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tyrannosaurus

Tramways and Dinosaurs: Jurassic Discovery in Seaton

Attraction Review July 6, 2026

“Seaton Tramway operates narrow gauge heritage trams between Seaton, Colyford and Colyton in East Devon’s glorious Axe Valley,” according to their website, providing superb views across the wetland habitats of curlews, lapwings, egrets, shelducks, swans, and many more. But just in case you’d rather see Mesozoic dinosaurs, Seaton Tramway (Enterprises) Ltd. also operates Jurassic Discovery, a venue filled with robotic saurians located directly next to their Seaton station. (And an indoor soft play area, but that doesn’t concern us.) What’s…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Life (In School and At Home)

Vintage Dinosaur Art June 23, 2026

In the decade before the Normanpedia appeared and all and sundry decided to slavishly copy John Sibbick’s work, Giovanni Caselli’s illustrations for Halstead’s The evolution and ecology of the Dinosaurs were often held up as the gold standard. Or so it would seem, based on the number of imitators. (Incidentally, did you know that there is a greater timespan between my review of the Halstead book and now than between Tyrannosaurus and humans?) This week’s example is Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia of…

The Hagenbeck Dinosaurs

You all know about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. In my lifetime, these went from the poster children of outdated, stodgy views of ponderous swamp dinosaurs, to being the most celebrated monuments of early dinosaur art around. And they are not alone. I’ve made it my mission to visit as many historic, unique dinosaur models in Europe as I can find, such as Boudewijn Bollee’s dinosaurs of Artis in Amsterdam and the dinosaurs of Chorzów Zoo in Poland. This spring, I…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art April 24, 2026

While John Sibbick Normanpedia knock-offs were pretty ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the illustrations in this book just might be unique in combining classic Sibbickisms with a more John McLoughlin-like, monochrome, stipply style. A rather obscure little volume very kindly sent over from the States by Herman Diaz, The Life and Death of the Dinosaurs was published in 1990 by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Audubon Society, written by Joseph K Slap (great name), and illustrated by Elaine…

Morgan Freeman’s The Dinosaurs

TV review March 17, 2026

Imagine, if you will, that I’m reciting all of this to you in the absolute gravelliest of tones – a voice that’s like a multi-tonne load cascading from a dumper truck that’s just returned from the deepest pits of an enormous quarry site. And I’ve been pouring neat whisky on my breakfast cereal and gargling small shards of flinty rock after brushing my teeth with sand. For many years, the empaahrr of the CG dahnosaur documentahries was thought to have…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: All About Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art March 10, 2026

Here’s a title that might seem familiar to you – perhaps because I reviewed a completely different book of the same name back in 2014, but more likely because it’s about as generic a 1980s retro-a-thon as one can get. While the Dinosaur Renaissance was very much underway, producing some of the most memorable and iconic (sorry, but it’s true) palaeoart of all time, anyone growing up at the time was far more likely to have their image of dinosaurs…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaur Dream

Vintage Dinosaur Art March 2, 2026

You know, I’ve only done one Vintage Dinosaur Art project in the entire year of 2025? Granted, it was the mammoth, three part project on Marie Hubrecht at the Lyceum, the results of which are used in her biography, but still. It’s time to crank it up a notch, and the best way to pick up the pace is to scale back the size of the projects. Let’s do a cute children’s book. Dennis Nolan (1945-2022) was a painter in…

Vintage Dinosaur Art – Prehistoric Animals (Macdonald First Library)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 30, 2026

Bernard Robinson is an artist whose work I’ve always been happy to stumble upon, ever since I first reviewed the Ladybird book Dinosaurs back in 2011 (can you believe I’ve been writing this twaddle for over 15 years? Me neither). He was extremely skilled at placing tangible-looking, highly detailed and very scaly dinosaurs in lush, evocative settings, and both the quality of his work and its obviously retro nature (by post-Dino Renaissance standards) make it hugely nostalgic for many. Yes, even…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 47 – Pam Mara according to Chris

Podcast Show Notes January 29, 2026

We’re trying out something new for our first podcast episode of 2026! Marc, Natee and Gemma are joined by returning guest Christopher DiPiazza, teacher, palaeoartist and now budding palaeontologist. Not only does he fill us in about all his adventures working with fossils from the Maryland Dinosaur Park bone beds, he also joins us for our Vintage Dinosaur Art discussion. Chris introduces us to the work of Pam Mara as it appears in several volumes of Rourke dinosaur books. These…

Boston Museum of Science

Museums January 6, 2026

I think enough time has passed between now and my previous write-up of the Harvard Museum of Natural History that I can post the other big museum I visited during my adventures in Massachusetts, in the summer of 2025. It’s in Boston proper, just about, less than three miles down the road from the Harvard museum in Cambridge, giving the people of greater Boston several quality museums to choose from. It follows that both museums would do well to differentiate…

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