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Brontosaurus

Vintage Dinosaur Art – Prehistoric Animals (Macdonald First Library)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 30, 2026

Bernard Robinson is an artist whose work I’ve always been happy to stumble upon, ever since I first reviewed the Ladybird book Dinosaurs back in 2011 (can you believe I’ve been writing this twaddle for over 15 years? Me neither). He was extremely skilled at placing tangible-looking, highly detailed and very scaly dinosaurs in lush, evocative settings, and both the quality of his work and its obviously retro nature (by post-Dino Renaissance standards) make it hugely nostalgic for many. Yes, even…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: A Guide to Earth History

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 4, 2026

Should you ever visit the historic Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know), be sure to drop by the superb Ironbridge Book Shop. There you’ll find a huge range of classic Pelican paperbacks for sale, a series created by Penguin in 1937 to provide some low-cost intellectual stimulation for the masses. I visited back in November and managed to pick up A Guide to Earth History, which stood out to me for a very obvious…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Hubrecht at the Lyceum – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art December 11, 2024

Once again: Marie Hubrecht. Are you tired of me talking about Marie Hubrecht yet? Because I’m not done. If you want more Hubrecht, check out my reviews of Verdwenen Werelden here, here and here, and our Verdwenen Werelden podcast episode here! This post is a direct companion to my last one, in which I detail the time I went to see the spectacular murals she made in the 1920s at the former Girls’ Lyceum in Amsterdam. These paintings have been…

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,…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Dinosaur Action Set (Book One!)

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 17, 2024

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,…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (A Golden World Explorer Book)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 8, 2024

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…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tiere der Urwelt (Reichardt) – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art November 28, 2023

And it’s a proper Vintage Dinosaur Art as today, we’re looking at a rather obscure collection of paleoart from the very beginning of the 20th century. Let’s lay down some groundwork. Collectable cards are of all ages. In my youth, in the schoolyard we would have traded, and beat each other senseless over, Pokémon cards (a fine tradition that continues to this day), or football cards (maybe baseball cards if you’re in the US?). Sometimes, there’s a fad around dinosaur…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Animals (Purnell Library of Knowledge)

Vintage Dinosaur Art October 16, 2023

Purnell’s prehistoric animal books of the 1970s – of which there were several, of varying quality (as mostly featured on LITC Mk 1) – attract a great deal of nostalgic fondness from people, uh, a little older than me. The fact that their output seemed to dry up from the 1980s onwards becomes a lot more explicable when one learns of how the company fell into the hands of notorious crook and amateur yachtsman Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell, and consequently…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 23, 2023

As a slim paperback from the 1970s aimed at very young, beginner readers, and published by Scholastic, you might well expect Giant Dinosaurs to be yet another book filled with Charles Knight knock-offs. And about half of it is. However, the other half features – quite unexpectedly – amusing cartoons of dinosaurs being a nuisance in the modern world. It’s making learning fun! Giant Dinosaurs was first published in 1973, with this edition arriving in 1979. Erna Rowe wrote the…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 16, 2023

We at LITC are the historians of prehistory, the rememberers of the forgotten, the detectives of dinosaurs. As the palaeontologist diligently searches the rocks and sediments, looking for traces of ancient life, so it is our calling to unearth the most dusty and ponderous tomes of outdated palaeontology, looking for ancient life reconstructions. And thus we come once more to the Victorians. Not the pioneers of palaeontology like Anning, Mantell, Buckland and the wretched Owen, but the second generation. Those…

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