It’s time to bring it home, the big project of discussing the seven massive paintings by Marie Hubrecht on the walls of the Joke Smit College, once the Girl’s Lyceum, in Amsterdam. Having discussed the major dinosaur painting first and the early stages of the Palaeozoic second, it’s time we crawl back up out of the time abyss, towards and into our familiar Mesozoic. In the middle of the Southern wall, above three different doorways, we have the second-largest painting…
Edaphosaurus
Usually I’m perfectly happy to stay in my lane and review Euro-kitsch. I didn’t really expect to be visiting the United States any time soon. Life takes some unexpected turns, though, and suddenly I find myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a town named after a famous university that houses a completely different famous university. And where there’s universities, there’s museums. So let’s make every Bostonian cringe and pahk the cah at hahvahd yahd. (Joke’s on us, you can’t actually park…
Today’s entry is rather similar in concept to the later Dinosaur Park, which I reviewed back in 2020, but quite unlike the DK ACTION PACK (in spite of the rather similar title). It would appear to be a straightforward book at first glance, but upon opening an instruction is immediately given to prise out the staples and then remove all the pages. What’s this, a book that wants you to destroy it?! Of course not – well, sort of, actually,…
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,…
Pangaea, The Mother Continent is one of the most unusual books that has ever found its way to me. It has done so by way of Grant Harding, who sent the scans to me, so full props to him. It came out in 1989, a great year for dinosaurs. It was witten by Karen Liptak and illustrated by Susan Steere. Susan Steere is another one of those mysterious figures who can’t be found on Google. As far as I can…
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…
Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Animals (by Peter Zallinger)
Vintage Dinosaur Art September 23, 2019There’s a tendency in children’s publishing to give any book that features a range of prehistoric animals – including dinosaurs – a title that literally places the word ‘dinosaurs’ above all else, in a huge typeface, often followed by a much smaller “and the prehistoric world” or “and other prehistoric animals”. It’s a tendency I’ve alluded to on a number of occasions by referring to ‘otherprehistoricanimals’ appearing in books, as if they’re an afterthought. Well, not here! For this 1978…







