Brian Franczak was one of the best palaeoartists around in the early ’90s, and I still feel (as I did a couple of years ago) that we don’t feature his work here quite enough. Happily, then, an opportunity presents itself in the 30th anniversary of That Movie. You know the one: Unix systems, expensive ice cream, disappointingly flimsy road signs. All that stuff. I didn’t fancy writing yet another article praising that movie to the skies for how groundbreaking and…
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…
Today we’re happy to welcome back Tommy Leung, who previously delighted you with their review of My Girlfriend is a T. rex in 2016… which is, somehow, six years ago. Tommy’s blog Parasite of the Day is a blast to read, as long as you can push your ick feelings aside and appreciate the wild diversity of the parasite world. You can do that, surely. Tommy is also part of the wonderful Gallimaufric Science podcast, which you really should listen to.…
So, you might imagine we’ve all been spoiled a bit lately, what with Prehistoric Planet and all. It’s easy to develop high expectations, and to expect everything to be subject to the same sublime standards of visual quality and scientific accuracy. Lest we get too comfortable, I think it prudent to take a stroll among some good old fashioned ugly Chinese dinosaur animatronics. It’s good to be reminded that dinosaurs in public spaces can still be rubbish, too. Take it…
Or Norman: Into the Normanverse What book casts a longer shadow than David Norman’s 1985 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs? Which dinosaur reconstructions are more iconic, more widely seen and more frequently copied than John Sibbick’s? What book has been referenced more frequently on these pages than the one we still affectionately call the Normanpedia? Will this whole review consist of rhetorical questions? Today, I want to talk about a book by David Norman that came out a mere three…
Although I became interested in dinosaurs before the release of that film in 1993, it was only just before, and as such I’m a tiny bit too young to remember Dinosaur!, a 1991 TV series that featured as consultant none other than sexily shiny-domed Iguanodon expert Dr David Norman. Yes, the very same Dr Norman who wrote the Normanpedia and stared out sultrily in black and white from the back cover of each issue of Dinosaurs! magazine (whether or not…
It can sometimes feel like, after countless (well, 10 or 11) years of scouring eBay, I’ve dug up virtually every popular dinosaur book from the ’80s and ’90s that could possibly be found. It doesn’t help matters that a large number of them feature a gloomy parade of depressingly sub-par Sibbick rip-offs, and therefore blend easily into one another, like a great amorphous blob of weird leathery flesh and plagiarism. And yet – and yet, not two weeks ago I…
Dinosaurs and zoos, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. A lot of the major zoos in the Netherlands have some sort of dinosaur presence, from the beautiful sculputures at Artis Amsterdam to the Dinobos at Amersfoort (remind me to talk about GaiaZoo’s Dino Dome someday). Not to be outdone, the small, regional zoo known as ZooParc Overloon has been taken over by animatronic dinosaurs for the autumn of 2020. The dinosaurs are some of the ones also found…
By popular demand (a whole two comments – hey, that’s good going these days!), here’s a small selection of Steve Kirk’s ‘catalogue’ illustrations, as featured in the Dinosaur Encyclopaedia for Children from Gollancz. As I mentioned previously, most of these are rather bland by Kirk’s standards, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them were rather older than the typically lively panoramas featured last time. Still, for connoisseurs of 1980s and ’90s ‘spotters guide’-type dinosaur books, I’m sure…
I can’t believe my luck: in the ten years LITC has been running, nobody has ever talked about what might be my favourite dinosaur book of all time! Get ready, everybody, this is gonna be a treat. The Great Dinosaurs was originally published in 1994 and translated for my neck of the woods in 1998, under the simple name Dinosauriërs. I got this gem of a book around the tail end of my childhood dinosaur obsession in the late nineties,…
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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.