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…
Marc Vincent
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…
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (Kingfisher My First Encyclopedia)
Vintage Dinosaur Art November 4, 2025Right 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…
If, like me, you struggle to keep up with the glut of quality palaeoart emanating from all corners of the world these days, then Steve White and Darren Naish have another book for you. The sequel to 2022’s Mesozoic Art (and spiritual successor to the earlier Dinosaur Art books), Mesozoic Art II, is a fatter-than-ever compendium of the work of no fewer than 25 palaeoartists (as opposed to the paltry 20 found in MA1). Whereas the leaps between Dinosaur Art, Dinosaur Art II and Mesozoic…
Who’d like some more Rosewarne? In my last post on The Reign of the Reptiles, looking predominantly at illustrations depicting contemporaneous animals in prehistoric landscapes, I mentioned that there were also a great many illustrations of individual animals isolated against white backgrounds, and that I’d consider a follow-up post if anyone actually read that far and wanted to see them. Well, someone did! BrianL left the following comment: The smaller illustrations in The Reign of the Reptiles, like the Dimorphodon…
Graham Rosewarne was an artist whose work greatly elevated my beloved Dinosaurs! magazine (published by Orbis in the 1990s), alongside that by the likes of Jim Robins and Steve White. Unfortunately, books featuring work of his that isn’t just recycled from Dinosaurs! can be a little difficult to come by. I was therefore quite pleased to happen upon The Reign of the Reptiles in The Warehouse Antiques & Collectables while over in Norfolk (a shop we definitely didn’t just visit because it’s adjoined…
We are going to be talking about Dinocon, honest. But until then, here are some of the other illustrations from The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs, first published in 2000 (this edition’s from 2002). In my last post, I looked at some (most, really) of Steve White’s contributions; this time, I’ll be featuring work from (deep breath) John Butler, Chris Christoforou, John Egan, Roger Goode, Philip Hood, Mark Iley, David McAllister, Martin McKenna, Michael Posen, and Tim White. Although because individual artists aren’t…
Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs – part 1 (Steve White ’90s bonanza!)
Vintage Dinosaur Art August 5, 2025Today’s title is mostly a prime example of late ’90s – early 2000s kiddie book filler, but no doubt thanks to the arcane rules of licensing it manages to feature some interesting artwork all the same. The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs (not to be confused with the vastly superior DK book from ’93) was first published in 2000 by Parragon, with this edition arriving in 2002. No fewer than 12 artists illustrated this book, but individual pieces are sadly not credited.…
Three years have passed since “the epic conclusion of the Jurassic era”, Jurassic World Dominion, the first in the series that I didn’t bother going to see in the cinema – mostly because Fallen Kingdom was bad and Dominion garnered dreadful reviews. I did catch it later on a borrowed DVD, and have to concur with the majority opinion that it’s the worst of the lot. In any case, we were all expecting the franchise to go on hiatus after such an “epic…
After a mere 12 years, it’s time to bring the Dinosaur Dynasty series to a close with the, er, penultimate book (at least according to the order presented on the back cover). If you’d like to look over the set in the correct order, I’ll list them at the end of this post. For now, here’s A Closer Look, published (as with all the others) in 1993 by Highlights for Children in the US and Watts Books in the UK, and…












