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Vintage Dinosaur Art

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art

The Magic School Bus franchise was a big deal at exactly the right sort of time for it to have impacted my childhood, but it completely passed me by – probably because I’m British, and it wasn’t quite as well known here. I do have vague memories of a fantastical yellow bus (which was a bit of an alien concept – the yellow school bus, that is) that could fly through space and whatnot, but that’s about it. A shame,…

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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,…

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 I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time.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

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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…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art, maybe: De dinosauriërs (Kennis Compact)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

The concept of “bad art” has been occupying my mind lately, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course. Bad palaeoart, especially. It is my firmly-held belief that even the shoddiest work made by human hand has infinitely more value than any image artificially created by a learning, plagiarizing algorithm. No matter how many works by Tony Gibbons and F. John we have to plough through on these pages, this will still be essentially true. All contributions to…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Záhada Dinosaurů – Part 3

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Oops, I guess it’s been a while. I promised you part three of that big Czech book from 1993, and here it is. If you need a refresher, and I imagine you do, here’s part one and part two again. So far, we’ve seen sauropods with trunks, theropods with fish heads, more sauropods with trunks, attempts at feathering and lots of mood and atmosphere. Also sauropods with trunks. Let’s see what other strange wonders Barbora Kyšková has in store for…

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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…

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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…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Záhada Dinosaurů – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

No doubt you’ve seen part one of our deep dive into Záhada Dinosaurů, this obscure gem from Czechia, written by Jaroslav Mareš and illustrated by Barbora Kyšková. Obscure unless you’re Czech, that is, in which case you will probably know this book very well. The comments on this and other platforms tell me it’s a divisive book, with divisive artwork, and Jaroslav Mareš a divisive character. We’ve already seen most of the theropods, but a big aspect of the book’s…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Záhada Dinosaurů – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Today’s book has gotten some attention recently on some of the palaeoart-centered Facebook groups we frequent. It features little-seen but high quality art from the nineties. Once I saw it, I knew I had to track this book down. This was not straightforward. Not only is this book only available in Czech, it is only available from Czech booksellers that only ship to Czechia. I managed to nab a copy off Rostislav Walica, so kudos to him. I now (maybe?)…

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