It feels like we’re doing this a lot now, but Marc, Gemma and Natee are once again reviewing a new television show with CGI dinosaurs! This time, the title is simply The Dinosaurs, a four-part miniseries on Netflix narrated by that fellow from Driving Miss Redemption of the Seven Penguins. Also, Marc has an in-depth chat with Dougal Dixon, the maestro of speculative evolution and the writer of half of all of our dinosaur books. He speaks enthousiastically about his…
You know, I’ve only done one Vintage Dinosaur Art project in the entire year of 2025? Granted, it was the mammoth, three part project on Marie Hubrecht at the Lyceum, the results of which are used in her biography, but still. It’s time to crank it up a notch, and the best way to pick up the pace is to scale back the size of the projects. Let’s do a cute children’s book. Dennis Nolan (1945-2022) was a painter in…
Zoos and dinosaurs. I have written a lot about Dutch zoos and dinosaurs on these pages. Most zoos in my home country have some degree of dinosaur presence, in the shape of permanent or temporary model exhibitions, interesting homemade sculptures, themed playgrounds or psychedelic light sculptures. But there was one zoo that had a full blown small natural history museum – complete with mounted dinosaur skeletons – as part of its permanent collection, fully integrated with the zoo and featuring…
We’re trying out something new for our first podcast episode of 2026! Marc, Natee and Gemma are joined by returning guest Christopher DiPiazza, teacher, palaeoartist and now budding palaeontologist. Not only does he fill us in about all his adventures working with fossils from the Maryland Dinosaur Park bone beds, he also joins us for our Vintage Dinosaur Art discussion. Chris introduces us to the work of Pam Mara as it appears in several volumes of Rourke dinosaur books. These…
I think enough time has passed between now and my previous write-up of the Harvard Museum of Natural History that I can post the other big museum I visited during my adventures in Massachusetts, in the summer of 2025. It’s in Boston proper, just about, less than three miles down the road from the Harvard museum in Cambridge, giving the people of greater Boston several quality museums to choose from. It follows that both museums would do well to differentiate…
In the season of Santa and weather so bleak, Three natural history nerds take a peek At young ancient mammals, so fluffy and twee As seen on the new show on Apple TV. In landscapes so snowy and icy and barren They go on adventures, instructed by Darren. Some get dehydrated and some weather-beaten, Alas, all too few of the babies get eaten. Is the show a success, or is it too hokey? Did the BBC trade in old David…
Gemma, Natee, and Marc are back for another attempt at entertaining prehistorically inclined people with carefully edited commentary and interviews with people who actually know what they’re talking about. In this episode, David Armsby’s back and better than ever, Darren Naish’s hair is slicker than ever, and Gemma interviews palaeobotanist and artist Julianne Kiely, who’s here to save us all from painfully generic and/or inaccurate flora in palaeoart. Will Gemma dare challenge Julianne’s assertion that plants are cooler than animals?…
When the days get shorter and leaves start to fall, there’s always a zoo somewhere in the Netherlands that gets taken over by dinosaurs. In previous years, I’ve covered dinosaur events at ZooParc Overloon and the former Dierenrijk, now Eindhoven Zoo. This year, to my mild surprise, it was the turn of our biggest and best zoo, the legendary Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem. Of course, the general quality of Burgers’, combined with the pretty great animatronic dinosaurs on display at…
Your Charmosaurs crew is here again with a cool new episode. This month, we’re discussing the works of the late, great Brian Franczak as it appears in The National Audubon Pocket Guide: Dinosaurs. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Mark, Natee and Gemma discuss the merits of an unfairly forgotten palaeo master of the ninetes. Then, old familiar voices Steve White and Darren Naish come on the show to discuss their new palaeoart compendium, Mesozoic Art II. Who is the…
It’s time to bring it home, the big project of discussing the seven massive paintings by Marie Hubrecht on the walls of the Joke Smit College, once the Girl’s Lyceum, in Amsterdam. Having discussed the major dinosaur painting first and the early stages of the Palaeozoic second, it’s time we crawl back up out of the time abyss, towards and into our familiar Mesozoic. In the middle of the Southern wall, above three different doorways, we have the second-largest painting…
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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.