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apatosaurus

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Life (In School and At Home)

Vintage Dinosaur Art June 23, 2026

In the decade before the Normanpedia appeared and all and sundry decided to slavishly copy John Sibbick’s work, Giovanni Caselli’s illustrations for Halstead’s The evolution and ecology of the Dinosaurs were often held up as the gold standard. Or so it would seem, based on the number of imitators. (Incidentally, did you know that there is a greater timespan between my review of the Halstead book and now than between Tyrannosaurus and humans?) This week’s example is Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Jurassic Park Institute – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art June 5, 2026

Last time, we took a look at some of the many theropods illustrated by Tim Bradley for the now-defunct Jurassic Park Institute Dinopedia. Let’s check out a few more of those before moving on to the sauropods. Thanks again to Tim for providing these illustrations, it’s a real pleasure to be able to see them again after all these years! I foolishly neglected to include a tyrannosaur last time, so here’s Daspletosaurus to make up for it. The intensity of the blue,…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art May 12, 2026

As regular readers will hopefully be aware, our sole criterion for Vintage Dinosaur Art is that the art in question must be at least 20 years old. (We’re also aware that ‘vintage’ is not synonymous with ‘old’, but you don’t mess with the brand.) Now that we are – rather frighteningly – well into the 2020s, that means works from the 2000s now fall within our purview. Unfortunately, the era immediately after Walking With Dinosaurs saw many publishers demanding ‘photo real’…

The Hagenbeck Dinosaurs

Attraction Review Vintage Dinosaur Art April 27, 2026

You all know about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. In my lifetime, these went from the poster children of outdated, stodgy views of ponderous swamp dinosaurs, to being the most celebrated monuments of early dinosaur art around. And they are not alone. I’ve made it my mission to visit as many historic, unique dinosaur models in Europe as I can find, such as Boudewijn Bollee’s dinosaurs of Artis in Amsterdam and the dinosaurs of Chorzów Zoo in Poland. This spring, I…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art April 24, 2026

While John Sibbick Normanpedia knock-offs were pretty ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the illustrations in this book just might be unique in combining classic Sibbickisms with a more John McLoughlin-like, monochrome, stipply style. A rather obscure little volume very kindly sent over from the States by Herman Diaz, The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs was published in 1990 by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Audubon Society, written by Joseph K Slap (great name), and illustrated by Elaine…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: All About Dinosaurs – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art April 9, 2026

By the popular request of a single commenter, here’s yet more All About Dinosaurs, written by Rupert Oliver, illustrated by Bernard Long, and first published in 1983 (with this edition arriving in 1990). I conveniently forgot that said commenter (Andreas Johansson) enthusiastically responded to the promise of more non-dinosaurs that I might have made, and have instead mostly scanned a number of further dinosaur illustrations by Long. Hurrah! We’ll start with this Corythosaurus, for it actually serves as the frontispiece for the…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaur Dream

Vintage Dinosaur Art March 2, 2026

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…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (Kingfisher My First Encyclopedia)

Vintage Dinosaur Art November 4, 2025

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…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (Ladybird Square books)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 28, 2025

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…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art October 22, 2024

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,…

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