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…
Welcome back to Verdwenen Werelden, an eccentric old book by an eccentric old lady! Last time, we looked at some of the fantastic dinosaur scenes from our unlikely heroine Maria Hubrecht. Today, I want to focus on the many Cenozoic paintings she made for the book. Unlike the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic paintings, none of these have any equivalent in the murals of the current Joke Smit college. These are all original works produced for the book only. Maria Hubrecht very…
There is nothing better than getting your hands on a forgotten, but important, volume of vintage palaeoart, and, folks, palaeoart doesn’t come much more vintage than this. The work featured today precedes Burian, Zallinger and Parker, but in many ways was ahead of its time. When you think of “stylized” palaeoart, you might think of modern figures such as Raven Amos, Johan Egerkrans or our own David Orr, but this book shows that even in the early 20th century there…
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Ilja Nieuwland. Inspired by our coverage of the palaeoart exhibition in Haarlem, he wrote in to share his views on a different palaeoart exhibition in Munich. Yes, it turns out there are no less than three palaeoart exhibitions running in Europe this year! Ilja is a cultural historian of science, focusing on the history of palaeontology and geology. In 2019, he published American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus,…
Teylers Museum of Haarlem, the Netherlands, has been featured on the blog before, when Marc gave the place his warm-hearted recommendation. In this age, when so many museums in this country want to be full-on sensory experiences and as a result start to look more and more like theme parks, because heaven forbid the kids should get bored, Teylers increasingly seems like the last museum standing. Even now, the Teylers is a most agreeably old-fashined collection of quietly beautiful halls,…
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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.