All Posts By

Marc Vincent

Uncovering Dinosaur Behaviour – review

Book Review

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,…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Dinosaur Action Set (Book One!)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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,…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Corridor of Life

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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 I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time.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…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Triceratops (Dinosaur books from The Child’s World)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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…

Continue Reading

Crystal Palace dinner party by Sean Rubin

The Iguanodon’s Horn – review

Book Review

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…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Oviraptor (Dinosaur books from The Child’s World)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Ornithomimus (Dinosaur books from The Child’s World)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Saltasaurus (Dinosaur books from The Child’s World)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Saltasaurus – the little armoured titanosaur that could – was a staple of popular dinosaur books in the ’80s and ’90s, following its naming in 1980. Sadly, since then, it has largely disappeared from view – displaced, no doubt, by certain much, much larger other South American titanosaurs. Of course, I’ve said all this before, not to mention hosted an art competition based around a terrible pun, but it remains as true today as it was 11 years ago. Alas,…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurus – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

In my previous post we took a look at Dinosaurus, a 1998 volume that I now know is essentially a compendium of the Looking At…Dinosaurs series, featuring much of the same dreadful artwork. (Thank you commenters!) For reasons best known to the publishers, artist Tony Gibbons – who was responsible for some of the weirder illustrations that appeared in the early issues of Dinosaurs! magazine in 1993 – was here let loose on dozens of pretty painful illustrations of dinosaurs,…

Continue Reading

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurus – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

When I first started writing for this blog – many, many years ago now, possibly even as long ago as 2009 – I was accused of being overly-critical. “Who cares if a dinosaur’s gross anatomy shifts considerably from one illustration to the next?” “You’re pissing all over a classic!” You know, that sort of thing. And the accusers had a point, at least some of the time. As I’ve got older I’ve certainly mellowed – not to mention got to…

Continue Reading