Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…
We’re trying out something new for our first podcast episode of 2026! Marc, Natee and Gemma are joined by returning guest Christopher DiPiazza, teacher, palaeoartist and now budding palaeontologist. Not only does he fill us in about all his adventures working with fossils from the Maryland Dinosaur Park bone beds, he also joins us for our Vintage Dinosaur Art discussion. Chris introduces us to the work of Pam Mara as it appears in several volumes of Rourke dinosaur books. These…
Graham Rosewarne was an artist whose work greatly elevated my beloved Dinosaurs! magazine (published by Orbis in the 1990s), alongside that by the likes of Jim Robins and Steve White. Unfortunately, books featuring work of his that isn’t just recycled from Dinosaurs! can be a little difficult to come by. I was therefore quite pleased to happen upon The Reign of the Reptiles in The Warehouse Antiques & Collectables while over in Norfolk (a shop we definitely didn’t just visit because it’s adjoined…
Not wanting the last post of the year to be a vanilla Vintage Dinosaur Art post featuring some filler art from 20 years ago presented a conundrum. What else am I supposed to do these days? A few different ideas came to mind – a bit of personal reflection, a review of a museum or other attraction that I’d failed to post about, or a humorous comparison of ‘expert reacts’ videos regarding dinosaur media. In the end, I decided to…
The Magic School Bus franchise was a big deal at exactly the right sort of time for it to have impacted my childhood, but it completely passed me by – probably because I’m British, and it wasn’t quite as well known here. I do have vague memories of a fantastical yellow bus (which was a bit of an alien concept – the yellow school bus, that is) that could fly through space and whatnot, but that’s about it. A shame,…
Whereas the first two episodes of Prehistoric Planet 2 took us to the Islands and Badlands, the final three transport the viewer to Swamps, Oceans and, er, North America. Why the sudden change of theme, to a continental locale rather than a type of habitat, in the final episode? It hardly matters, I suppose, if it means we get to see more of Prehistoric Planet‘s utterly fantastic T. rex. What’s more, in this series, I finally got what I really wanted… …That is, a…
Remember the St Michael dinosaur book, published in 1978 and notably featuring quite handsomely painted illustrations by Bernard Robinson? Discovering Dinosaurs, published a decade later by Cliveden Press, was illustrated by someone who evidently had a very well-thumbed copy of the earlier tome. I say ‘someone’, because neither the illustrator nor author here are credited, which is rather surprising. Then again, given the levels of Utter Shamelessness on show here, perhaps it’s because they’d rather their names weren’t attached to this…
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,…
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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.