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…
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…
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…
Say “Ladybird dinosaur book” to someone, and they’ll very likely think of the book illustrated by Bernard Robinson that was reprinted a number of times and spanned the childhoods of multiple generations. (Well, at least two.) I reviewed it all the way back in 2011, so perhaps my review is now as nostalgic for some people as Ladybird books are for others. (Nah, just kidding. I’m not so deluded.) Robinson’s illustrations, while technically superb and highly memorable, were looking rather…
The Magic School Bus franchise was a big deal at exactly the right sort of time for it to have impacted my childhood, but it completely passed me by – probably because I’m British, and it wasn’t quite as well known here. I do have vague memories of a fantastical yellow bus (which was a bit of an alien concept – the yellow school bus, that is) that could fly through space and whatnot, but that’s about it. A shame,…
Today’s entry is rather similar in concept to the later Dinosaur Park, which I reviewed back in 2020, but quite unlike the DK ACTION PACK (in spite of the rather similar title). It would appear to be a straightforward book at first glance, but upon opening an instruction is immediately given to prise out the staples and then remove all the pages. What’s this, a book that wants you to destroy it?! Of course not – well, sort of, actually,…
We’ve had a month off, but the famous LITC podcast is back in full strength with more fresh news, nostalgic art reviews and exciting interviews! After discussing the new films and documentaries that are coming our way, we review some very English palaeoart from the late 1970s by the unsung Peter Snowball. After that, Natee and Marc interview the Golden Boys of Dromaeosaurs, 3D sculptor Ruadhrí Brennan and returning LITC interviewee Jed Taylor, whose incredible Velociraptor sculpts have set last…
In my previous post we took a look at Dinosaurus, a 1998 volume that I now know is essentially a compendium of the Looking At…Dinosaurs series, featuring much of the same dreadful artwork. (Thank you commenters!) For reasons best known to the publishers, artist Tony Gibbons – who was responsible for some of the weirder illustrations that appeared in the early issues of Dinosaurs! magazine in 1993 – was here let loose on dozens of pretty painful illustrations of dinosaurs,…
The most well-known Golden Book to feature dinosaurs is undoubtedly The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs, also released in the guise of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (which was the edition I happened to review on this blog, back before some of you were born, probably). So memorable was that Zallinger-illustrated classic that Robert Bakker and Luis Rey deemed it worthy of a remake, published in 2013. Besides that, there was of course the very memorable Little Golden Book, packed…
We haven’t featured too many colouring books on LITC – Victoria Arbour reviewed the Jurassic Park one for us back in 2018, and they popped up a few times in David’s seasonal gift guides (back when he was still doing those), but that’s really the sum of it. I am therefore rather happy to present Prehistoric Creatures, number 6 in the Benwig Painting and Colouring Book series, published by Benwig Books in 1971. Until I find the colouring book full…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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.