It’s 2023, and we have a rule here. It’s an arbitrary rule, but here we are: We count everything as “vintage” that is 20 years old or older. That means, try not to die of shock here, that everything up to 2003 is now eligible for a Vintage Dinosaur Art review. Them’s the breaks. A whole new millennium is opening up for us! Now, when I think of what dinosaur books look like in the 21st century, I mostly think…
Falling very much into that particular sub-category of kiddy fodder dinosaur book in which the animals almost all inhabit parched desertscapes, Now You Can Read About…Dinosaurs was published by Brimax Books in 1984 (with this edition arriving in 1985). For the mid 1980s, it’s pretty much par for the course – a little backward when compared with the full-throttle Dino Renaissance art that was already out there, but hardly much more retrograde than even the Normanpedia. It was books like this…
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,…
Because at least a couple of people requested it, here’s a third outing for The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs (not that one). And this time, Heterodontosaurus would like to give you a lovely big hug. Christopher Santoro’s Heterodontosaurus follows in the proud ’80s and ’90s tradition of giving the animal rather unsettling arms and hands – oddly humanoid, with gnarly, grasping fingers and claws. Of course, this illustration can’t come close to Neil Lloyd’s Hetty as featured in Dinosaurs!,…
We’re back again today with the ecelctic Reuzen Uit De Oertijd, or Discoveries’ Dinosaurs, the Australian not-quite-Eyewitness-level nineties nostalgiavaganza featuring a plethora of works by different artists. Many of you told us you remember this one from your childhoods, so I hope I’m not going to ruin your opinion of it too much. Since last we spoke, I have returned this book to its actual owner, so all I’ve got left is the scans. I’m sure there’s enough in here…
Hello! With the review of the actual movie out of the way, today I’m going to review all the creatures great and small from Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time! Somebody’s gotta do it. It’s too late to celebrate the movie’s thirtieth birthday and it’ll be a good while before another significant anniversary comes up, so now is as good a day as any. I’m just going over all creature and character designs roughly in order of appearance. Let’s see…
Introducing Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs: The Podcast! In the first episode, Natee Himmapaan, Marc Vincent and Niels Hazeborg discuss the dinosaur news, admire a well known book full of Vintage Dinosaur Art, and interview palaeoartist Joschua Knüppe on his new book. On this blog post, you can find links to the relevant news articles, all the images we discuss, and links to the work of our interviewed artist. In the News TetZooMCon happened on 12 december 2020.…
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…
Right, it’s time for one last round of The Great Dinosaur Atlas (see part 1 and part 2), the greatest book that John Sibbick ever illustrated by proxy. Again, I must apologise for using (dodgy) photographs rather than scans, but the book is so Great that squeezing it under my scanner is an issue. At least we’re able to fully appreciate such double-page spreads as… …this stegosaur page, featuring the skeleton of Toujiangosaurus as it is mounted (as a cast)…
Some more Steve Kirk for you now, why not? You might have noticed that my first post on this book only covered theropods (for reasons that are surely well known by now), so let’s now turn to those pesky Other Dinosaurs. A good place to start would be what appear to have been the cover stars (I lack the dust jacket) – these two hadrosaurs, here. And suitably 1980s-looking they are, too. Prior to the Dino Renaissance, hadrosaurs tended to…
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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.