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…
Last month I reviewed A Guide to Earth History, our first foray into the world of Maurice Wilson’s illustrations in quite some time. At the end of said article, I asked readers (we still have them!) to let me know where I might find more Wilson excellence, and Alexander Guridov duly answered – by sending me scans of Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles, first published “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY)” in 1954, with this second…
Bernard Robinson is an artist whose work I’ve always been happy to stumble upon, ever since I first reviewed the Ladybird book Dinosaurs back in 2011 (can you believe I’ve been writing this twaddle for over 15 years? Me neither). He was extremely skilled at placing tangible-looking, highly detailed and very scaly dinosaurs in lush, evocative settings, and both the quality of his work and its obviously retro nature (by post-Dino Renaissance standards) make it hugely nostalgic for many. Yes, even…
Should you ever visit the historic Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know), be sure to drop by the superb Ironbridge Book Shop. There you’ll find a huge range of classic Pelican paperbacks for sale, a series created by Penguin in 1937 to provide some low-cost intellectual stimulation for the masses. I visited back in November and managed to pick up A Guide to Earth History, which stood out to me for a very obvious…
By popular request – and by that, I mean literally a single person asked for it – here’s another little look at Dinosaurs, published in 2000 as part of Kingfisher’s My First Encyclopedia series, although all of the content dates to 1994 (and it shows). As the last post featured a lot of work by Ann Winterbotham, it’s only fair that the work of the other illustrators gets an airing this time. Don’t say I don’t spoil you, Andrew McLeod. While…
Back in 2016, Dave Hone (for it was he) wrote The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, a book all about the best little clade of theropod dinosaurs that there ever was. Earlier this year saw the publication of Mark Witton’s King Tyrant, a book also dedicated to tyrannosaurs and one species in particular (can you guess?). Now, the two have joined forces to produce a book about…spinosaurs! Well, they’ve surely written enough about tyrannosaurs at this point. What’s more, it’s unsurprisingly rather good, although I…
Right then – who remembers this one? Hopefully quite a few of you, as it was originally published in 1990 in hardback as part of the Young World series, with this paperback recycling appearing in 2000. It may well have been translated into other languages, too (Agata seems to remember a Polish edition). It’s just one of the hundreds and hundreds (probably) of kids’ books about dinosaurs churned out by well-known palaeontologist Michael Benton while on his coffee breaks in…
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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.