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Marc Vincent

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Creatures (Benwig Painting and Colouring Book No. 6)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

We haven’t featured too many colouring books on LITC – Victoria Arbour reviewed the Jurassic Park one for us back in 2018, and they popped up a few times in David’s seasonal gift guides (back when he was still doing those), but that’s really the sum of it. I am therefore rather happy to present Prehistoric Creatures, number 6 in the Benwig Painting and Colouring Book series, published by Benwig Books in 1971. Until I find the colouring book full…

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Podcast Show Notes: Episode 29 – Life On Our Planet and Emily Stepp

Podcast Show Notes

Niels, Natee and Marc look forward to TetZooCon, chat about recent museum visits, and continue to shamelessly plug the new merchandise designed by The Founder, David Orr. Then, in lieu of Vintage Dinosaur Art, they – and special guest Agata Stachowiak – discuss the Netflix series Life On Our Planet, in which Morgan Freeman gravels his way through an intriguing mix of modern-day wildlife footage and CGI recreations of creatures from Deep Time. Finally, Niels and Marc discuss unlikely hybrids,…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Learn About Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art

As I’ve mentioned before, the promise of learning more about dinosaurs is an excellent way to compel young children to learn how to read, and so it’s unsurprising that so many books aimed at beginner readers feature them. Learn About Dinosaurs, published in 1990 by New Seasons as part of their Leap Frog series, is a very typical example. Not terribly remarkable, perhaps, but I’m sure it’ll be sweetly nostalgic for a few of our millennial readers and, hey, those…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Animals (Purnell Library of Knowledge)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Purnell’s prehistoric animal books of the 1970s – of which there were several, of varying quality (as mostly featured on LITC Mk 1) – attract a great deal of nostalgic fondness from people, uh, a little older than me. The fact that their output seemed to dry up from the 1980s onwards becomes a lot more explicable when one learns of how the company fell into the hands of notorious crook and amateur yachtsman Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell, and consequently…

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Thunder Beast: It Came From 1993

Toys

Ever run into someone whom you haven’t seen in years – or even decades – in a very unlikely place? A couple of weeks ago I went out for pizza in Leicester with Agata, and the somewhat quirky restaurant we visited had a small table inhabited by a range of rather ugly, cheap, chunky dinosaur figures. Most of them I recognised from recent forays in toy and gift shops (and the Natural History Museum gift shop, sadly), but one of…

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EX|TERRA – review

Book Review

If I were to sum up EX|TERRA, Welsh artist Andy Frazer‘s compendium of his 2022 palaeo-output, in a single word, it would have to be: caruncles. Make no mistake – if you are at all perturbed by the extraneous fleshy appendages present on the necks and faces of turkeys (and various other birds), then you’d best stay a great distance away from this book. Frazer is avowedly a fan of ‘weird’ dinosaurs, and in this case, ‘weird’ would appear to…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art

As a slim paperback from the 1970s aimed at very young, beginner readers, and published by Scholastic, you might well expect Giant Dinosaurs to be yet another book filled with Charles Knight knock-offs. And about half of it is. However, the other half features – quite unexpectedly – amusing cartoons of dinosaurs being a nuisance in the modern world. It’s making learning fun! Giant Dinosaurs was first published in 1973, with this edition arriving in 1979. Erna Rowe wrote the…

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The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers – review

Book Review

Back in 2021, plesiosaur-lovin’ scientist Adam Smith collaborated with author Jonathan Emmett and illustrator Adam Larkum to bring us Adam’s first children’s book – which was, naturally enough, all about plesiosaurs. Or rather, one particular plesiosaur species, namely Albertonectes vanderveldei. Now, Smith and Emmett are back, joined this time by artist Stieven van der Poorten, for a book that’s all about…Tyrannosaurus rex. But wait! It’s actually about how reconstructions of the animal have changed through time, and why. So it’s not as…

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T. rex and Triceratops in Speaking of Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Speaking of Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Dinosaurs have encouraged a great many kids to improve their reading skills – best way to find out all about ’em, after all – so it’s only natural that books of a saurian bent have appeared in a number of reading schemes through the years. (I’ve certainly covered a few before – just don’t ask me to find them in the haystack.) Speaking of Dinosaurs was first published in 1979 (with this edition arriving in 1983) as part of the…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Jurassic Park toy collector cards

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Brian Franczak was one of the best palaeoartists around in the early ’90s, and I still feel (as I did a couple of years ago) that we don’t feature his work here quite enough. Happily, then, an opportunity presents itself in the 30th anniversary of That Movie. You know the one: Unix systems, expensive ice cream, disappointingly flimsy road signs. All that stuff. I didn’t fancy writing yet another article praising that movie to the skies for how groundbreaking and…

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