Spring has sprung and episode 40 of the LITC podcast arrives! Today, famous palaeontologist, artist and all-around international fabulous guy Mark Witton returns to the show as he geeks out with our own Marc Vincent about Tyrannosaurus rex! Mark’s upcoming new book, King Tyrant, is all about the toothy star from Hell Creek. For Vintage Dinosaur Art, Marc, Gemma and Natee go back to 1950’s Denmark and discuss a rare treat from illustrator Verner Hancke, or rather from Gemma’s attic.…
When looking at books from the years BT (Before T’internet), we must of course always bear in mind that decent reference material was rather difficult to come by, especially for your average jobbing illustrator without privileged access to museums and/or scientists. (And even then, the scientists sometimes just didn’t give a toss.) This explains the proliferation of Knight, Burian, and Zallinger clones – what else were the poor artists supposed to do, if not take inspiration from the greats? Nevertheless,…
Hej allesammen! It’s hard to find proper illustrated mass-appeal dinosaur books from before the 1970s, when Zdeněk Burian brought Life Before Man into every European home. It’s always cause for minor celebration whenever something older than that shows up that isn’t Knight or Zallinger. So imagine my delight when I rediscovered this book in my very own archives when I moved house last year. Oh yes, I remember this one. This very, very old one. How old? It dates from…
Merry holidays! Here’s a fairly unremarkable book with a perfunctory title but, admittedly, a rather striking cover. Prehistoric Animals, by Sam and Beryl Epstein with illustrations by W R Lohse, was first published by George C. Harrap & Co in the UK in 1958, with this edition arriving in 1959. For its time, it’s not half bad, even if the monochrome illustrations aren’t necessarily all that exciting for our purposes. That jacket, though… There’s one thing I must address first…
Здравствуйте, comrades! Today, we are going to sneak past the Iron Curtain to see what the palaeoartists in the USSR were getting up to! Let’s get the obligatory joke out of the way first: in Mother Russia, dinosaur art review YOU! Ever since Zoë Lescaze’s monolithic book Paleoart came out, reviewed by me here, we’ve been wisening up to the fact that some of the most interesting Vintage Dinosaur Art was being produced under the Soviet regime. And no Soviet…
Natura Artis Magistra, or simply Artis, is Amsterdam’s city centre zoo. It was founded back in the 1830s, making it one of the oldest zoos in the world. As such, it’s has a fascinating history: it has many monumental buildings, including the plantearium and the aquarium, it was a haven for refugees during World War Two, and it holds the distinction of being the place where the world’s last quagga lived and died. Our story today takes us back to…
It’s very rarely that we get a book on here with a title that really appeals to me, but this has got to be one (even if it’s not quite up there with WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.) Originally published in 1955 as My Easy-to-Read True Book of Dinosaurs, I much prefer the title on the cover pictured below – The True Book of Dinosaurs. Yes, it’s the one true book of dinosaurs, the one dinosaur book to rule them…
The festive season is upon us, LITC has moved (by the grace of Mr Orr) to a shiny new home, and I’ve got a few nights all to myself with only a bottle of Bell’s for company. What better time, then, to look at a truly wonderful little example of Vintage Dinosaur Art that’s so old, my dad was born in the same year that it was produced. (And he’s old.) It also involves eggs, which will soon be a…
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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.