Here’s an unoffical followup to this post. As I explained there, my work as a science educator takes me to a large number of primary schools across the country, and whenever I can I sneak around the school library to see if I can find some palaeo-related content that I didn’t know yet. This one time, I found one of Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear books, most definitely not for children! I wonder how that got there?…
Here’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…
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…
Time for another round of The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. No, not that one – the one from 1988, written by Mary Elting and illustrated by Christopher Santoro. As an aside, I didn’t say too much about Santoro last time, and I probably should have. He’s an accomplished and much-lauded illustrator of children’s books with (as of today) over 30 years’ experience (as per a number of near-identical bios that appear on various publishers’ websites, like HarperCollins). He’s not…
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…
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…
Last time, as we took our first look at the treasure trove of unique palaeoart that is The Great Dinosaurs, a lot of people seemed blindsided by just how good Jan Sovák’s art is. Although there are plenty of 90s tropes to go around, there is definitely something timeless about Sovák’s style that sets him apart from the trends of the day. His work just has an artistic flair that is distinct from the hyperreal dioramas of Sibbick, Paul, Robinson…
Here’s a rather unusual book, so much so that, ever since I aquired it, I’ve been referring to it as “the weird book”. My translated copy is called “De Ontwikkeling der Aarde” (“the development of Earth”) but I believe its original English title to be The Ages of the Earth. It’s a book about geology, one in a 1960’s book series on science, authored by one Michael Dempsey (not the actor, I assume) and one David Larkin. It hails from…
I’m going to show you some more of Dinosaurs! The Multimedia Encyclopedia. Since I shared the first part last week, there has been no shortage of you guys telling me about the dinosaur computer progams and games you used to have back when CD-Rom was a thing. Unsurpisingly, there were far more dinosaur-centered computer programs and video games around at that time (1993 – the year of Jurassic Park), many of which might be worth looking into someday… if any…
Following on from Ranger Rick’s, here’s another more detailed look at a book that received some very brief attention long, long ago (2010). Why, it’s Dinosaurs and Other Archosaurs, written and illustrated by Peter Zallinger and published by Random House in 1986 (the year before I was born, incidentally). Once again, you can thank/blame Herman Diaz, who sent this book all the way over from the US. Cheers, Herman! Ten years ago, David noted that Zallinger’s work here “reflect[s] the…
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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.