It’s the triumphant return of The Giant Book of Dinosaurs, everyone’s fifth or sixth favourite children’s dinosaur book from the 1980s to be written by Mike Benton. As we’ve already examined the book’s theropods, let’s turn now to the lesser dinosaurs that pad out the rest of this irritatingly proportioned book – starting with the …
They say you can tell a lot about a person from looking at their bookshelf, and recently I found out that my friend Bas was the kind of person who had a dinosaur book from the nineties that I hadn’t seen yet. Those are the best kind of people. Bas has good memories of his …
Hello! With the review of the actual movie out of the way, today I’m going to review all the creatures great and small from Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time! Somebody’s gotta do it. It’s too late to celebrate the movie’s thirtieth birthday and it’ll be a good while before another significant anniversary comes up, …
Given that dinosaurs are so notorious in the popular imagination for having grown Very Large far more often than they had any right to, it’s only fitting that so many dinosaur books – especially those aimed at children – have adopted a correspondingly chunky, oversized format. The appeal is obvious, even if it means that …
On more than one occasion, I’ve bought an intriguing-looking old dinosaur book on eBay, only to find that it’s filled with artwork from an older book that’s already been featured on the blog. This would be one of those cases…almost. For you see, while an awful lot of the palaeoart in this book is recycled …
Happy New Year! Last month, I promised you I’d take an in-depth look at the dinosaur designs from The Land Before Time, and I’m still going to, but life, uh, got in the way (not least because there was a podcast to edit). Today, to cleanse the palate, I’m going to give you something small …
While old dinosaur books are a finite resource, as this blog grinds inexorably on – as years become decades, as countless sentient beings live, die and are consigned to oblivion by the unfeeling laws of an immeasurably vast universe, as my bones weary and ache and my teeth develop irritating, expensive faults – so we …
Halloween may have been a month ago, but it’s never too late for SPOOKINESS! The idea of ghostly apparitions haunting the living in the form of prehistoric animals from the Mesozoic era has seldom been explored in children’s fiction, but the child-friendliness of it seems obvious in hindsight. Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love spooky ghost …
Gather round everyone, it’s time for the fifth and final look we’re having at the fabulous book of The Great Dinosaurs, the swan song of the great Zdeněk Špinar, who died shortly after publishing this book, and the artistic masterpiece of his fellow Czech Jan Sovák. Here are part one, part two, part three and …
Hello again! It’s been a while, but our deep submersion into Jan Sovák’s artwork as it appears in The Great Dinosaurs continues today! For those who missed it, we’ve already looked at the theropods, sauropods and ornithopods featured in this massive book. That beings us to the ceratopsians! This isn’t the first time we’re doing …