Our guest this episode is Emiliano Troco, a modern ‘old master’ whose traditional paintings evoke the imagery of the flowering of early 20th century palaeontology. Our Vintage Dinosaur Art title is Dorling Kindersley’s The Ultimate Dinosaur Book, another of those formative publications released in the same year as Jurassic Park, and one which can quite justly claim to have then lived up to its name. Can Niels resist making a Slam Dunk joke? Can Marc resist referencing Jurassic Park and…
Published by The Trumpet Club (great name) in 1990, New Questions and Answers about Dinosaurs is exactly the right age to be the sort of book that I might have encountered in my very first years learning about dinosaurs. Except, I didn’t – perhaps it was more widely available in the US than over here, for that is where this copy came from, sent over once again by Herman Diaz. (Thank you Herman!) In terms of the artwork, it’s a…
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.…
Our journey into the distant past (that is, the eighties) continues today! Last time, we looked at specifically the dinosaurs among Chris Forsey’s work for Creatures of the Past. Today, we will dive into the sea of the Devonian and work our way up past all those jolly otherprehistoricanimals. When it comes to Dunkleosteus, there’s really two ways to go about it. You can either make a somewhat naturalistic looking Dunk that doesn’t overplay it, you can give it expressionless,…
While we obviously long ago stopped caring whether or not the art we featured in this series was strictly ‘vintage’, and while non-dinosaurs have frequently made an appearance (often with entire posts to themselves), I’m not sure we’ve ever featured a post that opens with an illustration depicting various Carboniferous corals. Somewhat Vintage Coral Art, anyone? Hey, you can’t say I never step out of my comfort zone. As I mentioned last time, Prehistoric World isn’t one of those books…
About a month ago now (I know! I’m slacking these days! I do have my reasons) we had a look at the dinosaurs in The Prehistoric World, a beautifully illustrated and often gloriously violent book first published in Italy in 1982. Such was the overwhelming clamour for me to feature pre- and post-Mesozoic life from the book (at least two comments!), here we go again – this time, with creatures of the Palaeozoic. It’s freaky, surreal and often unsettling, and…
Here’s a rather unusual book, so much so that, ever since I aquired it, I’ve been referring to it as “the weird book”. My translated copy is called “De Ontwikkeling der Aarde” (“the development of Earth”) but I believe its original English title to be The Ages of the Earth. It’s a book about geology, one in a 1960’s book series on science, authored by one Michael Dempsey (not the actor, I assume) and one David Larkin. It hails from…
Geez, it’s been hot here. But the katydids, crickets, and cicadas have made it more bearable, as has the phenological progression of the seasons which now brings ironweed and goldenrod into bloom. I’ll be wishing for these things in the dead of winter. Also, there’s been a fair amount of paleontology goings-on! So let’s check it out in This Mesozoic Month for July, 2020. In the News Dilophosaurus is a rather famous dinosaur, thanks to a movie it appeared in…
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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.