Vintage Dinosaur Art: All About Dinosaurs – Part 2

By the popular request of a single commenter, here’s yet more All About Dinosaurs, written by Rupert Oliver, illustrated by Bernard Long, and first published in 1983 (with this edition arriving in 1990). I conveniently forgot that said commenter (Andreas Johansson) enthusiastically responded to the promise of more non-dinosaurs that I might have made, and have instead mostly scanned a number of further dinosaur illustrations by Long. Hurrah!

We’ll start with this Corythosaurus, for it actually serves as the frontispiece for the book. Although all of the hadrosaurs that appear here are wonderfully upright, tottering and retro, this one is surely the best simply for those webbed hands that resemble the feet of some aberrant waterfowl. Aside from the obvious pre-Dino Renaissance flourishes, you’ll note that it has oddly theropod-like feet…although not waterfowl-like. Long’s rendering of knobbly scaly skin here is particularly excellent.

Throughout the book, the illustrations are a mix of dino-portraits that occupy a single page alongside double-page spreads that usually show animals interacting. Brachiosaurus (or, Giraffatitan) is an obvious candidate for the former, and it’s another wonderfully retro piece; the blue-grey colour palette is suitably moody, and handy pterosaurs help emphasise the animal’s scale in a Casselian fashion. We’re past the era of swamp-dwelling sauropods here, but not quite beyond an image of them as tail-dragging dullards, which would persist into the early ’90s. This brachiosaur has a particularly fat and peculiarly long dragging tail, which we can probably attribute to a dearth of decent reference material. I mean, it was 1983, you couldn’t just ask generative AI to churn out an image clearly based on the Brachiosaurus from Jurassic Park.

One of my favourite vertical-format images is the above Ornitholestes, which is depicted reaching out to grab something, as is tradition. It’s not some other, featherier coelurosaur this time, though, but instead a suspiciously varanid-looking lizard. This is a beautifully painted piece, in particular the animal’s skin (once again), the foliage, and the clouds in the distance. Long could well have splurged blue all over the background and called it a day, but instead we’re treated to a distractingly gorgeous stormcloud in the distance. Nice.

As for the dinosaur, it’s a little retrograde for the time, what with its under-muscled limbs. But then, that’s true of pretty much every dinosaur depicted here.

Although it’s spared a confrontation with Ornitholestes (which lived at a different time on another continent, but that never stopped anyone), Archaeopteryx does appear here, with suitably vibrant pheasant-like plumage. Archaeopteryx is always either monochrome or ultra-flamboyant, and there can be nothing in between. The fantastic flora here, and the superb depiction of sunlight breaking through a forest canopy, are almost enough for me to forgive this being another Archaeopteryx with nonsense hands. But you know me – I’m one of those people who huffs and harrumphs on seeing an errant apostrophe in a word that’s clearly a plural, and honestly, who doesn’t know that one need not include an apostrophe in a plural, and that feathers are attached to manual digits? I’m great fun at parties. But I digress.

And now, here’s one of those non-dinosaurs for poor old, long suffering Andreas. This is a very attractive depiction of the ichthyosaur Nannopterygius, which probably wasn’t as elongated as this from what I can tell, but then I know nothing about the fish-lizards. Its smooth, hydrodynamic shape and dolphin-like markings are especially pleasing. It’s one of my favourite illustrations in the whole book.

And now for some more dinosaurs. When Long wasn’t homaging Caselli, he would appear to have been dead keen on Peter Snowball’s work as seen in Charig’s A New Look at the Dinosaurs. Both the Deinonychus and Psittacosaurus in the above piece appear to have been copied from Snowball’s work, although the more memorable Deinonychus is the most obvious. Its pose has been altered and its colouration changed to green, but it’s still quite clearly based on Snowball’s work. Mind you, it does make a change from all the Bakker clones, and the background is, once again, very nice indeed.

Further multi-dinosaur scenes include the above piece featuring what would appear to be Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, except the latter is actually Apatosaurus. Yes, that’s right, not Brontosaurus as one might expect, given the camarasaur-like head and all, but Apatosaurus. Given that this isn’t the first edition, there’s every chance that it was originally referred to as Brontosaurus, but never mind. For all that it’s obviously a very retro palaeoart piece, this illustration does do a good job at presenting  the scale of these animals, giving a human’s-eye-view of Diplodocus easily feeding from the tops of some trees, but still being dwarfed by others. The Diplodocus in particular does also hang together well as a convincing-looking animal, with a suitable sense of mass and anatomy that makes intuitive sense.

And finally…Stegosaurus in a storm. This is definitely based on another piece, although I can’t quite remember if it’s by Caselli, Rod Ruth or someone else. In any case, for my money, it’s very dynamic and engaging, portraying an animal that stands firm against anything threatening it (without a marauding allosaur in sight). It’s another wonderful example of a generalist natural history illustrator turning in an artwork that goes far beyond what we might have expected, even if the dinosaur is retro for the time. I like it.