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…
1990s
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (Kingfisher My First Encyclopedia)
Vintage Dinosaur Art November 4, 2025Right 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…
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…
Graham Rosewarne was an artist whose work greatly elevated my beloved Dinosaurs! magazine (published by Orbis in the 1990s), alongside that by the likes of Jim Robins and Steve White. Unfortunately, books featuring work of his that isn’t just recycled from Dinosaurs! can be a little difficult to come by. I was therefore quite pleased to happen upon The Reign of the Reptiles in The Warehouse Antiques & Collectables while over in Norfolk (a shop we definitely didn’t just visit because it’s adjoined…
After a mere 12 years, it’s time to bring the Dinosaur Dynasty series to a close with the, er, penultimate book (at least according to the order presented on the back cover). If you’d like to look over the set in the correct order, I’ll list them at the end of this post. For now, here’s A Closer Look, published (as with all the others) in 1993 by Highlights for Children in the US and Watts Books in the UK, and…
The 1990s was a decade of unparalleled Dinomania; a time where dinosaur books threatened to spill out from bookstores and libraries and bury us all in literary celebrations of prehistoric life. It was a better time. The majority of books published back then were illustrated by artists just didn’t get dinosaurs, and worse still, by artists who just copied the art of whatever dinosaur book they could find at the local library. Patrick O’Brien was no such artist. Gigantic! was…
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a book from 1993’s Dinosaur Dynasty series (written by Dougal Dixon, published by Highlights for Children in the US and Watts in the UK) for the first time since 2013. Well, here’s another one! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy of A Closer Look for sale outside the US, so here’s Death and Discovery, which predictably is rather lighter on the life reconstructions. But there’s still good stuff to be had, although not courtesy…
Part of the same Dinosaur Dynasty series that brought us Giants of the Earth and The Real Monsters, Dinosaurs – All Shapes and Sizes was published in 1993 by Highlights for Children in the US and Watts Books in the UK, and was one of the several popular dinosaur books that Dougal Dixon wrote one evening while engaging in lively conversation and playing a game of darts down at his local. (Which is not to imply that it’s bad, merely that he…
An awful lot of dinosaur toys and models have been created and collected since the dawn of the mass-produced plastic tat era (let’s call it the ‘Tatozoic’), but few have had as much impact as the Carnegie Collection (manufactured by Safari Ltd). The models made by Invicta Plastics for the London Natural History Museum are certainly up there (as we’ve discussed on the podcast), as are the Battat and Tyco ranges of the ’80s and ’90s, but the Carnegie Collection…
Oops, I guess it’s been a while. I promised you part three of that big Czech book from 1993, and here it is. If you need a refresher, and I imagine you do, here’s part one and part two again. So far, we’ve seen sauropods with trunks, theropods with fish heads, more sauropods with trunks, attempts at feathering and lots of mood and atmosphere. Also sauropods with trunks. Let’s see what other strange wonders Barbora Kyšková has in store for…












