Following my first post on Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Life (aka Prehistoric Life, part of the In School and At Home series in Russia in the ’90s), at least four people wanted me to carry on and review some of the non-Mesozoic, non-dinosaurian illustrations. So here we go! Rather than start with the smelly mammals of the Cenozoic, I’d prefer it if we could first go back to a simpler, better time…the Permian, or possibly the early Triassic. (Who can tell?)…
In the decade before the Normanpedia appeared and all and sundry decided to slavishly copy John Sibbick’s work, Giovanni Caselli’s illustrations for Halstead’s The evolution and ecology of the Dinosaurs were often held up as the gold standard. Or so it would seem, based on the number of imitators. (Incidentally, did you know that there is a greater timespan between my review of the Halstead book and now than between Tyrannosaurus and humans?) This week’s example is Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of…
Gregory Wenzel’s gorgeous Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is well deserving of a second entry, especially as I showed my terrible theropod bias last time. Given the predominance of carnivores in the previous post, why not kick off with the completely harmless, very innocent and almost certainly meek and impeccably well-behaved Dryosaurus this time? While certainly not a Giant Dinosaur, Dryosaurus helps flesh out the wider ecosystem surrounding Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and the rest. While it maintains the same rather sleek, Paulian aesthetic as the…
Last time, we took a look at some of the many theropods illustrated by Tim Bradley for the now-defunct Jurassic Park Institute Dinopedia. Let’s check out a few more of those before moving on to the sauropods. Thanks again to Tim for providing these illustrations, it’s a real pleasure to be able to see them again after all these years! I foolishly neglected to include a tyrannosaur last time, so here’s Daspletosaurus to make up for it. The intensity of the blue,…
As regular readers will hopefully be aware, our sole criterion for Vintage Dinosaur Art is that the art in question must be at least 20 years old. (We’re also aware that ‘vintage’ is not synonymous with ‘old’, but you don’t mess with the brand.) Now that we are – rather frighteningly – well into the 2020s, that means works from the 2000s now fall within our purview. Unfortunately, the era immediately after Walking With Dinosaurs saw many publishers demanding ‘photo real’…
You all know about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. In my lifetime, these went from the poster children of outdated, stodgy views of ponderous swamp dinosaurs, to being the most celebrated monuments of early dinosaur art around. And they are not alone. I’ve made it my mission to visit as many historic, unique dinosaur models in Europe as I can find, such as Boudewijn Bollee’s dinosaurs of Artis in Amsterdam and the dinosaurs of Chorzów Zoo in Poland. This spring, I…
While John Sibbick Normanpedia knock-offs were pretty ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the illustrations in this book just might be unique in combining classic Sibbickisms with a more John McLoughlin-like, monochrome, stipply style. A rather obscure little volume very kindly sent over from the States by Herman Diaz, The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs was published in 1990 by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Audubon Society, written by Joseph K Slap (great name), and illustrated by Elaine…
It might be hard to believe these days, but the Jurassic Park franchise was once used as a force for palaeontological education. The Jurassic Park Institute website, a kid-friendly hub for dinosaur edutainment, went online in 2001 to coincide with the release of the infamously divisive Jurassic Park 3. This site was a mainstay for my generation of dinosaur lovers, hosting a huge array of articles, activities, and games. Arguably the biggest draw of the site was the Dinopedia. This…
By the popular request of a single commenter, here’s yet more All About Dinosaurs, written by Rupert Oliver, illustrated by Bernard Long, and first published in 1983 (with this edition arriving in 1990). I conveniently forgot that said commenter (Andreas Johansson) enthusiastically responded to the promise of more non-dinosaurs that I might have made, and have instead mostly scanned a number of further dinosaur illustrations by Long. Hurrah! We’ll start with this Corythosaurus, for it actually serves as the frontispiece for the…
Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…
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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.