It’s time. Time to tackle the Big Effing Book. It’s been out for years, it’s got our name written all over it and most of us have seen it by now. I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but there’s no more reason for delay. It’s time. Preamble ramble: In my review of the palaeoart exhibition at Teylers Museum, I complained that Zoë Lescaze’s book was too expensive and too heavy to buy at that time. My endless complaining…
What began with an examination of 1994’s Eyewitness Dinosaur video has lead me to this – purchasing a children’s activity pack from eBay. Ah, but not any children’s activity pack, for this one includes warm 1990s nostalgia alongside a pop-out card model, board game and (gasp!) “five facsimile documents”. Yes, it’s the DK ACTION PACK that, in true Eyewitness style, is simply entitled Dinosaur – even if it isn’t branded up with the monochromatic all-seeing eye. My copy may have…
As promised, here’s some more from Dinosaur, part of the Eyewitness Guides series, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary – and not a Diplodocus in sight. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the emphasis of this book is definitely not on life reconstructions, which always play second fiddle to gloriously large photographs of fossil specimens. It’s an approach that I doubt a publisher would encourage these days, and indeed the most recent edition of Dinosaur leans far more heavily on (often…
Last month, I finally got around to reviewing the Eyewitness Dinosaur video from 1994, part of a series spun off from the Eyewitness Guides books published by Dorling Kindersley. It occurred to me then that I’d never actually reviewed the Dinosaur book itself, which prompted a quick scouring of eBay for a copy – preferably as old and cheap as possible. Having bought what I thought was a 1989 edition for less than the price of a pint, I was…
So, do you think you can palaeoart? As a reader of this blog, it’s quite likely that you’ve had a pop at restoring a prehistoric animal on paper (or, these days, on a screen – damn kids) at some point in your life. Even if it was just a silly doodle in order to enter one of our superb competitions. But if you want to get serious about your palaeoart, there’s an awful lot to consider – both scientific details…
Back in August, I received a couple of books from regular reader Herman Diaz (along with some very fetching duck prints), one of which – My Favorite Dinosaurs – I’ve already reviewed as a pair of Vintage Dinosaur Art posts. I must admit, I’ve been putting off this one simply because it’s an awkward sort of age – as it’s from 2005, it’s not quite old enough qualify for Vintage Dinosaur Art (yes, even by my very loose standards), but…
Why don’t we see any four-winged feathered dinosaurs, these days? Time was, not so many hundreds of millions of years ago, that various theropods sported quite well-developed vaned feathers not just on their forelimbs, but on their hind limbs as well. The most famous, and perhaps most flamboyant of these animals (that we know of) was Microraptor, a small four-winged dromaeosaur known from fossils that, even given their tiny size by dinosaur standards, are among the most spectacular ever found.…
It’s very seldom that I’ll buy a book having never read a review – never mind one where I have no idea what’s inside it. I came upon Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom purely by chance in an independent bookshop in a nearby town, and found it hard to resist a cellophane-wrapped box sporting Charles Knight’s famous tumbling dryptosaurs. The choice of cover image seemed telling – surely anyone willing to plaster that all over their brand new…
Some palaeoart books – many palaeoart books – are monumental hardback affairs, printed on the very sheeniest of glossy paper, sufficiently large that casually reading them on the train to work is quite impossible without drawing attention to yourself. (Not that I speak from personal experience, or anything.) Their pages burst with colour, as awe-inspiringly rendered, hyper-realistic vanished beasts of the past threaten to burst forth from their papery confines. They are, in short, Worthy. They are Art Books dealing…
Any dinosaur book aimed at a popular audience has a few core responsibilities. It needs to impart the latest scientific consensus on its subjects, give a digestible explanation of how various branches of dinosauria evolved over time, explain their broader evolutionary context, and explain convincingly that the birds are The Dinosaurs Who Lived. I’m sure others could add must-haves I’d consider tacking on. Steve Brusatte’s recently-published The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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.