It all started a week or two ago, when my partner Maartje found a Dutch translation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park somewhere. It is an original 1991 edition. This means the cover image had been produced before the movie was made. It is necessarily completely free of the iconography of the film that would come to overshadow the novel, and indeed overshadow all other dinosaur media. That logo, that skeleton, that font, the designs of those dinosaurs and those characters…
Brian Franczak was one of the best palaeoartists around in the early ’90s, and I still feel (as I did a couple of years ago) that we don’t feature his work here quite enough. Happily, then, an opportunity presents itself in the 30th anniversary of That Movie. You know the one: Unix systems, expensive ice cream, disappointingly flimsy road signs. All that stuff. I didn’t fancy writing yet another article praising that movie to the skies for how groundbreaking and…
Big month! Good job diggin’, studyin’ and publishin’ all these fossils, paleontologists! In the News The next Jurassic Foundation grant deadline is September 15. If you’re in need of some money to fund research into non-avian dinosaurs and/or Mesozoic birds, check it out! It’s always important to test assumptions that have been handed down from previous generations, especially as new technology allows us to study fossils in novel ways. That’s Jordan Bestwick’s goal in new research that surveys at a…
So we’ve reached the fifth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise. I never thought I’d see it. It’s a series doomed to diminishing returns by the very nature of its first chapter. “Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?”, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire asks Chris Pratt’s Owen during a rare quiet moment. Those of us old enough to remember watching the first movie in cinemas certainly do. It was a special effects breakthrough that ‘more of the…
Blasting into your feed reader, it’s another roundup to close out this month. Over the first four months into 2018, we’ve been treated to a glut of Mesozoic insights. You never know what’s coming next on this veritable feast of knowledge! Dine away, my friends… feast on this prehistoric enlightenment. In the News The Ichthyosaurus specimen with a belly full ‘o babies has been published. Read more at the BBC and Phys Org. Well, look at that: some caenagnathid eggs…
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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.