Vintage Dinosaur Art: A Guide to Earth History

Should you ever visit the historic Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know), be sure to drop by the superb Ironbridge Book Shop. There you’ll find a huge range of classic Pelican paperbacks for sale, a series created by Penguin in 1937 to provide some low-cost intellectual stimulation for the masses. I visited back in November and managed to pick up A Guide to Earth History, which stood out to me for a very obvious reason. Look, ma, Parasaurolophus!

A Guide to Earth History was number 351 in the Pelican series and was published in 1958, although the book was first published by Chatto and Windus as a hardback in 1956. Author Richard Carrington is given a condensed biography on the back; born in 1921, he had had quite the career by the late ’50s, and as of the book’s publication was “a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society, the Zoological Society of London, and a Member of the Institute of Archaeology”. And he couldn’t half deliver a stern stare into the middle distance, to boot. Of more interest for our purposes, though, is that the illustrator was none other than Maurice Wilson, whose work we discussed on the podcast back in May 2024 but who otherwise hasn’t made too many appearances around here. It’s a shame, as we’re all big fans of his work – just take a look at the beautiful, deceptively simple detailing on that cover Parasaurolophus and tell me you aren’t immediately charmed.

The illustrations are divided between simpler, monochrome pieces depicting individual animals, and greyscale plates inserted in the centre of the book, exactly as in the earlier hardback edition. It’s a shame not to have Wilson’s work in full glorious colour, but I’ll take what I can get. At least the dinosaurs get a decent chunk of the plates, given that the book covers the entire history of the Earth (and Carrington’s seeming contempt for them, although really he was just reflecting the orthodoxy of the time). The first to appear is Plateosaurus, depicted as a quadruped in spite of Carrington’s description of the animal as a “prototype of the giant carnivores of the later part of the Mesozoic Era,” a statement that seems very strange today now that Plateosaurus has been firmly established as the archetypal ‘prosauropod’. Carrington also mentions von Huene’s idea of “great hordes of plateosaurs” migrating over deserts to reach seasonal feeding grounds, but Wilson’s animals appear lost and isolated. They’re small components of a piece that mostly consists of an inhospitable, barren landscape and endless, open sky, making them appear lonely and vulnerable. It’s a remarkably atmospheric piece for a book that one might well expect to just contain ‘spotter’s guide’ type images of animals.

Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of illustrations featuring animals in good ol’ convenient lateral view. Wilson’s dinosaurs often appear remarkably slim and sprightly for the time in which they were produced, and I’d argue that that’s even the case for his Brontosaurus, which manages to look quite alert and svelte in spite of its dragging tail and minimal detailing (that we can see in this reproduction). It probably helps that the animal actually has shoulders, rather than its neck emerging from somewhere between its forelimbs. Carrington is naturally of the opinion that sauropods spent most of their time in the water, and that’s reflected here in a pair of swimming animals in the background.

Wilson also notably depicts Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus in active, energetic poses, with the former appearing to brace itself against the latter (with its tail in the air and everything!), and the latter lunging forward rather than plodding along in a Godzilla pose. He also pays decent attention to detail on the Tyrannosaurus, especially for the time; you can certainly nitpick it (that leg’s far too straight) but the head, forelimbs, and stout torso are all recognisably T. rex. It’s a shame we can’t fully appreciate the foliage here, as Wilson’s attention to detail and painterly flourishes certainly extended to the plants he surrounded his animals with.

Edmontosaurus features on the same page, logically enough, under one of its better known junior synonyms. (This blog post will look really silly in 100 years’ time, when someone finds a way to split Anatosaurus off again somehow.) Again, although the tail is drooping, you’ll note the choice to depict the animal standing bipedally with a horizontal back, making its form much more recognisable to a modern viewer than it might have been. It also has a row of spines as per certain very well-preserved specimens – Wilson must have had access to decent reference material for 1956.

The chapter on birds follows the chapter on dinosaurs, and so it is with the illustrations. After all, back then, they were regarded as being a class apart (literally) from those beastly, beastly reptiles. Carrington is mostly very complimentary of birds, even if he does describe the ostrich as being “dowdy” and “grotesquely reminiscent of its ancestors in the geological past”. What a meanie. Being “the first bird”, Archaeopteryx receives special attention and, of course, its own illustration. Wilson was known to turn in a very decent Archaeopteryx, and so it is here, with his reconstruction looking like a cohesive animal rather than a freakish reptilo-bird – the feathers are rather nicely done, and it avoids ‘wings, but with hands’ syndrome (i.e. having what appear to be inexplicable extra digits sticking out from the top of the wing).

Further down the avian line, here are Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, which Wilson again renders in a very pleasing naturalistic fashion. Look closely, and you can even make out the shape of Ichthyornis‘ forelimb under the feathers. Hesperornis appears wonderfully streamlined, too, with very effective and sparing use of countershading. And the waves are pretty. That’s about all I have to say, other than I’ve only just now been reminded how speciose Hesperornis is for a Cretaceous dinosaur. Why, it gives Psittacosaurus a run for its money!

While the plates will be of most interest to seekers of dinosaur art that might be considered vintage (or just old and interesting, which is how we’ve defined ‘vintage’ since about 2010), the supplementary illustrations scattered throughout the text are worth a look, too. There are a few dinosaurs among them, including Iguanodon, as seen above. It’s a little dumpier and more retro-looking when compared with the Edmontosaurus, although that likely has as much to do with its posture as anything. At least it has decently-sized hands and a well-observed head. I’d hazard a guess that it’s based on the animal now known as Mantellisaurus, which was mounted in a pose much like this in London’s Natural History Museum for many years. Wilson also does an excellent job in adapting his style for this format, employing thick lines and a stippling technique that really works on the low-quality paper.

And finally…Polacanthus, both because it’s an interesting dinosaur and because it gives me an excuse to mention that Richard Carrington was a firm believer, at least as of 1956, in the very silly idea of ‘racial senescence’ (I know, I know, hindsight’s a wonderful thing and all that). This posits that it’s not only individual organisms that grow old and a bit dotty, but entire groups of animals, with dinosaurs being held up as the prime example. While today we might see thyreophorans as an evolutionary success thanks, in part, to their extensive armour, persisting over tens of millions of years, Carrington has quite a different view. For him, they are “fantastic and over-specialised forms whose growth bore no relation to any effective evolutionary purpose,” with Polacanthus itself being “grotesque” and Scolosaurus “hideously repulsive”, and Stegosaurus‘ plates being “a grim portent of over-specialisation and extinction” – in spite of it living over 80 million years before the thyreophorans as a whole went extinct (a longer period than all the time since). While a fairly commonplace view at the time, there’s no denying that it seems entertainingly bizarre and a wee bit daft from a modern standpoint.

As for Wilson’s illustration, again, it’s very good for the time, effectively expressing a lot of detail when it might easily have been lost due to the format. I’d really like to track down more of his work – do leave a comment if you know a good place to start!