It’s back! Already! This year, I don’t quite have the time to squeeze out a blog post after the release of every episode, but I’m still determined to mark the occasion in suitable fashion. So, I’ll post once today, having seen the first two episodes, and again on Friday. Can you believe that another season is already upon us? I guess that’s what Apple’s endless pit of money will buy you. That, and Darren Naish’s increasingly snazzy shirts. I’ll admit…
Zoo Chorzów, or the Silesian Zoological Park, is located a stone’s throw from the centre of Katowice in the Upper Silesia region of southern Poland. The zoo was founded on its current location in 1954, as part of the Socialist-era post-mining development of a big city park also including an amusement park, a planetarium, a sports centre and an art gallery. And there’s dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Valley section of the zoo, or the Kotlina Dinozaurów, was finished in 1974. Originally,…
Our second trip to the Prehistoric Planet takes us to a series of desert landscapes, including the Gobi, North Africa and South America (twice). And in contrast with the first episode, it’s rather heavy on dinosaurs – as one might expect, given that a marine reptile flopping around in the sands wouldn’t look very dignified. Other creatures do significantly feature – pterosaurs, of course, and a little anonymous lizard chasing flies around the faces of sleeping Tarbosaurus. However, the dinosaurs…
While I’ve found a great deal of blog fodder on eBay, it’s always immeasurably more pleasurable to spot a book in person, out there in the wild. As it happens, my friend Huseyin actually found this one, amid the glorious chaos of the aptly-named Raining Books shop here in Brighton. Originally published in 1982 in Italian, with this English translation arriving in 1987, The Prehistoric World was written by Giorgio P Panini and illustrated by a variety of artists, most…
I check the copyright page, and I check it again. 1993? Really? Surely that can’t be true. Surely this book is at least fifteen years newer than that. But no. The proof is right there, undeniable, clear as day. What sorcery is this? Who stole a time machine? How is this book so good? That year again, that fateful year. 1993. The Year of the Dinosaur, according to ancient astrology that I made up. The deluge of dino books from…
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…
Здравствуйте, comrades! Today, we are going to sneak past the Iron Curtain to see what the palaeoartists in the USSR were getting up to! Let’s get the obligatory joke out of the way first: in Mother Russia, dinosaur art review YOU! Ever since Zoë Lescaze’s monolithic book Paleoart came out, reviewed by me here, we’ve been wisening up to the fact that some of the most interesting Vintage Dinosaur Art was being produced under the Soviet regime. And no Soviet…
On more than one occasion, I’ve bought an intriguing-looking old dinosaur book on eBay, only to find that it’s filled with artwork from an older book that’s already been featured on the blog. This would be one of those cases…almost. For you see, while an awful lot of the palaeoart in this book is recycled from 1992’s Gollancz Dinosaur Enyclopaedia for Children, there’s a significant amount of newer material here too, and given that it’s all from the same artist…
By popular demand (a whole two comments – hey, that’s good going these days!), here’s a small selection of Steve Kirk’s ‘catalogue’ illustrations, as featured in the Dinosaur Encyclopaedia for Children from Gollancz. As I mentioned previously, most of these are rather bland by Kirk’s standards, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them were rather older than the typically lively panoramas featured last time. Still, for connoisseurs of 1980s and ’90s ‘spotters guide’-type dinosaur books, I’m sure…
November’s done, and it’s been a busy month here at LITC. In addition to the eight posts we’ve published, we finally joined Twitter properly, instead of continuing to sponge off of my personal account. Give us a follow! The content is very good. You’ll notice that there’s no “Empty Wallets Club” section this time around – plenty of opportunities to rid yourself of legal tender in our 2019 Dinosaur Gift Guide. Be sure to check it out – after delving…
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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.