Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 27 – Dinosaurium and Matt Dempsey

Podcast Show Notes September 29, 2023

As the summer fades and the leaves start falling, nothing better but to sit and listen to the latest episode of the LITC podcast. Marc, Niels and Natee discuss a favourite from the early 90s: Donna Braginetz’ brilliant Dinosaurium, the dream museum in book form. In a not dissimilar vein, Marc and Niels interview Matt Dempsey, whose musculoskeletal dinosaur reconstructions are a great help to palaeoartists everywhere. Lots of discussions about tyrannosaur legs, ornithischian quadrupedality and recreations of Jurassic Park…

Vintage Jurassic Park Covers!

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 22, 2023

It all started a week or two ago, when my partner Maartje found a Dutch translation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park somewhere. It is an original 1991 edition. This means the cover image had been produced before the movie was made. It is necessarily completely free of the iconography of the film that would come to overshadow the novel, and indeed overshadow all other dinosaur media. That logo, that skeleton, that font, the designs of those dinosaurs and those characters…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (St. Martin’s Press) – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 19, 2023

You know how we’re always reviewing books that are so big that our scanners have trouble with them? We always have to scrape our images together from two, sometimes four, separate scans. It’s getting tiresome. Let’s do a small book. I found a book that is absolutely teeny tiny, smaller than my hand. Scanning this one was no trouble at all, look. The scan probably appears bigger on your screen than the real thing. I’ve said nothing at all about…

EX|TERRA – review

Book Review September 4, 2023

If I were to sum up EX|TERRA, Welsh artist Andy Frazer‘s compendium of his 2022 palaeo-output, in a single word, it would have to be: caruncles. Make no mistake – if you are at all perturbed by the extraneous fleshy appendages present on the necks and faces of turkeys (and various other birds), then you’d best stay a great distance away from this book. Frazer is avowedly a fan of ‘weird’ dinosaurs, and in this case, ‘weird’ would appear to…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 29, 2023

A while ago we had a look at Extinct Monsters, a book from 1892 by H. N. Hutchinson and illustrated by Joseph Smit. Now, we’re going all the way to 1910 for the the new, revised, expanded edition of Extinct Monsters by the same author, that reflects almost two decades of scientific discovery. This new version of the book is the one that has the awesome extended title “…and Creatures of Other Days“. The ageing Joseph Smit, Dutchman in England,…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 23, 2023

As a slim paperback from the 1970s aimed at very young, beginner readers, and published by Scholastic, you might well expect Giant Dinosaurs to be yet another book filled with Charles Knight knock-offs. And about half of it is. However, the other half features – quite unexpectedly – amusing cartoons of dinosaurs being a nuisance in the modern world. It’s making learning fun! Giant Dinosaurs was first published in 1973, with this edition arriving in 1979. Erna Rowe wrote the…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 26 – The Burian Episode

Podcast Show Notes August 21, 2023

For episode 26, we’re crossing a big one from our list: The work of the legendary Zdeněk Burian, as it appears in 1972’s Life Before Man. Surely, this book is worth an entire episode, so we’re foregoing the interview this month. Niels, Natee and Marc discuss not only the art of the Czech master, but also his life, his beliefs and his enormous legacy. How did Burian get around reconstructing dinosaurs when he had no access to any fossils? Is…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 16, 2023

We at LITC are the historians of prehistory, the rememberers of the forgotten, the detectives of dinosaurs. As the palaeontologist diligently searches the rocks and sediments, looking for traces of ancient life, so it is our calling to unearth the most dusty and ponderous tomes of outdated palaeontology, looking for ancient life reconstructions. And thus we come once more to the Victorians. Not the pioneers of palaeontology like Anning, Mantell, Buckland and the wretched Owen, but the second generation. Those…

The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers – review

Book Review August 2, 2023

Back in 2021, plesiosaur-lovin’ scientist Adam Smith collaborated with author Jonathan Emmett and illustrator Adam Larkum to bring us Adam’s first children’s book – which was, naturally enough, all about plesiosaurs. Or rather, one particular plesiosaur species, namely Albertonectes vanderveldei. Now, Smith and Emmett are back, joined this time by artist Stieven van der Poorten, for a book that’s all about…Tyrannosaurus rex. But wait! It’s actually about how reconstructions of the animal have changed through time, and why. So it’s not as…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: In The Presence of Dinosaurs – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art July 21, 2023

So here I am once more, in the playground of the finer arts. This is the 21st century, and we’re looking at one of the definitive dinosaur books of the year 2000, illustrated or rather painted by the talented Larry Felder. If you’ve seen part one, you’ll know Larry’s depictions of Triassic and Jurassic creatures was, gorgeous though they may have been, somewhat indebted to Walking With Dinosaurs. In the Cretaceous chapters of In The Presence of Dinosaurs, his work…