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 One can well understand outdated views on dinosaur evolutionary history, anatomy and biology, but it’s quite something else to encounter a book that’s such a culture shock that it might as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…
Back in the early 1990s, John Sibbick’s artwork for the Normanpedia (that is, 1985’s The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, authored by David Norman) was simply everywhere. There was no escaping it. Pick up a magazine – Sibbick. Box of chocolate-coated biscuits – Sibbick. Breakfast cereal – Sibbick. Naturally, the ubiquity of Sibbick’s gorgeously painted, but rather idiosyncratic, illustrations from the mid-’80s resulted in a huge number of imitators and outright copycats – there was even a mysterious company apparently named…
What Is A Dinosaur is a small, short book from 1961, in a series of “What Is It” books, explaining scientific concepts to children. It was illustrated by Maidi Wiebe and written by Daniel Q. Posin, a Chicago-based physicist and a well-known tevelvision personality in his time. Despite that pedigree, the book is your typical, child’s first rough guide to dinosaurs. We’ve seen dozens of books like this, of course. Small books for children, containing all the dinosaur factoids we’ve…
I recently had the opportunity to wade into Project Gutenberg at work, and as one does I took a few minutes to type “paleontology” into the book search and see what popped up. There were a few titles I had never heard of or never seen in full, one of which being The Dinosaur Quarry by John Good, Theodore White, and Gilbert Stucker. The Vintage Dinosaur Art itch was irresistible! The Dinosaur Quarry contains some interesting pieces by artists who…
Having covered this book’s theropods in a previous post, I suppose it’s time we give those Other Dinosaurs a quick look. I still think it’s a real shame that this series wasn’t published more widely; the illustrations are consistently excellent and serve as a wonderful reminder of where we were at in the late ’90s. This was the work of some of the best palaeo-illustrators around, and it’s never made more clear than when they apply the same care, attention…
Blasting into your feed reader, it’s another roundup to close out this month. Over the first four months into 2018, we’ve been treated to a glut of Mesozoic insights. You never know what’s coming next on this veritable feast of knowledge! Dine away, my friends… feast on this prehistoric enlightenment. In the News The Ichthyosaurus specimen with a belly full ‘o babies has been published. Read more at the BBC and Phys Org. Well, look at that: some caenagnathid eggs…
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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.