We’re back with more German dinosaur cards from the Reichardt cocoa company! In parts one and two, we discussed two series of 1900s illustrations by one F. John. In the late 1910s, Reichardt once again hit the market with collectible cards themed to extinct animals. Incidentally, after Series 1 and Series 2, the third series was numbered Series 1a, because that’s what makes the most sense. The original featured artist, F. John, was, not to put too fine a point…
Deinotherium
And it’s a proper Vintage Dinosaur Art as today, we’re looking at a rather obscure collection of paleoart from the very beginning of the 20th century. Let’s lay down some groundwork. Collectable cards are of all ages. In my youth, in the schoolyard we would have traded, and beat each other senseless over, Pokémon cards (a fine tradition that continues to this day), or football cards (maybe baseball cards if you’re in the US?). Sometimes, there’s a fad around dinosaur…
Last time, we explored the upper floor of the baroque 19th century palace that holds the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It’s time to descend the marble staircase into the past and take our journey through deep time, from the distant precambrian days to the Holocene. Maybe we’ll even meet some dinosaurs along the way, who knows? I hadn’t done any research beforehand, so I visited the museum with very limited knowledge and not much in the way of expectations.…
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric World (Richard Moody) – Part 3
Vintage Dinosaur Art February 11, 2022Because at least two people asked for it, here’s a final look at 1980’s Prehistoric World, written by Richard Moody and illustrated by a variety of artists – and this time, we’re looking at some Cenozoic beasties (and no more coral – with apologies to coral fans). Or as the book would have it, “Cainozoic”, a seldom-seen spelling that Moody might have chosen because it’s somewhat closer to the Greek. Since I can’t remember the last time I saw “Cainozoic”…
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,…
By the popular demand of at least a couple of people, let’s have one last look at Prehistoric Animals (see parts one and two for dinosaurs and mostly Palaeozoic non-dinosaurs, respectively). It’s the mammals’ turn! Granted, there are an awful lot of models of fish in here too, which is quite remarkable for a book like this; but they’re fish. Sorry, fish fans. On with those smelly mammals, then. Most of the models in the Cenozoic section of the book…