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Ceratosaurus

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art June 8, 2026

Gregory Wenzel’s gorgeous Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is well deserving of a second entry, especially as I showed my terrible theropod bias last time. Given the predominance of carnivores in the previous post, why not kick off with the completely harmless, very innocent and almost certainly meek and impeccably well-behaved Dryosaurus this time? While certainly not a Giant Dinosaur, Dryosaurus helps flesh out the wider ecosystem surrounding Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and the rest. While it maintains the same rather sleek, Paulian aesthetic as the…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art May 12, 2026

As regular readers will hopefully be aware, our sole criterion for Vintage Dinosaur Art is that the art in question must be at least 20 years old. (We’re also aware that ‘vintage’ is not synonymous with ‘old’, but you don’t mess with the brand.) Now that we are – rather frighteningly – well into the 2020s, that means works from the 2000s now fall within our purview. Unfortunately, the era immediately after Walking With Dinosaurs saw many publishers demanding ‘photo real’…

The Hagenbeck Dinosaurs

You all know about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. In my lifetime, these went from the poster children of outdated, stodgy views of ponderous swamp dinosaurs, to being the most celebrated monuments of early dinosaur art around. And they are not alone. I’ve made it my mission to visit as many historic, unique dinosaur models in Europe as I can find, such as Boudewijn Bollee’s dinosaurs of Artis in Amsterdam and the dinosaurs of Chorzów Zoo in Poland. This spring, I…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: All About Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art March 10, 2026

Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…

Vintage Dinosaur Art, maybe: De dinosauriërs (Kennis Compact)

Vintage Dinosaur Art July 13, 2024

The concept of “bad art” has been occupying my mind lately, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course. Bad palaeoart, especially. It is my firmly-held belief that even the shoddiest work made by human hand has infinitely more value than any image artificially created by a learning, plagiarizing algorithm. No matter how many works by Tony Gibbons and F. John we have to plough through on these pages, this will still be essentially true. All contributions to…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 35 – Snowball and the Raptor Boys

Podcast Show Notes June 30, 2024

We’ve had a month off, but the famous LITC podcast is back in full strength with more fresh news, nostalgic art reviews and exciting interviews! After discussing the new films and documentaries that are coming our way, we review some very English palaeoart from the late 1970s by the unsung Peter Snowball. After that, Natee and Marc interview the Golden Boys of Dromaeosaurs, 3D sculptor Ruadhrí Brennan and returning LITC interviewee Jed Taylor, whose incredible Velociraptor sculpts have set last…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Záhada Dinosaurů – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art April 30, 2024

No doubt you’ve seen part one of our deep dive into Záhada Dinosaurů, this obscure gem from Czechia, written by Jaroslav Mareš and illustrated by Barbora Kyšková. Obscure unless you’re Czech, that is, in which case you will probably know this book very well. The comments on this and other platforms tell me it’s a divisive book, with divisive artwork, and Jaroslav Mareš a divisive character. We’ve already seen most of the theropods, but a big aspect of the book’s…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurus – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art March 26, 2024

In my previous post we took a look at Dinosaurus, a 1998 volume that I now know is essentially a compendium of the Looking At…Dinosaurs series, featuring much of the same dreadful artwork. (Thank you commenters!) For reasons best known to the publishers, artist Tony Gibbons – who was responsible for some of the weirder illustrations that appeared in the early issues of Dinosaurs! magazine in 1993 – was here let loose on dozens of pretty painful illustrations of dinosaurs,…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (St. Martin’s Press) – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 19, 2023

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…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 29, 2023

A while ago we had a look at Extinct Monsters, a book from 1892 by H. N. Hutchinson and illustrated by Joseph Smit. Now, we’re going all the way to 1910 for the the new, revised, expanded edition of Extinct Monsters by the same author, that reflects almost two decades of scientific discovery. This new version of the book is the one that has the awesome extended title “…and Creatures of Other Days“. The ageing Joseph Smit, Dutchman in England,…

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