Time for another round of The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. No, not that one – the one from 1988, written by Mary Elting and illustrated by Christopher Santoro. As an aside, I didn’t say too much about Santoro last time, and I probably should have. He’s an accomplished and much-lauded illustrator of children’s books …
I check the copyright page, and I check it again. 1993? Really? Surely that can’t be true. Surely this book is at least fifteen years newer than that. But no. The proof is right there, undeniable, clear as day. What sorcery is this? Who stole a time machine? How is this book so good? That …
Here’s a book that feels like it could’ve come straight out of my childhood, although in reality the first time I ever saw it was just a few weeks ago. Published in 1988 by Western Publishing under the Golden Book banner, it is (at least, in name) a direct successor to a Zallinger-illustrated classic. In …
Funny story, this one. As a science educator, I visit primary schools all over the country, and I often can’t resist scanning their school libraries for dinosaur books. Most of the time, I run into these awful late-2000’s stock-CGI schlockfests, but last week, I hit paydirt. A beautifully illustrated German-made children’s book from the late …
As you can well imagine, I’ve read a fair few dinosaur books from the latter half of the twentieth century, and while they are almost always dated in just about every respect, there are very few that stun me with their sheer strangeness. One can well understand outdated views on dinosaur evolutionary history, anatomy and …
The Last Dinosaur is a strange little book I remember reading as a dinosaur-obsessed kid. I thought it was quite neat at the time. Re-reading it now, however, I’ve gained a new appreciation for just how unusual this book is. The Last Dinosaur (no relation to the 1977 tokusatsu film) was written by Jim Murphy …
Having done the obligatory theropods, it’s time to take a second look at The Strange World of Dinosaurs, one of those dinosaur books where the author – John Ostrom – is considerably more well-known than the artist. Joseph Sibal’s pencil illustrations, printed in either red or green, are competent and lush and amusingly of their …
Although I became interested in dinosaurs before the release of that film in 1993, it was only just before, and as such I’m a tiny bit too young to remember Dinosaur!, a 1991 TV series that featured as consultant none other than sexily shiny-domed Iguanodon expert Dr David Norman. Yes, the very same Dr Norman …
The year is 1964 and, although he doesn’t know it yet, Yale palaeontologist John H. Ostrom is about to make history. In the summer of that year, he will embark on an expedition to Montana where he will make some remarkable discoveries. Five years later, he will be publishing one of the most game-changing papers …
Because I’ll wring two blog posts out of any old thing, here’s another round for 1997’s Dinosaurs, part of the Identifying series from The Apple Press. In my previous post, I mentioned that The Mighty Graham Rosewarne had only contributed a single sauropodomorph (Anchisaurus) to this book. But – as so many people have in …