Westfalen in October can mean only one thing: rain, rain and more rain. But nothing is to spoil my mood today: I’ve come to Münster, more or less on a whim, for this lovely natural history museum (as well as the zoo next door). The museum is currently undergoing partial renovations, but no matter; I’ll come back again next year to see what they made of it. A planetarium is also housed in the building at an upcharge. It’s worth…
Mark Hallett
Who remembers Zoobooks? Beginning in 1980, the richly illustrated and highly authoritative Zoobooks series made a name for itself as some of the very best educational books in the world of children’s publishing. Zoobooks were primarily distributed as mail-in magazines and hardback library copies, though I’ve also seen hardbacks sold at zoo gift shops. Most issues, as you’d expect, covered modern animals in great detail and the one devoted to dinosaurs is no different. Originally published in 1985, it was…
I always enjoy receiving books from overseas that date to my childhood, but were never released in the UK (or if they were, were really well hidden) – there’s a special fascination in seeing what contemporary, for example, American kids were reading while I was devouring The Ultimate Dinosaur Book and Dinosaurs! magazine (er, the UK version). Graveyards of the Dinosaurs was (very kindly) sent to me from the US by Herman Diaz – thanks once again, Herman. It features a…
While my previous post on this book focused on the work of someone who is an acclaimed wildlife artist – but not a dinosaur specialist – it should be noted that Ranger Rick’s does feature rather a lot of work from some Big Names in palaeoart, especially Mark Hallett and Ely Kish. Most of the Kish pieces have been featured on this blog before (often multiple times, including in David’s 2010 post), so I thought I’d take a closer look…