As the sort of unremarkable kids’ book that you might find buried in a stack at a charity shop, looking a little forlorn (but I found on eBay, of course), you might not expect too much from the Oxford First Book of Dinosaurs (part of a series that included further volumes on animals, art, maths, science, and space). As you’ve no doubt guessed, it uses a lot of art recycled from earlier books. Ah, but in this case, it’s a…
Not wanting the last post of the year to be a vanilla Vintage Dinosaur Art post featuring some filler art from 20 years ago presented a conundrum. What else am I supposed to do these days? A few different ideas came to mind – a bit of personal reflection, a review of a museum or other attraction that I’d failed to post about, or a humorous comparison of ‘expert reacts’ videos regarding dinosaur media. In the end, I decided to…
Regular readers (we have some, right?) will be aware that our sole criterion for a book’s inclusion in Vintage (=Old) Dinosaur Art is that it be 20 years old. Consequently, books from the early 2000s have now entered our purview. It was a time when, in the wake of Walking With Dinosaurs, publishers demanded increasing numbers of CG creations in lieu of more traditional illustrations and model photography. Dorling Kindersley (aka DK) very much followed this trend, inserting very dodgy…
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…
We’ve had a month off, but the famous LITC podcast is back in full strength with more fresh news, nostalgic art reviews and exciting interviews! After discussing the new films and documentaries that are coming our way, we review some very English palaeoart from the late 1970s by the unsung Peter Snowball. After that, Natee and Marc interview the Golden Boys of Dromaeosaurs, 3D sculptor Ruadhrí Brennan and returning LITC interviewee Jed Taylor, whose incredible Velociraptor sculpts have set last…
One month on from the last entry, here’s another slice of the early ’90s dinosaur book series from The Child’s World, this time featuring everyone’s favourite misunderstood, misnamed, cassowary-casqued* weirdo, Oviraptor. Diana Magnuson, who illustrated the Megalosaurus book, also provided the artwork here. In the main, it’s a considerable improvement over her work on Megalosaurus, although that might have been because up-to-the-minute reference material and illustrations of Megalosaurus were hard to come by at the time, while Oviraptor was enjoying…
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…
Our tremendous trio is back for 2024, but not all things are as they were… mostly they are, though. We get back into the swing of Vintage Dinosaur art, or is that Nostalgic Dinosaur Art? We explore the work of Mark Hallett, the man Marc once declared his Favourite Palaeoartist Ever, as it appears in Stephen and Sylvia Czerkas’ Dinosaurs: A Global View, also featuring works by John Sibbick and Douglas Henderson. Then, Marc and Natee interview Andy Frazer, also…
That time again: Another zoo in the Netherlands has been dinosaurified! Previously I showed you the dinosaurs that came to ZooParc Overloon, Dierenrijk and GaiaZoo. This time, it’s Ouwehands Dierenpark in the town of Rhenen that has been visited by creatures from millions of years ago. There’s a twist, though; whereas the previous attractions centered around the usual models and animatronics, this attraction is a dinosaur-themed edition of Ouwehands’ yearly Light Nights winter event. That means these dinosaurs are light…
Ever run into someone whom you haven’t seen in years – or even decades – in a very unlikely place? A couple of weeks ago I went out for pizza in Leicester with Agata, and the somewhat quirky restaurant we visited had a small table inhabited by a range of rather ugly, cheap, chunky dinosaur figures. Most of them I recognised from recent forays in toy and gift shops (and the Natural History Museum gift shop, sadly), but one of…
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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.