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…
apatosaurus
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (St. Martin’s Press) – Part 1
Vintage Dinosaur Art September 19, 2023You 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…
As previously observed, our 20-year rule for what does and does not count as Vintage Dinosaur Art means that we are now tentatively beginning to review 21st-century palaeoart. Nevertheless, I had to resist using the “vintage-ish” stamp for this one. As the 2000’s pool for VDA widens, and as our own aging brains start entering a stasis when we can’t meaningfully distinguish between 10, 5 and 2 years ago, we begin to come across books that feel nearly contemporary. Written…
Welcome back! You may have previously seen me cover the Ornithomimids and Troodon volumes in the Carolrohda Special Dinosaurs Series. As Don and Donna month enters its second month, it’s time to take a break from all those charmingly dated unfeathered ’90s coelurosaurs (don’t worry, they’ll be back) and take a look at a specialized volume of palaeontology and palaeoart that is charmingly dated in a completely different way! Published, again, in 1996, Seismosaurus – The Longest Dinosaur is the…
Over a decade go, on the blog’s previous incarnation, I wrote a slightly unusual Vintage Dinosaur Art article about a single poster. Said artwork was produced to accompany the officially endorsed Natural History Museum (or, as it properly was at the time, British Museum (Natural History)) dinosaur toy line, made by Invicta Plastics of England. At the time, I mentioned that I knew of two posters, both with the same theme (an Age of Reptiles-esque seamless transition through time), but…
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric World (Richard Moody) – Part 1
Vintage Dinosaur Art December 22, 2021Here’s another book found through sheer serendipity while browsing charity shops with a friend – Prehistoric World, written by Richard Moody and published by Hamlyn in 1980. That means it was published a few years after another Moody-authored book that I reviewed in 2019 – A natural history of Dinosaurs – and it recycles a fair few illustrations from said earlier tome. No matter – there’s plenty of unique material here to make it worthy blog fodder, not least because…
While I’ve found a great deal of blog fodder on eBay, it’s always immeasurably more pleasurable to spot a book in person, out there in the wild. As it happens, my friend Huseyin actually found this one, amid the glorious chaos of the aptly-named Raining Books shop here in Brighton. Originally published in 1982 in Italian, with this English translation arriving in 1987, The Prehistoric World was written by Giorgio P Panini and illustrated by a variety of artists, most…
Or Norman: Into the Normanverse What book casts a longer shadow than David Norman’s 1985 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs? Which dinosaur reconstructions are more iconic, more widely seen and more frequently copied than John Sibbick’s? What book has been referenced more frequently on these pages than the one we still affectionately call the Normanpedia? Will this whole review consist of rhetorical questions? Today, I want to talk about a book by David Norman that came out a mere three…
In the latest episode of the podcast, Marc, Natee and Niels finally answer the age-old question: Is the P silent in “pterosaurs”? (no, it isn’t) [Yes – it is. M]. The LITC crew discuss one of history’s most celebrated palaeoartists, the late Ely Kish, and her work for Dale Russell’s An Oddyssey in Time. Some of us are big fans, while others need some convincing… Jed Taylor discusses the trials and tribulations of the beginning palaeoartist whose work blew up…
I check the copyright page, and I check it again. 1993? Really? Surely that can’t be true. Surely this book is at least fifteen years newer than that. But no. The proof is right there, undeniable, clear as day. What sorcery is this? Who stole a time machine? How is this book so good? That year again, that fateful year. 1993. The Year of the Dinosaur, according to ancient astrology that I made up. The deluge of dino books from…