The concept of “bad art” has been occupying my mind lately, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course. Bad palaeoart, especially. It is my firmly-held belief that even the shoddiest work made by human hand has infinitely more value than any image artificially created by a learning, plagiarizing algorithm. No matter how many works by Tony Gibbons and F. John we have to plough through on these pages, this will still be essentially true. All contributions to…
Today’s book has gotten some attention recently on some of the palaeoart-centered Facebook groups we frequent. It features little-seen but high quality art from the nineties. Once I saw it, I knew I had to track this book down. This was not straightforward. Not only is this book only available in Czech, it is only available from Czech booksellers that only ship to Czechia. I managed to nab a copy off Rostislav Walica, so kudos to him. I now (maybe?)…
Niels, Natee and Marc look forward to TetZooCon, chat about recent museum visits, and continue to shamelessly plug the new merchandise designed by The Founder, David Orr. Then, in lieu of Vintage Dinosaur Art, they – and special guest Agata Stachowiak – discuss the Netflix series Life On Our Planet, in which Morgan Freeman gravels his way through an intriguing mix of modern-day wildlife footage and CGI recreations of creatures from Deep Time. Finally, Niels and Marc discuss unlikely hybrids,…
Here’s part two of our tentative exploration into the early 2000s with the World Atlas of Dinosaurs. Lots of Todd Marshall and Luis Rey to discover, but also I will tell you the real reason I couldn’t resist this book when I found it. Without further ado: Here’s one half of a Tendaguru spread by Todd Marshall. It depicts ceratosaurs in a bout of speculative intraspecific combat. The animals themselves are entirely speculative; the only ceratosaur material from Tanzania is…
It’s Don and Donna month here at LITC! I will be reviewing a few volumes in a series of books written by superstar dinosaur author, robot builder, TV presenter and firebrand “Dino” Don Lessem and illustrated by superstar palaeoartist Donna Braginetz. Published by Carolrhoda Books, each of these books is a small but in-depth entry level look at one species (or in this case family) of dinosaur, well researched and richly illustrated. Lessem worked with a few different palaeoartists in…
Zoo Chorzów, or the Silesian Zoological Park, is located a stone’s throw from the centre of Katowice in the Upper Silesia region of southern Poland. The zoo was founded on its current location in 1954, as part of the Socialist-era post-mining development of a big city park also including an amusement park, a planetarium, a sports centre and an art gallery. And there’s dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Valley section of the zoo, or the Kotlina Dinozaurów, was finished in 1974. Originally,…
I love a good alphabet book. The fact that the author has to find one animal for each letter inevitably means they have to make a lot of choices. Some letters have lots of candidates – Do we put Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops under ‘T”? – which means painful cuts need to be made. Other letters, like Q and Z, only have some deeply obscure taxa that you wouldn’t otherwise see in a mainstream dinosaur book. At the same time, the…
In Episode 4 of the fabulous Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs Podcast, Natee, Marc and Niels discuss the final nail in the coffin of Nanotyrannus, the surprising truth behind Rudolph Zallinger’s famous mural, some Triassic weirdos and whether the best Tyrannosaurus might be a dead Tyrannosaurus. We discuss the works of Wayne Barlowe, the legendary sci-fi artist who sometimes painted dinosaurs with spectacular results. Marc then interviews palaeoartist Chris DiPiazza, who talks us though his recent projects, learning to…
Right, it’s time for one last round of The Great Dinosaur Atlas (see part 1 and part 2), the greatest book that John Sibbick ever illustrated by proxy. Again, I must apologise for using (dodgy) photographs rather than scans, but the book is so Great that squeezing it under my scanner is an issue. At least we’re able to fully appreciate such double-page spreads as… …this stegosaur page, featuring the skeleton of Toujiangosaurus as it is mounted (as a cast)…
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…
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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.