Due to illness, we missed an episode of the podcast, but we are back on track with the episode recorded in April! This time, Dr. Mark Witton takes us back to what might be the first large-scale expression of palaeoart in 3D: The dinosaurs at the Geological Court at Crystal Palace Park! Tying in with his new book with Ellinor Michel, he tells us all about their history, their surprising influence and their uncertain future. Also, a lot of unashamed…
There’s a new face on the blog! Sophie has been getting some attention on Twitter with, among other things, her threads on vintage dinosaur books. Of course, it was a matter of time before she found her way here. Please welcome Sophie and come say hi in the comments! – Niels Hi there, everyone! I’m Sophie, you might know me from my Twitter where I’ve made a name for myself with my enormous threads on old dinosaur art, regular commentary…
Time for a quick one! Here’s a little oddity I found somewhere online. As far as I understand, this was a free givaway at Sinclair petrol stations all the way back in 1934, making this one of the oldest books I’ll probably ever review for LITC. Popular books with original palaeoart are exceedingly rare from this time. The first dinosaur boom, cranked up by the Victorians and recklessly kicked into high gear during the Bone Wars, was sputtering out of…
As you can well imagine, I’ve read a fair few dinosaur books from the latter half of the twentieth century, and while they are almost always dated in just about every respect, there are very few that stun me with their sheer strangeness. One can well understand outdated views on dinosaur evolutionary history, anatomy and biology, but it’s quite something else to encounter a book that’s such a culture shock that it might as well have emerged from a completely…
Although I became interested in dinosaurs before the release of that film in 1993, it was only just before, and as such I’m a tiny bit too young to remember Dinosaur!, a 1991 TV series that featured as consultant none other than sexily shiny-domed Iguanodon expert Dr David Norman. Yes, the very same Dr Norman who wrote the Normanpedia and stared out sultrily in black and white from the back cover of each issue of Dinosaurs! magazine (whether or not…
The year is 1964 and, although he doesn’t know it yet, Yale palaeontologist John H. Ostrom is about to make history. In the summer of that year, he will embark on an expedition to Montana where he will make some remarkable discoveries. Five years later, he will be publishing one of the most game-changing papers in the history of dinosaur palaeontology: the scientific description of Deinonychus antirrhopus. It will mark the beginning of a complete revolution in how we see…
They say you can tell a lot about a person from looking at their bookshelf, and recently I found out that my friend Bas was the kind of person who had a dinosaur book from the nineties that I hadn’t seen yet. Those are the best kind of people. Bas has good memories of his childhood dinosaur phase and of this book in particular. Of course, I just had to borrow it, and since an opportunity to return it is…
Given that dinosaurs are so notorious in the popular imagination for having grown Very Large far more often than they had any right to, it’s only fitting that so many dinosaur books – especially those aimed at children – have adopted a correspondingly chunky, oversized format. The appeal is obvious, even if it means that the bloody things simply refuse to squeeze under my scanner. The Giant Book of Dinosaurs is around 24.5cm wide and 34.5cm tall – big enough…
It’s time for one last outing with Peter Zallinger’s tan-and-green creations (see parts 1 and 2), only this time, we’re entering the Cenozoic! Although not right away. There are some heretofore unseen ceratopsians that deserve a look, first. Triceratops, being the ceratopsian rock star that it is, gets an entire page to itself. This is one of my favourite illustrations in the book – not only is it superbly detailed, in every aspect from the animal’s scaly skin folds to…
I’m going to show you some more of Dinosaurs! The Multimedia Encyclopedia. Since I shared the first part last week, there has been no shortage of you guys telling me about the dinosaur computer progams and games you used to have back when CD-Rom was a thing. Unsurpisingly, there were far more dinosaur-centered computer programs and video games around at that time (1993 – the year of Jurassic Park), many of which might be worth looking into someday… if any…
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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.