Merry holidays! Here’s a fairly unremarkable book with a perfunctory title but, admittedly, a rather striking cover. Prehistoric Animals, by Sam and Beryl Epstein with illustrations by W R Lohse, was first published by George C. Harrap & Co in the UK in 1958, with this edition arriving in 1959. For its time, it’s not half bad, even if the monochrome illustrations aren’t necessarily all that exciting for our purposes. That jacket, though… There’s one thing I must address first…
Over a decade go, on the blog’s previous incarnation, I wrote a slightly unusual Vintage Dinosaur Art article about a single poster. Said artwork was produced to accompany the officially endorsed Natural History Museum (or, as it properly was at the time, British Museum (Natural History)) dinosaur toy line, made by Invicta Plastics of England. At the time, I mentioned that I knew of two posters, both with the same theme (an Age of Reptiles-esque seamless transition through time), but…
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.…
My first post on this book was almost entirely dedicated to theropods (the best dinosaurs) – so we’d best now turn our attention to Everything Else. As discussed last time, the artwork here (credited to Wilcock Riley Graphic Art) is mostly fairly typical, and often even quite good, for the time in which was produced (i.e. 1977). But the artists do manage to make the odd strange turn here and there… Behold: Styracosaurus, but it’s a rhino now. As in,…
Another day, another dinosaur book that is too bloody big for my scanner. Written by the ever-prolific Mike Benton and published in 1989, On The Trail Of The Dinosaurs is one in a series of three books on palaeontology and prehistoric life. There’s also separate volumes on palaeozoic and cenozoic animals. What makes this one of interest to us is that, in the life reconstructions, we recognize the steady hand of perennial LITC darling Graham Rosewarne. We mostly know Rosewarne…
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…
George Solonevich is one my favorite artists covered at LITC. His work stands out during an era of paleoart that saw so many artists copying Knight and Burian. I’ve long planned to do a “golden oldie” post on him, and today I’m finally marking that off the to-do list. I initially wrote a brief post about him in 2010, which Marc followed up in more fleshed-out form a few years later (part one and two). The bulk of today’s post…
Here’s an unoffical followup to this post. As I explained there, my work as a science educator takes me to a large number of primary schools across the country, and whenever I can I sneak around the school library to see if I can find some palaeo-related content that I didn’t know yet. This one time, I found one of Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear books, most definitely not for children! I wonder how that got there?…
Here’s another book found through sheer serendipity while browsing charity shops with a friend – Prehistoric World, written by Richard Moody and published by Hamlyn in 1980. That means it was published a few years after another Moody-authored book that I reviewed in 2019 – A natural history of Dinosaurs – and it recycles a fair few illustrations from said earlier tome. No matter – there’s plenty of unique material here to make it worthy blog fodder, not least because…
After covering Konstantin Flyorov a few monts ago, I found there to be a lot of interest in vintage Russian palaeoart. There was a small but very interesting palaeoart scene in Soviet-era Moscow, linked to its tradition of animal and wildlife art, that is stylistically quite distinct from the western tradition. Today, I want to give some attention to the original Russian palaeoartist: Vasily Alekseyevic Vatagin (Василий Алексеевич Ватагин, 1883 – 1969). Vatagin was a world traveller, a keen student…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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.