Today’s book has gotten some attention recently on some of the palaeoart-centered Facebook groups we frequent. It features little-seen but high quality art from the nineties. Once I saw it, I knew I had to track this book down. This was not straightforward. Not only is this book only available in Czech, it is only available from Czech booksellers that only ship to Czechia. I managed to nab a copy off Rostislav Walica, so kudos to him. I now (maybe?)…
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,…
A couple of years ago, we looked at the book The Last Dinosaur by Jim Murphy and illustrated by Mark Alan Weatherby. It was a piece of naturalist fiction from the late 80s that followed the adventures of a female Triceratops as the world around her was dying. It was a beautiful and odd little book, one that I remembered reading when I was young. Less famously, in 1992, Murphy and Weatherby reunited for another dinosaur adventure, this one not…
Ahoy-hoy, whippersnappers! I guess it’s been a while since we did part one of the 1990 Golden Guide to Dinosaurs, illustrated by John D. Dawson. The “D” stands for “Dinosaur”, one imagines. It’s time for some more early nineties Sibbicksaurs from this tiny spotter’s guide. Deinonychus is at least partially based on the somewhat notoriously freaky creature from the Normanpedia. Dawson manages to tone down its creep factor a little bit. All the wrinkles that carried over from Bakker have…
Westfalen in October can mean only one thing: rain, rain and more rain. But nothing is to spoil my mood today: I’ve come to Münster, more or less on a whim, for this lovely natural history museum (as well as the zoo next door). The museum is currently undergoing partial renovations, but no matter; I’ll come back again next year to see what they made of it. A planetarium is also housed in the building at an upcharge. It’s worth…
So here I am once more, in the playground of the finer arts. This is the 21st century, and we’re looking at one of the definitive dinosaur books of the year 2000, illustrated or rather painted by the talented Larry Felder. If you’ve seen part one, you’ll know Larry’s depictions of Triassic and Jurassic creatures was, gorgeous though they may have been, somewhat indebted to Walking With Dinosaurs. In the Cretaceous chapters of In The Presence of Dinosaurs, his work…
Time for another round of How to Keep Dinosaurs, a book written by Robert Mash in 1983 that would prove very handy for anyone who might find themselves stuck in a James Gurney-esque fantasy world. For those who missed the first post, the 1983 edition features a series of really quite charming colour illustrations by Diz Wallis and Philip Hood, with monochrome cartoons provided by William Rushton. This is in contrast with the more common 2003 version, which just featured…
Greetings my good sir or madam or otherwise! Hark, I come bearing joyful tidings! Have you heard the good news? Although this copy comes from 1994, The News About Dinosaurs was originally wirtten as early as 1989 by Patricia Lauber. Patricia Lauber (1924-2010) was a prolific American science writer for children, and this book is all about her excitement for the Dinosaur Renaissance. As the title suggests, it is a book relaying all the new insights that had been coming…
As Don and Donna Month draws to a close, what better way to end this series of reviews than with the meanest, baddest, freshest dinosaur of the mid-to-late-nineties? It’s easy to take for granted these days, but back then, the newly-described Utahraptor was a pretty big deal. It was a case of life imitating art. Here we had what was, seemingly, a dead ringer for those oversized movie raptors, except released into the world only months after that movie came…
We’re back on the trail of the dinosaurs with Mike Benton and Graham Rosewarne, two giants of the extremely niche genre of Popular British Dino Rennaissance Books (always well-represented on these pages). Last time, we looked mostly at Rosewarne’s panoramic compositions and found ourselves maybe a bit less than extremely impressed. But Rosewarne is at his best when drawing dinosaur profiles, and fortunately, this book allows him to do plenty of that. One of Rosewarne’s most famous and well-remembered creations…
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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.