Last month I reviewed A Guide to Earth History, our first foray into the world of Maurice Wilson’s illustrations in quite some time. At the end of said article, I asked readers (we still have them!) to let me know where I might find more Wilson excellence, and Alexander Guridov duly answered – by sending me scans of Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles, first published “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY)” in 1954, with this second…
Today’s entry is rather similar in concept to the later Dinosaur Park, which I reviewed back in 2020, but quite unlike the DK ACTION PACK (in spite of the rather similar title). It would appear to be a straightforward book at first glance, but upon opening an instruction is immediately given to prise out the staples and then remove all the pages. What’s this, a book that wants you to destroy it?! Of course not – well, sort of, actually,…
If you’re anything like me, you spent a lot of your childhood playing educational video games. I was the perfect age for the cavalcade of edutainment titles that flooded shelves in the early 2000s and none captured my attention quite like those that prominently featured dinosaurs. Endless hours of my youth were spent skulking in the needlessly eerie museum halls of DK’s Eyewitness: Dinosaur Hunter, unleashing ravenous Allosaurus into the food courts in the quasi-educational management sim Zoo Tycoon’s Dino…
This one goes out to Ben Hillier, who both wins the coveted Reader of the Month award* and shall be treated to various non-dinosaurs from 1977’s The World of Dinosaurs (see parts one and two). As befits the book’s title, here are a couple of animals from, er, the Permian. That’s right – it’s everyone’s favourite synapsid menace Dimetrodon, alongside Diadectes, which was certainly a tetrapod. Yes. As is tradition, Dimetrodon is shown inhabiting an arid, upland landscape, quite unlike…
Pangaea, The Mother Continent is one of the most unusual books that has ever found its way to me. It has done so by way of Grant Harding, who sent the scans to me, so full props to him. It came out in 1989, a great year for dinosaurs. It was witten by Karen Liptak and illustrated by Susan Steere. Susan Steere is another one of those mysterious figures who can’t be found on Google. As far as I can…
The fifth episode of the LITC podcast is here, in which the team ventures off the beaten path into more unusual forms of palaeoart. We discuss a volume of vintage dinosaur art that was ahead of its time in its blending of photography and illustration. For our interview, Natee talks to Rebecca Groom, whose hand-crafted soft toys of underrepresented animals, both living and extinct, have won her many admirers. Featuring rainbows and unicorns and an exclusive poetry reading by Natee.…
Because the last post got a least a couple of comments asking for it, let’s take this Steve Kirk-illustrated children’s book out for one more spin. Naturally, and in spite of its name, the Dinosaur Encyclopaedia for Children contains a rather large variety of non-dinosaurs – larger, in fact, than in many other books that are ostensibly about dinosaurs but veer off into the realm of otherprehistoricanimals. These include all manner of pterosaurs, crocodilians, squamates, synapsids and various marine reptiles…
Now here’s a blast from the past, and in more than the usual multiple senses – for David took a very brief look at this book back in 2010. It’s a measure of just how much things have changed in a decade that David’s post now seems incongruously short – just a smattering of pics from Flickr, shared by the wonderful Trish Arnold. That does mean that there’s an awful lot left to explore in Ranger Rick’s Dinosaur Book, and…
Not so long ago, an image did the rounds on the Media that is Social that appeared to be an illustration of Lystrosaurus, except that it was suffering from a severe case of the cephalothorax. It was apparently from a kids’ dinosaur book, and soon other illustrations from the book began to emerge. I was intrigued. Happily, Adrian Wimmer had a copy of the aforementioned book that he was willing to let me borrow…and so here we are. Is it…
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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.