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…
Another day, another dinosaur book that is too bloody big for my scanner. Written by the ever-prolific Mike Benton and published in 1989, On The Trail Of The Dinosaurs is one in a series of three books on palaeontology and prehistoric life. There’s also separate volumes on palaeozoic and cenozoic animals. What makes this one of interest to us is that, in the life reconstructions, we recognize the steady hand of perennial LITC darling Graham Rosewarne. We mostly know Rosewarne…
Here’s an unoffical followup to this post. As I explained there, my work as a science educator takes me to a large number of primary schools across the country, and whenever I can I sneak around the school library to see if I can find some palaeo-related content that I didn’t know yet. This one time, I found one of Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear books, most definitely not for children! I wonder how that got there?…
Carrying on from last time! The woes of 2021 drove me to the occasional book shopping spree, and as a result I’ve got at least another year’s worth of VDA books on my shelf. If I recall, this book was a fortunate find on Dutch web shopping giant Bol punt com. I was unfamiliar to it but it turns out that a lot of you grew up with this one, so I hope you enjoy part two of this trip…
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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.