Following my first post on Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Life (aka Prehistoric Life, part of the In School and At Home series in Russia in the ’90s), at least four people wanted me to carry on and review some of the non-Mesozoic, non-dinosaurian illustrations. So here we go! Rather than start with the smelly mammals of the Cenozoic, I’d prefer it if we could first go back to a simpler, better time…the Permian, or possibly the early Triassic. (Who can tell?)…
“Seaton Tramway operates narrow gauge heritage trams between Seaton, Colyford and Colyton in East Devon’s glorious Axe Valley,” according to their website, providing superb views across the wetland habitats of curlews, lapwings, egrets, shelducks, swans, and many more. But just in case you’d rather see Mesozoic dinosaurs, Seaton Tramway (Enterprises) Ltd. also operates Jurassic Discovery, a venue filled with robotic saurians located directly next to their Seaton station. (And an indoor soft play area, but that doesn’t concern us.) What’s…
In the decade before the Normanpedia appeared and all and sundry decided to slavishly copy John Sibbick’s work, Giovanni Caselli’s illustrations for Halstead’s The evolution and ecology of the Dinosaurs were often held up as the gold standard. Or so it would seem, based on the number of imitators. (Incidentally, did you know that there is a greater timespan between my review of the Halstead book and now than between Tyrannosaurus and humans?) This week’s example is Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of…
Gregory Wenzel’s gorgeous Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is well deserving of a second entry, especially as I showed my terrible theropod bias last time. Given the predominance of carnivores in the previous post, why not kick off with the completely harmless, very innocent and almost certainly meek and impeccably well-behaved Dryosaurus this time? While certainly not a Giant Dinosaur, Dryosaurus helps flesh out the wider ecosystem surrounding Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and the rest. While it maintains the same rather sleek, Paulian aesthetic as the…
In this no-doubt pivotal 50th episode of the somewhat irregular LITC podcast, Gemma and Marc interview Tim Haines about his latest televisual venture featuring CG recreations of prehistoric animals in photogenic settings – Surviving Earth! But before that, a short preamble packs in Isle of Wight shoutouts, Thai-ropods (or something like that), and Gemma’s boundless flair for the dramatic. In the News Marc’s been back to the Dinosaur Expeditions Centre on the Isle of Wight, the home base and showcase…
As regular readers will hopefully be aware, our sole criterion for Vintage Dinosaur Art is that the art in question must be at least 20 years old. (We’re also aware that ‘vintage’ is not synonymous with ‘old’, but you don’t mess with the brand.) Now that we are – rather frighteningly – well into the 2020s, that means works from the 2000s now fall within our purview. Unfortunately, the era immediately after Walking With Dinosaurs saw many publishers demanding ‘photo real’…
While John Sibbick Normanpedia knock-offs were pretty ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the illustrations in this book just might be unique in combining classic Sibbickisms with a more John McLoughlin-like, monochrome, stipply style. A rather obscure little volume very kindly sent over from the States by Herman Diaz, The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs was published in 1990 by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Audubon Society, written by Joseph K Slap (great name), and illustrated by Elaine…
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…
Imagine, if you will, that I’m reciting all of this to you in the absolute gravelliest of tones – a voice that’s like a multi-tonne load cascading from a dumper truck that’s just returned from the deepest pits of an enormous quarry site. And I’ve been pouring neat whisky on my breakfast cereal and gargling small shards of flinty rock after brushing my teeth with sand. For many years, the empaahrr of the CG dahnosaur documentahries was thought to have…
Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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.