Welcome back to This Mesozoic Month, the roundup of news, blogging, multimedia content, and art related to life of the Mesozoic era. I’ve made the decision that this will be the final edition of the series. These regularly scheduled roundups have been going since December 2016, preceded by less regular Mesozoic Miscellany posts. These simple posts take more time to compile than they might look like, and it’s time I just can’t spare any more. Thank you to everyone who…
Halfway through 2020, and it’s time for another This Mesozoic Month roundup of news, writing, art, and merch. I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of the museum workers who have been so hard hit as this pandemic and its attendant financial crisis continue. Museums are basically a house of worship for me, and the work you all do matters so much. My deepest hope is that the pandemic will be brought to an end…
Yer boy David here, returning with another look back at the current month in Mesozoic paleontology. Pandemic or no, each month I look for a selection of interesting research and news stories, posts from the shrinking-but-still-kicking blogosphere, videos, and a piece of paleoart that grabbed my attention. And, of course, I gleefully shine a spotlight on our own Natee’s current palaeoartistic efforts. Thanks so much for reading each month! In the News Let’s just get this depressing news out of…
As discussed in the previous post, the artist most frequently referenced by Giuliano Fornari in illustrating The Great Dinosaur Atlas was John Sibbick. Specifically, art from the Normanpedia was often quite slavishly copied, right down to particular colour choices. As such, when Fornari shifts gears and opts to, er, pay tribute to the work of other palaeoartists with wildly contrasting styles, the effect is very jarring. Sibbick’s Normanpedia work, while beautifully executed and hugely influential, was also a little retrograde…
As someone who reads this blog (hopefully on a regular basis), you’re no doubt familiar with Greg Paul’s Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (aka Dinosaurs: a Field Guide), first published in 2010 with a second edition arriving in 2016. It’s arguably one of the most significant popular books about dinosaurs written this century, an attempt to catalogue dinosaur diversity in (almost) its entirety, complete with copious illustrations. Such a feat hasn’t been attempted too many times in the past (because…
We’ve reached the halfway point for 2019, and the paleontology train keeps chug-chug-chuggin’ down the tracks. Since I’ve been on vacation (or HOLIDAY, to make Natee happy) for the last week and had this post locked down before I left, there’s a chance I missed a blockbuster publication. Rest assured, July’s round up will mop up anything big that happened over this past week. And this edition is packed anyway, so all aboard… In the News I totally neglected to…
Never judge a dinosaur book by its cover. The first edition of Naish and Barrett’s Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved, back in 2016, had an eye-wateringly dreadful example of NHM (London) stock image muck on its cover, but the book itself was excellent, as I noted at the time. While the art on The Day of the Dinosaur‘s dust jacket isn’t bad in itself – it’s the Age of Reptiles mural, for crying out loud – it also does…
When speaking to Steve White not so long ago – in relation to his work on Dinosaurs! – he told me about a multi-volume dinosaur encyclopedia he’d also played a part in back in the ’90s. Steve contributed illustrations alongside LITC favourites Jim Robins and Steve Kirk among others, while the text was written by the likes of Paul Barrett, Tom Holtz and Mark Norell. Sadly, the encyclopedia – published by Marshall Cavendish in 1999 – was only ever sold…
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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.