As I’ve mentioned before, the promise of learning more about dinosaurs is an excellent way to compel young children to learn how to read, and so it’s unsurprising that so many books aimed at beginner readers feature them. Learn About Dinosaurs, published in 1990 by New Seasons as part of their Leap Frog series, is a very typical example. Not terribly remarkable, perhaps, but I’m sure it’ll be sweetly nostalgic for a few of our millennial readers and, hey, those…
Westfalen in October can mean only one thing: rain, rain and more rain. But nothing is to spoil my mood today: I’ve come to Münster, more or less on a whim, for this lovely natural history museum (as well as the zoo next door). The museum is currently undergoing partial renovations, but no matter; I’ll come back again next year to see what they made of it. A planetarium is also housed in the building at an upcharge. It’s worth…
You 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…
Douglas Henderson! Roughly half of you just let out a wistful sigh. Few palaeoartists are more universally praised and beloved. At the same time, his work might not be as well known and widely seen as that of, say, Greg Paul, John Gurche or John Sibbick. For whatever reason, his work wasn’t featured in too many of the books we read in our nineties childhoods (I’m assuming you’re about my age). Apart from Dinosaurs: A Global View and this very…
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…
Of late, I’ve been designing a final report for a massive media preservation project at the hallowed institution that keeps the roof above my head, Indiana University. Some of the time I’ve spent scouring our archives for cool visuals has been spent in the online media collection that the initiative established. You can probably imagine my Spielbergian, slack-jawed reaction when on a gloomy December day I stumbled upon… dinosaurs. Produced by KETC out of St. Louis, this is a nice…
It’s time for the eleventh episode of the famous LITC podcast! Today, Marc, Niels and Natee discuss perhaps the single most influential book of dinosaur art in the entire world: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, by one Gregory S. Paul ™. Marc interviews Friend Of The Blog Steve White about his upcoming compendium of Mesozoic Art, his new, gruesome alphabet book, and of course his legendary work for Dinosaurs! Magazine and the wilderness years that followed. In the news, Niels…
Here’s a book that feels like it could’ve come straight out of my childhood, although in reality the first time I ever saw it was just a few weeks ago. Published in 1988 by Western Publishing under the Golden Book banner, it is (at least, in name) a direct successor to a Zallinger-illustrated classic. In much the same way as Zallinger’s work is nostalgic for so many people of an older generation, the illustrations here – by Christopher Santoro –…
As you can well imagine, I’ve read a fair few dinosaur books from the latter half of the twentieth century, and while they are almost always dated in just about every respect, there are very few that stun me with their sheer strangeness. One can well understand outdated views on dinosaur evolutionary history, anatomy and biology, but it’s quite something else to encounter a book that’s such a culture shock that it might as well have emerged from a completely…
Having done the obligatory theropods, it’s time to take a second look at The Strange World of Dinosaurs, one of those dinosaur books where the author – John Ostrom – is considerably more well-known than the artist. Joseph Sibal’s pencil illustrations, printed in either red or green, are competent and lush and amusingly of their time, but also highly derivative of older artists, especially Burian and Parker. Let’s see if Ostrom and Sibals’ herbivores are as exciting and forward-thinking as…
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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.