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…
The 1990s was a decade of unparalleled Dinomania; a time where dinosaur books threatened to spill out from bookstores and libraries and bury us all in literary celebrations of prehistoric life. It was a better time. The majority of books published back then were illustrated by artists just didn’t get dinosaurs, and worse still, by artists who just copied the art of whatever dinosaur book they could find at the local library. Patrick O’Brien was no such artist. Gigantic! was…
Once again: Marie Hubrecht. Are you tired of me talking about Marie Hubrecht yet? Because I’m not done. If you want more Hubrecht, check out my reviews of Verdwenen Werelden here, here and here, and our Verdwenen Werelden podcast episode here! This post is a direct companion to my last one, in which I detail the time I went to see the spectacular murals she made in the 1920s at the former Girls’ Lyceum in Amsterdam. These paintings have been…
We’re back with more German dinosaur cards from the Reichardt cocoa company! In parts one and two, we discussed two series of 1900s illustrations by one F. John. In the late 1910s, Reichardt once again hit the market with collectible cards themed to extinct animals. Incidentally, after Series 1 and Series 2, the third series was numbered Series 1a, because that’s what makes the most sense. The original featured artist, F. John, was, not to put too fine a point…
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…
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…
Here’s part two of our tentative exploration into the early 2000s with the World Atlas of Dinosaurs. Lots of Todd Marshall and Luis Rey to discover, but also I will tell you the real reason I couldn’t resist this book when I found it. Without further ado: Here’s one half of a Tendaguru spread by Todd Marshall. It depicts ceratosaurs in a bout of speculative intraspecific combat. The animals themselves are entirely speculative; the only ceratosaur material from Tanzania is…
Sometimes you catch a scent and can’t drop it. My bloodhound mode was activated by a recent email from Carl Mehling of the American Museum of Natural History, asking if we knew what the earliest children’s book on dinosaurs. If I’m not mistaken, the earliest book we’ve written about which was purely intended for children is Hilary Stebbing’s Extinct Animals (read Niels’ 2020 post and listen to the podcast episode). Its 1946 publication date beats Roy Chapman Andrews’ juvenile-aimed dinosaur…
Time for another trip to the educational films of the past, and this one is a doozy! 1970’s Dinosaurs: The Age of the Terrible Lizard is an edited English translation of an animated Polish film called Dinozaury, written and directed by Witold Giersz and Ryszard Slapczynski. It was digitized by IU Libraries and made available to the public via Media Collections Online. It was also featured by Rifftrax (available to subscribers). This edit is only 6 minutes long, but is…
We’re back on the trail of the dinosaurs with Mike Benton and Graham Rosewarne, two giants of the extremely niche genre of Popular British Dino Rennaissance Books (always well-represented on these pages). Last time, we looked mostly at Rosewarne’s panoramic compositions and found ourselves maybe a bit less than extremely impressed. But Rosewarne is at his best when drawing dinosaur profiles, and fortunately, this book allows him to do plenty of that. One of Rosewarne’s most famous and well-remembered creations…
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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.