Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaur Dream

You know, I’ve only done one Vintage Dinosaur Art project in the entire year of 2025? Granted, it was the mammoth, three part project on Marie Hubrecht at the Lyceum, the results of which are used in her biography, but still. It’s time to crank it up a notch, and the best way to pick up the pace is to scale back the size of the projects. Let’s do a cute children’s book.

Dennis Nolan (1945-2022) was a painter in Connecticut, mostly working on children’s books in the realms of fantasy, fairy tales and religious stories. His students at the University of Hartford called him “the wizard“. Dinosaur Dream, from 1990, was his first commercial foray into dinosaur art, and one of several he wrote, in addition to doing all the artwork.

As you can see, we’ve got a pajama-clad child on the cover along with a baby sauropod, so we’ve got a “boy and his dinosaur” fantasy story on our hands. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and we usually stick to more straightforwardly educational fare on this blog, but the artwork is very nice. Nolan did in fact know his classics of dinosaur art, and he does have some educational ambitions here.

A popos of nothing, I have no idea how this book came to be in my possession. Sometimes I just bulk-buy random old dinosaur books online. If someone recommended it to me once, thanks! After publishing, I found out that Marc, back in 2013, also wrote a rather good review for this one. Go read and compare our notes!

Meet our red-clad protagonist Wilbur. Bet you a dollar Wilbur is based on a real person, by the way. On the wall behind him, there’s something that us palaeoart nerds like: palaeoartists directly referencing other palaeoartists. We see reproductions of Zallinger’s 1947 Age of Reptiles and Knight’s 1928 Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus. Clearly, Wilbur is a connoisseur.

His taste in toys seems to be less excellent, with only a single, simple wooden brontosaur and a stegosaur plush to keep him company. Perhaps he’s a serious hobbyist who keeps his collection in a dedicated room, like Marc Vincent. His pajamas and bed spread have similar themes going on. According to the text, he’s reading something called Through the Ages. It would be cool if that was a real book, too. I haven’t been able to find it, but Life Through The Ages is the title of a Charles Knight art book.

In one image, Nolan has shown us all we need to know about Wilbur. Even I think this kid is a bit weird about dinosaurs.

What should happen to him but a real dinosaur should knock at his window. What are the odds! This is Gideon, our baby apatosaur, named, in-story, after that Gideon. I like how matter-of-factly Wilbur deals with having a dinosaur at his window. Guess we’ll have to take you back to the Jurassic.

As a sauropod reconstruction, Gideon is of its time. He came a couple of years after Littlefoot, and like Littlefoot he is an amalgamation of retro tropes – the rotund body shape, the slightly too mammalian feet, the wrinkly skin – and renaissance behaviour, being an intelligent, terrestrial creature that has its tail off the ground and seems to be able to run quite fast. I don’t really mind the placement of the ear or the overly large red eye. In a children’s book, the artist can get away with some anthropomorphization. The lumpy protrusions on its back, mimicking almost the look of human vertebrae, do look disturbing to me.

And so the boy and his dinosaur set off on foot to the Jurassic, as you do. What’s fun is that the book now takes us to the Jurassic in reverse chronological order, starting off in the Pleistocene and then going back in time. Only a handful of books move through time in this way, but it makes sense for this particular dream story. I don’t remember my own actual dreams to be quite this narratively coherent.

I like the angle for this image, the long evening shadows and the trail the two leave in the snow. The little shrubs sticking out of the snow are a lovely detail.

And so the sauropod comes eye to eye with woolly mammoths. We already know Nolan is a Charles Knight fan (he’s even dedicated the book to him). Knight has illustrated mammoths many times, but the dramatically posing one reminds me a lot more of Zdeněk Burian. Some lovely use of perspective here.

I like how Wilbur never rides the sauropod. Gideon never speaks, his integrity as an animal is kept intact, but he is no mere beast of burden, either.

In Smilodon, we once again strongly recognize the influence of Knight. Here, my suspension of disbelief is tested. No cat worth its salt would have any trouble at all with a leap like this. Those two are doomed. I have no trouble with people walking to the Jurassic as a narrative convention in a dream story, but you have to draw a line somewhere. I will give Nolan a brownie point for never calling it a saber-toothed “tiger”. It’s strictly a cat.

