Marc, Niels and Natee essay a new and improved, that is, much more informal, news section, as we follow up on previous items and comment on two new palaeo media releases. This month’s Vintage Dinosaur Art is illustrated with the sculptures of Arthur Hayward and others and is an approach that we at least would very much enjoy seeing a return of in newer publications. Finally, our Lord and Blogmaster, David Orr, makes another very welcome appearance and joins Niels…
Arthur Hayward
Our first episode of 2023 celebrates classics of two different kinds: the masterly palaeoart of the Queen of #DrawDinovember, Rebecca Dart, which surely merits the stamp of ‘modern classic’; and, in what Niels has determined is a one-off for us and not the beginning of a foray into collectibles, the enduring charm of the Invicta dinosaur toys commissioned by London’s Natural History Museum, beginning in 1974. How does Rebecca work her timeless magic on her snapshots of deep time, and…
By the popular demand of at least a couple of people, let’s have one last look at Prehistoric Animals (see parts one and two for dinosaurs and mostly Palaeozoic non-dinosaurs, respectively). It’s the mammals’ turn! Granted, there are an awful lot of models of fish in here too, which is quite remarkable for a book like this; but they’re fish. Sorry, fish fans. On with those smelly mammals, then. Most of the models in the Cenozoic section of the book…
In my first post on this book, I exclusively looked at model dinosaurs, most of which were created by Arthur Hayward. (This is Vintage Dinosaur Art, after all.) However, ignoring the many, many models of other prehistoric animals would be doing the book a great disservice, especially because – surprise – Hayward sculpted rather a lot of them too. He even turned his hand to the odd giant ocean-going arthropod, as shown below… Yes, it’s Pterygotus, a “particularly cruel-looking” (in…
I’m really not sure how this one managed to evade my attention for so long, but here it is, finally – Prehistoric Animals: The Extraordinary Story of Life before Man, written by Ellis Owen and published by Octopus in 1975. It’s unusual in that the palaeoart within it consists almost entirely of photographs of models, many of them created by the renowned Arthur Hayward, who worked not only for the Natural History Museum in London (then the British Museum (Natural…