It’s 2023, and we have a rule here. It’s an arbitrary rule, but here we are: We count everything as “vintage” that is 20 years old or older. That means, try not to die of shock here, that everything up to 2003 is now eligible for a Vintage Dinosaur Art review. Them’s the breaks. A whole new millennium is opening up for us! Now, when I think of what dinosaur books look like in the 21st century, I mostly think…
I was only a year old when BBC’s landmark series Walking with Dinosaurs first aired, but I have to imagine watching it in 1999 must have felt similar to the way I felt watching Prehistoric Planet this week. Not since then has the age of dinosaurs ever been portrayed so believably. For the first time in a big-budget media project we’re getting depictions of Mesozoic life that isn’t plagued by concessions and strange design choices. Feathers are commonplace. Multi-ton behemoths…
And so Prehistoric Planet comes to an end, although thankfully not with the extinction of the (non-avian) dinosaurs as some had feared. Instead, we’re treated to glimpses of Late Cretaceous life in woodland environments, and although the show remains dominated by dinosaurs, plants do get their due this time. Starting with a herd of Austroposeidon clearing trees in the South American forest (and a look at how plants aggressively colonise the space created), the episode then shifts north, following a…
Or Norman: Into the Normanverse What book casts a longer shadow than David Norman’s 1985 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs? Which dinosaur reconstructions are more iconic, more widely seen and more frequently copied than John Sibbick’s? What book has been referenced more frequently on these pages than the one we still affectionately call the Normanpedia? Will this whole review consist of rhetorical questions? Today, I want to talk about a book by David Norman that came out a mere three…
Our sixth episode is all about legendary palaeoartist Luis V. Rey! We discuss some of his most eye-catching artwork, as it appears in his art compendium Extreme Dinosaurs (2001). Then, Marc and Niels speak to Luis himself, as he shares many of his trade secrets, anecdotes, his surprising inspirations, his artistic philosophies, his future projects and much more. A must-listen for all Rey fans! In the News A new open-access paper by Novas et al compares the shoulder girdles of…
While old dinosaur books are a finite resource, as this blog grinds inexorably on – as years become decades, as countless sentient beings live, die and are consigned to oblivion by the unfeeling laws of an immeasurably vast universe, as my bones weary and ache and my teeth develop irritating, expensive faults – so we are able to increase the scope of our Vintage Dinosaur Art posts. Our sole criterion has always been that the books we cover should be…
Gather round everyone, it’s time for the fifth and final look we’re having at the fabulous book of The Great Dinosaurs, the swan song of the great Zdeněk Špinar, who died shortly after publishing this book, and the artistic masterpiece of his fellow Czech Jan Sovák. Here are part one, part two, part three and part four, if you’ve missed them. There’s been a healthy number of comments and discussions under each of these so let’s see if we can…
I can’t believe my luck: in the ten years LITC has been running, nobody has ever talked about what might be my favourite dinosaur book of all time! Get ready, everybody, this is gonna be a treat. The Great Dinosaurs was originally published in 1994 and translated for my neck of the woods in 1998, under the simple name Dinosauriërs. I got this gem of a book around the tail end of my childhood dinosaur obsession in the late nineties,…
From paleoart to spec evo and biologically plausible fantasy creatures, Mette Aumala’s artwork spans genres and embraces a dizzying diversity of aesthetic approaches. Through all of this diversity, there is a strong through-line, a clear fascination with evolution and a curiosity that seems to demand so many varying approaches to manifest. I’m happy to bring you this interview, in which we discuss her artistic journey and her practice. What are your earliest memories as an enthusiast of prehistoric life? Was…
I can’t pretend that today’s post isn’t fueled by pure, shameless, self-indulgent nostalgia. This little computer program from 1993 is something I spent literally months with as a child, quite undeterred by the fact that I didn’t understand a word of English. I had my own sources for actually reading about dinosaurs, after all (mostly Dinosaurs! Magazine, though my memory of that series has soured since I’ve learnt that the Dutch version ran for only half as many issues 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.