterns to the tiny, ink-squirting belemnite in the lower right.

And finally…some more skeletals from Jim Robins. Jim contributed a great many wonderful skeletals to this book, and I’m quite tempted to write a post dedicated to them, except I’d run out of things to say other than “this is a really good skeletal”. This page illustrates how fish evolved into different, land-dwelling fish, and it’s really quite nicely done. I always enjoy Jim’s work and it’s a treat to see him at whichever Naish-adjacent annual convention I’m attending this year.

Coming up next: another generic kids’ dinosaur book from the ’90s! Or perhaps something brand new…