Sometimes you catch a scent and can’t drop it. My bloodhound mode was activated by a recent email from Carl Mehling of the American Museum of Natural History, asking if we knew what the earliest children’s book on dinosaurs. If I’m not mistaken, the earliest book we’ve written about which was purely intended for children is Hilary Stebbing’s Extinct Animals (read Niels’ 2020 post and listen to the podcast episode). Its 1946 publication date beats Roy Chapman Andrews’ juvenile-aimed dinosaur…
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,…
It’s been over two years since I shared with you my first experience of the renovated Naturalis, the Netherlands’ premier museum of nature and natural history. My review, found here and here, was somewhat mixed, and for whatever reason (I forget the reason but I’m fairly sure there was a reason) we missed the Live Science Hall. An egregious oversight on my part, it’s true. It was for this reason that Martijn “Dinosaurus” Guliker reached out to me. He is…
In my last post on The Prehistoric World, I noted that it had been a whole month since my last VDA post – but this time it’s been even longer! Well, as Ian Malcolm didn’t say, life…gets in the way. Here’s one last look at the work of a series of fabulous, (mostly) Italian artists, as featured in a book originally published (in Italian) in 1982. This time, we’ll move on to Cenozoic wildlife, on which I am rather ill…
It’s time for more Vatagin! Last time I showed you some of the dinosaur-centric works of the old Russian master. There are still some dinosaurs left, but today I will cover mostly the otherprehistoricanimals in his portfolio. As I don’t have a way to date his works except very broadly, I will simply do so in the chronological order of the Earth itself. Vatagin’s most famous and prominent palaeontological works are those in the “History of Life on Earth” series…
It was a coincidence, really. It so happened that my work took me to Twente, the far Eastern corner of the Netherlands, and I saw these posters along the side of the road, advertising a dinosaur exhibition at Natura Docet. Of course, Natura Docet. The local nature museum. That’s here somewhere, isn’t it? Had I not befriended its curator, Eric Mulder, a couple of years ago? I immediately wrote it down and paid a visit to the museum at the…
Здравствуйте, comrades! Today, we are going to sneak past the Iron Curtain to see what the palaeoartists in the USSR were getting up to! Let’s get the obligatory joke out of the way first: in Mother Russia, dinosaur art review YOU! Ever since Zoë Lescaze’s monolithic book Paleoart came out, reviewed by me here, we’ve been wisening up to the fact that some of the most interesting Vintage Dinosaur Art was being produced under the Soviet regime. And no Soviet…
I’ve found another very old dinosaur book! This one was released in 1946, and it’s a short but sweet one. The author and illustrator is one Hilary Stebbing, a stalwart of children’s literature of the mid-20th century. It’s rare to find dinosaur art from the 1940’s, a quiet time for palaeontology for obvious reasons, so kudos to Stebbing for getting this book out! I always like to give some biographical information or historical context when reviewing a book like this,…
Welcome back to Verdwenen Werelden, an eccentric old book by an eccentric old lady! Last time, we looked at some of the fantastic dinosaur scenes from our unlikely heroine Maria Hubrecht. Today, I want to focus on the many Cenozoic paintings she made for the book. Unlike the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic paintings, none of these have any equivalent in the murals of the current Joke Smit college. These are all original works produced for the book only. Maria Hubrecht very…
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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.