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Scelidosaurus

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

We at LITC are the historians of prehistory, the rememberers of the forgotten, the detectives of dinosaurs. As the palaeontologist diligently searches the rocks and sediments, looking for traces of ancient life, so it is our calling to unearth the most dusty and ponderous tomes of outdated palaeontology, looking for ancient life reconstructions. And thus we come once more to the Victorians. Not the pioneers of palaeontology like Anning, Mantell, Buckland and the wretched Owen, but the second generation. Those…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Second Invicta Poster

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Over a decade go, on the blog’s previous incarnation, I wrote a slightly unusual Vintage Dinosaur Art article about a single poster. Said artwork was produced to accompany the officially endorsed Natural History Museum (or, as it properly was at the time, British Museum (Natural History)) dinosaur toy line, made by Invicta Plastics of England. At the time, I mentioned that I knew of two posters, both with the same theme (an Age of Reptiles-esque seamless transition through time), but…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Great Dinosaurs – Part 5

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Gather round everyone, it’s time for the fifth and final look we’re having at the fabulous book of The Great Dinosaurs, the swan song of the great Zdeněk Špinar, who died shortly after publishing this book, and the artistic masterpiece of his fellow Czech Jan Sovák. Here are part one, part two, part three and part four, if you’ve missed them. There’s been a healthy number of comments and discussions under each of these so let’s see if we can…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs and Other Archosaurs – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Having already covered Peter Zallinger’s theropods – or at least, the non-avian ones – we should probably turn our attention to the various Other Dinosaurs that populate Dinosaurs and Other Archosaurs. We’ll start with some basal sauropodomorphs which are, yet again, green and tan. Or is it tan and green? Once again, these are reconstructions that are exceptionally well-observed for the time in terms of anatomical details, but also rather skinny – particularly for herbivorous animals, which would have had…

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Diplodocus ribcage

Eyewitness Guides: Dinosaur – 30 years on (part 1)

Book Review

Last month, I finally got around to reviewing the Eyewitness Dinosaur video from 1994, part of a series spun off from the Eyewitness Guides books published by Dorling Kindersley. It occurred to me then that I’d never actually reviewed the Dinosaur book itself, which prompted a quick scouring of eBay for a copy – preferably as old and cheap as possible. Having bought what I thought was a 1989 edition for less than the price of a pint, I was…

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Bones

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs of the World (Avi-Cha) – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Having covered this book’s theropods in a previous post, I suppose it’s time we give those Other Dinosaurs a quick look.  I still think it’s a real shame that this series wasn’t published more widely; the illustrations are consistently excellent and serve as a wonderful reminder of where we were at in the late ’90s. This was the work of some of the best palaeo-illustrators around, and it’s never made more clear than when they apply the same care, attention…

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