Regular readers (we have some, right?) will be aware that our sole criterion for a book’s inclusion in Vintage (=Old) Dinosaur Art is that it be 20 years old. Consequently, books from the early 2000s have now entered our purview. It was a time when, in the wake of Walking With Dinosaurs, publishers demanded increasing numbers of CG creations in lieu of more traditional illustrations and model photography. Dorling Kindersley (aka DK) very much followed this trend, inserting very dodgy…
Seatbelts, everyone! A few weeks ago I reviewed The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs, and mused at the end that I might have to seek out the TV episode on the same theme…which was in no way an appeal for commenters to do the work for me and provide a link, oh no. (As if I’d be so lazy.) Nevertheless, Zain Ahmed obligingly provided a link to a YouTube video. Thanks, Zain! (Admittedly, it’s not exactly…
The Magic School Bus franchise was a big deal at exactly the right sort of time for it to have impacted my childhood, but it completely passed me by – probably because I’m British, and it wasn’t quite as well known here. I do have vague memories of a fantastical yellow bus (which was a bit of an alien concept – the yellow school bus, that is) that could fly through space and whatnot, but that’s about it. A shame,…
While at TetZooCon 2024 (the last one ever! Sort of), I took the opportunity to pick up the latest book from Dave Hone (for it is he) – Uncovering Dinosaur Behaviour: What They Did and How We Know, published by Princeton University Press (in early November for the non-TZC-going public). Dave’s previous book, The Future of Dinosaurs (known as How Fast Could T. rex Run? in the US for reasons best understood by the publishers) was certainly a decent read,…
Today’s entry is rather similar in concept to the later Dinosaur Park, which I reviewed back in 2020, but quite unlike the DK ACTION PACK (in spite of the rather similar title). It would appear to be a straightforward book at first glance, but upon opening an instruction is immediately given to prise out the staples and then remove all the pages. What’s this, a book that wants you to destroy it?! Of course not – well, sort of, actually,…
The palaeontologist Dr William Elgin Swinton (W E Swinton to you) is perhaps best known, in the context of popular books about dinosaurs at least, for works published by the Natural History Museum (or the British Museum (Natural History) as it then properly was) that featured artwork by Neave Parker. I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time. However, it’d be…
It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, hasn’t it? Personally, the first half of this year felt like a good 2 years in itself, such were the Life Events that happened. Things have settled down now, though, so I’m hoping to get back to more frequent posting. Why not start with another in The Child’s World dinosaur series (because I have it handy)? Triceratops was published in 1988, written by Janet Riehecky (of course) and illustrated by Diana Magnuson…
As children, we’re all told the same story about the scientific evolution of Iguanodon, one of the earliest-named dinosaurs – how it went from a whale-sized lizard (some kind of ‘cetiosaur’, if you will. OK, not that), to a mono-horned quadruped, to a tail-dragging thumbs-upping tripod, to the mean and muscular, mostly quadrupedal but facultatively bipedal, intimidatingly brutish beast we know today. Along the way, we’re typically encouraged to have a good old chuckle at just how wrong people got…
One month on from the last entry, here’s another slice of the early ’90s dinosaur book series from The Child’s World, this time featuring everyone’s favourite misunderstood, misnamed, cassowary-casqued* weirdo, Oviraptor. Diana Magnuson, who illustrated the Megalosaurus book, also provided the artwork here. In the main, it’s a considerable improvement over her work on Megalosaurus, although that might have been because up-to-the-minute reference material and illustrations of Megalosaurus were hard to come by at the time, while Oviraptor was enjoying…
Ornithomimosaurs: they almost always get a mention, but are hardly ever in the spotlight (except for that crazy giant one). How fortunate, then, that The Child’s World saw fit to dedicate an entire volume in their series of dinosaur books to Ornithomimus, a pretty vanilla ornithomimosaur if ever I did see one. (It’s a good thing that there’s no such thing as a specialist ornithomimosaur researcher, so no one can take me up on that.) What’s more, it has some…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.