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…
You know, I’ve only done one Vintage Dinosaur Art project in the entire year of 2025? Granted, it was the mammoth, three part project on Marie Hubrecht at the Lyceum, the results of which are used in her biography, but still. It’s time to crank it up a notch, and the best way to pick up the pace is to scale back the size of the projects. Let’s do a cute children’s book. Dennis Nolan (1945-2022) was a painter in…
Last month I reviewed A Guide to Earth History, our first foray into the world of Maurice Wilson’s illustrations in quite some time. At the end of said article, I asked readers (we still have them!) to let me know where I might find more Wilson excellence, and Alexander Guridov duly answered – by sending me scans of Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles, first published “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY)” in 1954, with this second…
Bernard Robinson is an artist whose work I’ve always been happy to stumble upon, ever since I first reviewed the Ladybird book Dinosaurs back in 2011 (can you believe I’ve been writing this twaddle for over 15 years? Me neither). He was extremely skilled at placing tangible-looking, highly detailed and very scaly dinosaurs in lush, evocative settings, and both the quality of his work and its obviously retro nature (by post-Dino Renaissance standards) make it hugely nostalgic for many. Yes, even…
Should you ever visit the historic Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know), be sure to drop by the superb Ironbridge Book Shop. There you’ll find a huge range of classic Pelican paperbacks for sale, a series created by Penguin in 1937 to provide some low-cost intellectual stimulation for the masses. I visited back in November and managed to pick up A Guide to Earth History, which stood out to me for a very obvious…
By popular request – and by that, I mean literally a single person asked for it – here’s another little look at Dinosaurs, published in 2000 as part of Kingfisher’s My First Encyclopedia series, although all of the content dates to 1994 (and it shows). As the last post featured a lot of work by Ann Winterbotham, it’s only fair that the work of the other illustrators gets an airing this time. Don’t say I don’t spoil you, Andrew McLeod. While…
Themed playing card sets are a dime a dozen, offering a fun spin on the standard deck that we’ve all seen thousands of times. As we at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs know, there’s no better theme than dinosaurs! The Heritage Playing Card Company, purveyor of innumerable themed decks, clearly knew this and released a set of dinosaur-themed cards back in 2002. This was a time of Jurassic Park sequels, Walking with Dinosaurs, and so much more iconic dinosaur…
Right then – who remembers this one? Hopefully quite a few of you, as it was originally published in 1990 in hardback as part of the Young World series, with this paperback recycling appearing in 2000. It may well have been translated into other languages, too (Agata seems to remember a Polish edition). It’s just one of the hundreds and hundreds (probably) of kids’ books about dinosaurs churned out by well-known palaeontologist Michael Benton while on his coffee breaks in…
It’s time to bring it home, the big project of discussing the seven massive paintings by Marie Hubrecht on the walls of the Joke Smit College, once the Girl’s Lyceum, in Amsterdam. Having discussed the major dinosaur painting first and the early stages of the Palaeozoic second, it’s time we crawl back up out of the time abyss, towards and into our familiar Mesozoic. In the middle of the Southern wall, above three different doorways, we have the second-largest painting…
Who’d like some more Rosewarne? In my last post on The Reign of the Reptiles, looking predominantly at illustrations depicting contemporaneous animals in prehistoric landscapes, I mentioned that there were also a great many illustrations of individual animals isolated against white backgrounds, and that I’d consider a follow-up post if anyone actually read that far and wanted to see them. Well, someone did! BrianL left the following comment: The smaller illustrations in The Reign of the Reptiles, like the Dimorphodon…
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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.