On the other side of the mountain, there’s the Cretaceous, so it’s Mesozoic cliché time! A perfectly conical volcano? Check. Pteranodons in the background? Check. Once again, all this can be narratively justified by the implication that the kid is dreaming. The Cretaceous looks like this to him, because his entire concept of the prehistoric world would have come from older dinosaur books.

I must say Gideon the dinosaur is consistently drawn with considerably more expression and personality than the human child, which I assume has been Nolan’s intent. Wilbur is intended to be the audience surrogate, so he doesn’t have much going on as a character. Wilbur, in his slippers, turns out to be a confident rock climber and goes out in front of Gideon… presumably to catch the latter if he falls?

As the characters look for where the Jurassic is, they disturb a Triceratops. Nolan makes the interesting choice to portray it from a high angle, looking down at its back and showing its silhouette in the shadow. I like that it’s quite belligerent, no peaceful herbivores here. The animal itself looks familiar to me, perhaps inspired by a toy.

What a fantastic monster is Tyrannosaurus rex. No dragon, no kaiju, no bugbear or boggart cooked up by the human imagination has ever been as frightening and good-looking as this creature from prehistory designed by Mother Nature herself. It works so well in a storybook fantasy setting; it’s the scaled-up, primordial version of the archetypal crocodile under the bed. No wonder all illustrators want to have a go at it.

Nolan’s version kinda bypasses the palaeoart tropes of the day and gives us a creature that borrows most closely from Charles Knight himself, although slightly updated. There’s a real early twentieth century vibe to this one, lumpy and twisted and corpulent and grinning. Something to scare the children. Even so, Nolan has given it no malice in its eye. Guillermo del Toro always says you shouldn’t give the monster a frown. It’s realer that way.

And then the Jurassic is reached, and the adults are found. It’s so interesting to me that in dinosaur fiction, sauropods are displayed so often as loving family, while in reality they were anything but. We humans find the concept of r-strategists (animals that get tons of young at a time and only expect a few individuals to survive) quite alien and horrifying, and we associate it with insects and fish, animals we don’t commonly find attractive. Surely an animal as likeable and charismatic as an Apatosaurus must be a caring mother, like an elephant? Nature sometimes works in completely counter-intuitive ways. Sea turtles also often get this treatment.

The Apatosaurus are large versions of young Gideon. They are terrestrial and have their tails up, but other than that they look like the rotund, elephantine creatures you’d expect to see in early 20th century palaeoart. The wrinkly skin is odd, not so much elephantine as worm-like. The triangular, diplodocid heads do look more modern than the blocky heads you’d see in classic brontosaurs, and Nolan manages to get quite a bit of personality out of those heads. The little throat sack, which Gideon also sports, is a nice creative flourish that helps give them a bit more character.

I mentioned Nolan had some educational aspirations with this book. I think Dinosaur Dream is best viewed as a fictional companion piece to the many non-fiction books any dinosaur kid in the early nineties would no doubt already have. It would be quite satisfying to see an adventure unfold with the right animals in the right, if reversed, order.

The book now tugs at our heart strings, as all “a boy and his dinosaur” stories must. Wilbur must inevitably say goodbye to his loyal friend Gideon. As one of the adult sauropods gives him his ride home, he fondly remembers all his adventures, and night falls on his dream. Aww.

Is Dinosaur Dream still considered a classic? I’d be curious to hear if anyone has fond memories of this book. I’m going to wear the hat of the straight-talking cynical Dutch critic for a second. I’ve checked out some of Dennis Nolan’s other works, and I won’t mince my words here: some of the books he lent his paintbrush to over his lifetime do look a bit naff. Clearly, Nolan was not someone who would shy away from schmaltz. I’d rather have my leg chewed by a T. rex than read a book on Francis of Assisi written by Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

It’s entirely possible that the cutesy and slightly sentimental nature of Dinosaur Dream is not to every dinosaur fan’s taste, either, but there’s a place for it. I’m not opposed to some cuteness every now and again, and this book at least never crosses the line into mawkishness. Dennis Nolan’s other dinosaur-centric works include Shadow of the Dinosaurs which seems to be a spiritual successor to this book, as well as his final book Dinosaur Feathers.