The palaeontologist Dr William Elgin Swinton (W E Swinton to you) is perhaps best known, in the context of popular books about dinosaurs at least, for works published by the Natural History Museum (or the British Museum (Natural History) as it then properly was) that featured artwork by Neave Parker. I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time. However, it’d be…
Dinosaurs have encouraged a great many kids to improve their reading skills – best way to find out all about ’em, after all – so it’s only natural that books of a saurian bent have appeared in a number of reading schemes through the years. (I’ve certainly covered a few before – just don’t ask me to find them in the haystack.) Speaking of Dinosaurs was first published in 1979 (with this edition arriving in 1983) as part of the…
Published by The Trumpet Club (great name) in 1990, New Questions and Answers about Dinosaurs is exactly the right age to be the sort of book that I might have encountered in my very first years learning about dinosaurs. Except, I didn’t – perhaps it was more widely available in the US than over here, for that is where this copy came from, sent over once again by Herman Diaz. (Thank you Herman!) In terms of the artwork, it’s a…
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,…
Slightly late but sure as rain comes the fourteenth episode of the world-famous Chasmosaurs Podcast! Natee, Marc and Niels dive into the Zallinger dynasty, as after covering Rudolph’s famous mural, this time we shine a light on his son Peter Zallinger. Natee interviews Greer Stothers, who has a book coming out called Kaleidoscope of Dinosaurs, a great title for a book. We also have a brief interview with Tom van der Linden, who may just have discovered a new dinosaur!…
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…
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…
There is nothing better than getting your hands on a forgotten, but important, volume of vintage palaeoart, and, folks, palaeoart doesn’t come much more vintage than this. The work featured today precedes Burian, Zallinger and Parker, but in many ways was ahead of its time. When you think of “stylized” palaeoart, you might think of modern figures such as Raven Amos, Johan Egerkrans or our own David Orr, but this book shows that even in the early 20th century there…
Many years ago, Marc introduced you all to the marvellous wonder that is Paradise Park. Early in 2019, he also introduced me to the place. Now I will re-introduce you to it, because I am on a mission to bring back Ugly Ugly Dinosaurs to LITC (or, as those savvy to today’s Internet lingo call them, Cursed Dinosaurs), and there is simply no place quite like Paradise Park. Enjoy! Although there’s plenty of tourism in the greater Brighton area, there…
Today we’re back following the Dollybutt Children and their great uncle Lancelot as they journey through the Age of Dinosaurs, meeting some unusual critters along the way, as written down by Gerald Durrell and illustrated by Graham Percy. Part one is here. We’ve arrived in the Jurassic now, which means… Sauropods! Diplodocus are a case where the simplified, “broad strokes” approach to dinosaur depiction works reasonably well. After all, what is a sauropod but an animal that is skinny on…
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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.