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…
For episode 26, we’re crossing a big one from our list: The work of the legendary Zdeněk Burian, as it appears in 1972’s Life Before Man. Surely, this book is worth an entire episode, so we’re foregoing the interview this month. Niels, Natee and Marc discuss not only the art of the Czech master, but also his life, his beliefs and his enormous legacy. How did Burian get around reconstructing dinosaurs when he had no access to any fossils? Is…
It’s time for another trip down scicomm memory lane, courtesy Indiana University’s media collections online. 1971’s “Extinction: A Lesson from the Past” was written by Elizabeth Werrenrath and produced by her husband Reinald Werrenrath, Jr., a television pioneer and son of a famous opera singer. While Reinald passed away at the grand old age of 104 in 2019, Elizabeth is still with us at 108, and she seems to be a heck of a lady. Teetering on the very edge…
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Ilja Nieuwland. Inspired by our coverage of the palaeoart exhibition in Haarlem, he wrote in to share his views on a different palaeoart exhibition in Munich. Yes, it turns out there are no less than three palaeoart exhibitions running in Europe this year! Ilja is a cultural historian of science, focusing on the history of palaeontology and geology. In 2019, he published American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus,…
Teylers Museum of Haarlem, the Netherlands, has been featured on the blog before, when Marc gave the place his warm-hearted recommendation. In this age, when so many museums in this country want to be full-on sensory experiences and as a result start to look more and more like theme parks, because heaven forbid the kids should get bored, Teylers increasingly seems like the last museum standing. Even now, the Teylers is a most agreeably old-fashined collection of quietly beautiful halls,…
It’s very seldom that I’ll buy a book having never read a review – never mind one where I have no idea what’s inside it. I came upon Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom purely by chance in an independent bookshop in a nearby town, and found it hard to resist a cellophane-wrapped box sporting Charles Knight’s famous tumbling dryptosaurs. The choice of cover image seemed telling – surely anyone willing to plaster that all over their brand new…
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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.