Welcome back! You may have previously seen me cover the Ornithomimids and Troodon volumes in the Carolrohda Special Dinosaurs Series. As Don and Donna month enters its second month, it’s time to take a break from all those charmingly dated unfeathered ’90s coelurosaurs (don’t worry, they’ll be back) and take a look at a specialized volume of palaeontology and palaeoart that is charmingly dated in a completely different way! Published, again, in 1996, Seismosaurus – The Longest Dinosaur is the…
A big one for our twentieth, as today we discuss what is, so far, probably the most influential palaeoart book of the 21st centruy: the seminal All Yesterdays, by John Conway, Memo Kosemen and Darren Naish, which came out ten years ago (insert obligatory reference to how old we are). The book is famously full of outlandish and speculative takes on dinosaurs andotherprehistoricanimals and shook up the palaeoart world like a whirlwind… but does it hold up now? In anticipation…
It’s time for another entry into Don and Donna month, which will take more than a month but time is meaningless. Today, we look at a volume in the mid-90s Carolrhoda dinosaur series on specific dinosaurs, this one focusing on that big-eyed, big-brained, not at all venomous pint-sized predator that looked very different way back when. Sorry Mrs. Newhard, they didn’t do a thorough enough job censoring out your name. As reconstructed by Donna Braginetz, Troodon looks pretty much what…
It’s Don and Donna month here at LITC! I will be reviewing a few volumes in a series of books written by superstar dinosaur author, robot builder, TV presenter and firebrand “Dino” Don Lessem and illustrated by superstar palaeoartist Donna Braginetz. Published by Carolrhoda Books, each of these books is a small but in-depth entry level look at one species (or in this case family) of dinosaur, well researched and richly illustrated. Lessem worked with a few different palaeoartists in…
Last time, we explored the upper floor of the baroque 19th century palace that holds the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It’s time to descend the marble staircase into the past and take our journey through deep time, from the distant precambrian days to the Holocene. Maybe we’ll even meet some dinosaurs along the way, who knows? I hadn’t done any research beforehand, so I visited the museum with very limited knowledge and not much in the way of expectations.…
Greetings, one and all! Today’s episode features quite a contrast: the naïve, childish creatures illustrated by Hillary Stebbing in her 1946 children’s book Extinct Animals, contrasted against the gnarly, outlandish modern work of Zubin Erik Dutta, a true up-and-comer in the palaeoart world. How do horror and pin-ups influence dinosaur art? Does every ceratopsian scrap gets its own genus name? What on earth is a Jakapil? And how did we end up with a dinosaur book with no T. rex…
There’s many natural history museums in this world. Not many of them look like this: Granted, this isn’t the museum we’re talking about, although it does indeed look similar. The above image is of the nearly identical Kunsthistorisches Museum across the square. Cross the square, to the other side of the bombastic monument to Empress Maria Theresia. Here is the real subject of today’s excursion: That’s right, we’re in Vienna today and we’re going to see the famous Naturhistorisches Museum.…
We’re back on the trail of the dinosaurs with Mike Benton and Graham Rosewarne, two giants of the extremely niche genre of Popular British Dino Rennaissance Books (always well-represented on these pages). Last time, we looked mostly at Rosewarne’s panoramic compositions and found ourselves maybe a bit less than extremely impressed. But Rosewarne is at his best when drawing dinosaur profiles, and fortunately, this book allows him to do plenty of that. One of Rosewarne’s most famous and well-remembered creations…
Another day, another dinosaur book that is too bloody big for my scanner. Written by the ever-prolific Mike Benton and published in 1989, On The Trail Of The Dinosaurs is one in a series of three books on palaeontology and prehistoric life. There’s also separate volumes on palaeozoic and cenozoic animals. What makes this one of interest to us is that, in the life reconstructions, we recognize the steady hand of perennial LITC darling Graham Rosewarne. We mostly know Rosewarne…
Zoo Chorzów, or the Silesian Zoological Park, is located a stone’s throw from the centre of Katowice in the Upper Silesia region of southern Poland. The zoo was founded on its current location in 1954, as part of the Socialist-era post-mining development of a big city park also including an amusement park, a planetarium, a sports centre and an art gallery. And there’s dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Valley section of the zoo, or the Kotlina Dinozaurów, was finished in 1974. Originally,…
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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.