It might be hard to believe these days, but the Jurassic Park franchise was once used as a force for palaeontological education. The Jurassic Park Institute website, a kid-friendly hub for dinosaur edutainment, went online in 2001 to coincide with the release of the infamously divisive Jurassic Park 3. This site was a mainstay for my generation of dinosaur lovers, hosting a huge array of articles, activities, and games. Arguably the biggest draw of the site was the Dinopedia. This…
Today’s title is mostly a prime example of late ’90s – early 2000s kiddie book filler, but no doubt thanks to the arcane rules of licensing it manages to feature some interesting artwork all the same. The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs (not to be confused with the vastly superior DK book from ’93) was first published in 2000 by Parragon, with this edition arriving in 2002. No fewer than 12 artists illustrated this book, but individual pieces are sadly not credited.…
In my further quest to avoid the DK Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Life from 2001 (which I do now own, at least), here’s another book from around that time – Dinosaurs, published in 2002 by Fog City Press. It’s a rather generic affair all told, but I’m sure there’s someone out there for whom this is an important childhood memory. Besides which, it features illustrations by Steve Kirk and Luis Rey (among others), not to mention an interesting mix of…
Or Norman: Into the Normanverse What book casts a longer shadow than David Norman’s 1985 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs? Which dinosaur reconstructions are more iconic, more widely seen and more frequently copied than John Sibbick’s? What book has been referenced more frequently on these pages than the one we still affectionately call the Normanpedia? Will this whole review consist of rhetorical questions? Today, I want to talk about a book by David Norman that came out a mere three…
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…
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…
I can’t believe my luck: in the ten years LITC has been running, nobody has ever talked about what might be my favourite dinosaur book of all time! Get ready, everybody, this is gonna be a treat. The Great Dinosaurs was originally published in 1994 and translated for my neck of the woods in 1998, under the simple name Dinosauriërs. I got this gem of a book around the tail end of my childhood dinosaur obsession in the late nineties,…
Now here’s a blast from the past, and in more than the usual multiple senses – for David took a very brief look at this book back in 2010. It’s a measure of just how much things have changed in a decade that David’s post now seems incongruously short – just a smattering of pics from Flickr, shared by the wonderful Trish Arnold. That does mean that there’s an awful lot left to explore in Ranger Rick’s Dinosaur Book, and…
Steve Kirk’s an underappreciated talent in the world of palaeoart, so I’m happy to say that we’ve featured his work a few times before, both here and over at our old home. Previously featured Kirk works have predominantly been from the 1990s, so imagine my delight when one John Conway thrust The Big Book of Dinosaurs into my hands – a Kirk-illustrated book from 1989! It’s fascinating to see just how much Kirk’s dinosaur art evolved in really quite a…
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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.