Following my first post on Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Life (aka Prehistoric Life, part of the In School and At Home series in Russia in the ’90s), at least four people wanted me to carry on and review some of the non-Mesozoic, non-dinosaurian illustrations. So here we go! Rather than start with the smelly mammals of the Cenozoic, I’d prefer it if we could first go back to a simpler, better time…the Permian, or possibly the early Triassic. (Who can tell?)…
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…
Falling very much into that particular sub-category of kiddy fodder dinosaur book in which the animals almost all inhabit parched desertscapes, Now You Can Read About…Dinosaurs was published by Brimax Books in 1984 (with this edition arriving in 1985). For the mid 1980s, it’s pretty much par for the course – a little backward when compared with the full-throttle Dino Renaissance art that was already out there, but hardly much more retrograde than even the Normanpedia. It was books like this…
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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.