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ugly ugly dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art, maybe: De dinosauriërs (Kennis Compact)

Vintage Dinosaur Art

The concept of “bad art” has been occupying my mind lately, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course. Bad palaeoart, especially. It is my firmly-held belief that even the shoddiest work made by human hand has infinitely more value than any image artificially created by a learning, plagiarizing algorithm. No matter how many works by Tony Gibbons and F. John we have to plough through on these pages, this will still be essentially true. All contributions to…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurus – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

When I first started writing for this blog – many, many years ago now, possibly even as long ago as 2009 – I was accused of being overly-critical. “Who cares if a dinosaur’s gross anatomy shifts considerably from one illustration to the next?” “You’re pissing all over a classic!” You know, that sort of thing. And the accusers had a point, at least some of the time. As I’ve got older I’ve certainly mellowed – not to mention got to…

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Podcast Show Notes: Episode 32 – Stavros and Solonevic

Podcast Show Notes

Spring has come early, and episode 32 has come late! In this one, Marc, Natee and Gemma discuss the unusual, singular and slightly deranged dinosaurs from the swinging 60s by cult palaeoartist George Solonevic, as it appears in a book called Dinosaurs and More Dinosaurs. Marc interviews the esteemed Stavros Svenson Kulindadromaeus Kundromichalis on his fabulous book on the dinosaurs of the Triassic. Have we polished up our Swedish? Will Allosaurus emerge from your wardrobe and swallow you up if…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: The World’s Wonderful Creatures

Vintage Dinosaur Art

When looking at books from the years BT (Before T’internet), we must of course always bear in mind that decent reference material was rather difficult to come by, especially for your average jobbing illustrator without privileged access to museums and/or scientists. (And even then, the scientists sometimes just didn’t give a toss.) This explains the proliferation of Knight, Burian, and Zallinger clones – what else were the poor artists supposed to do, if not take inspiration from the greats? Nevertheless,…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tiere der Urwelt (Reichardt) – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art

Have you seen our last post about these cards? Blog statistics tell me you mostly haven’t, so make sure to read it here. Today, I want to take you again to the wonderful, whimsical, slightly puzzling, occasionally grotesque prehistoric world of the enigmatic F. John, who exists only as a signature on sixty collectable cards from the Reichardt cocoa company. Quick recap: in the early 1900s, Reichardt released two series of thirty collectable cards with illustrations of prehistoric animals. All…

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Vintage Dinosaur Art: Tiere der Urwelt (Reichardt) – Part 1

Vintage Dinosaur Art

And it’s a proper Vintage Dinosaur Art as today, we’re looking at a rather obscure collection of paleoart from the very beginning of the 20th century. Let’s lay down some groundwork. Collectable cards are of all ages. In my youth, in the schoolyard we would have traded, and beat each other senseless over, Pokémon cards (a fine tradition that continues to this day), or football cards (maybe baseball cards if you’re in the US?). Sometimes, there’s a fad around dinosaur…

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Vintage Jurassic Park Covers!

Vintage Dinosaur Art

It all started a week or two ago, when my partner Maartje found a Dutch translation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park somewhere. It is an original 1991 edition. This means the cover image had been produced before the movie was made. It is necessarily completely free of the iconography of the film that would come to overshadow the novel, and indeed overshadow all other dinosaur media. That logo, that skeleton, that font, the designs of those dinosaurs and those characters…

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Dinosaurs of Vlaardingen

Museums

Ah, the glamorous lifestyle of the dinosaur blogger. It’s a life full of fast cars, fancy clothes, exclusive parties, sexy people of all genders and, don’t forget, exotic locations all around the world. Today we are in Vlaardingen! It’s a historic fishing town in the greater Rotterdam area. Rotterdam is famed for both its bizarre architecture and interesting museums. Not to be outdone, Vlaardingen has some of its own to offer in both categories. The collection of Museum Vlaardingen is…

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ROARR!

Attraction Review

Given Sam Bright’s excellent recent guest post on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, it only seems fitting that we turn to another, more modern park full of full-scale life reconstructions of prehistoric beasts. Except, of course, this is firmly on the kitsch-o-saurus end of the scale, and there certainly won’t be a reference section at the end. Leave it to me to the lower the tone. What’s more, this is yet another example of me wallowing in childhood nostalgia. For I…

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The Dinosaur Kitsch Parade

Attraction Review

I wanted to do something quirky to close off the year. I like to think we are all dinosaur kitsch connaisseurs here. As the blog’s resident European mainlander, I have made it my mission to visit lots of dinosaur-related attractions, expositions and museums around the continent. I will then write whatever there is to write, whether it’s about priceless, unique vintage models in Poland or rubbish animatronics at some zoo. I’ve found that in this time of plenty there is…

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