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Megatherium

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tiere der Urwelt (Reichardt) – Part 3

Vintage Dinosaur Art

We’re back with more German dinosaur cards from the Reichardt cocoa company! In parts one and two, we discussed two series of 1900s illustrations by one F. John. In the late 1910s, Reichardt once again hit the market with collectible cards themed to extinct animals. Incidentally, after Series 1 and Series 2, the third series was numbered Series 1a, because that’s what makes the most sense. The original featured artist, F. John, was, not to put too fine a point…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tiere der Urwelt (Reichardt) – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

And it’s a proper Vintage Dinosaur Art as today, we’re looking at a rather obscure collection of paleoart from the very beginning of the 20th century. Let’s lay down some groundwork. Collectable cards are of all ages. In my youth, in the schoolyard we would have traded, and beat each other senseless over, Pokémon cards (a fine tradition that continues to this day), or football cards (maybe baseball cards if you’re in the US?). Sometimes, there’s a fad around dinosaur…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Fortidsdyr i farver

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Hej allesammen! It’s hard to find proper illustrated mass-appeal dinosaur books from before the 1970s, when Zdeněk Burian brought Life Before Man into every European home. It’s always cause for minor celebration whenever something older than that shows up that isn’t Knight or Zallinger. So imagine my delight when I rediscovered this book in my very own archives when I moved house last year. Oh yes, I remember this one. This very, very old one. How old? It dates from…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Red Book of Animal Stories

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric World (Richard Moody) – Part 3

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Because at least two people asked for it, here’s a final look at 1980’s Prehistoric World, written by Richard Moody and illustrated by a variety of artists – and this time, we’re looking at some Cenozoic beasties (and no more coral – with apologies to coral fans). Or as the book would have it, “Cainozoic”, a seldom-seen spelling that Moody might have chosen because it’s somewhat closer to the Greek. Since I can’t remember the last time I saw “Cainozoic”…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Ages of the Earth

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Here’s a rather unusual book, so much so that, ever since I aquired it, I’ve been referring to it as “the weird book”. My translated copy is called “De Ontwikkeling der Aarde” (“the development of Earth”) but I believe its original English title to be The Ages of the Earth. It’s a book about geology, one in a 1960’s book series on science, authored by one Michael Dempsey (not the actor, I assume) and one David Larkin. It hails from…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Animals

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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,…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Verdwenen Werelden – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

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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