Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs – Exploring the Mesozoic era in science, art, and pop culture

Vintage Dinosaur Art – Prehistoric Animals (Macdonald First Library)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 30, 2026

Bernard Robinson is an artist whose work I’ve always been happy to stumble upon, ever since I first reviewed the Ladybird book Dinosaurs back in 2011 (can you believe I’ve been writing this twaddle for over 15 years? Me neither). He was extremely skilled at placing tangible-looking, highly detailed and very scaly dinosaurs in lush, evocative settings, and both the quality of his work and its obviously retro nature (by post-Dino Renaissance standards) make it hugely nostalgic for many. Yes, even…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 47 – Pam Mara according to Chris

Podcast Show Notes January 29, 2026

We’re trying out something new for our first podcast episode of 2026! Marc, Natee and Gemma are joined by returning guest Christopher DiPiazza, teacher, palaeoartist and now budding palaeontologist. Not only does he fill us in about all his adventures working with fossils from the Maryland Dinosaur Park bone beds, he also joins us for our Vintage Dinosaur Art discussion. Chris introduces us to the work of Pam Mara as it appears in several volumes of Rourke dinosaur books. These…

Boston Museum of Science

Museums January 6, 2026

I think enough time has passed between now and my previous write-up of the Harvard Museum of Natural History that I can post the other big museum I visited during my adventures in Massachusetts, in the summer of 2025. It’s in Boston proper, just about, less than three miles down the road from the Harvard museum in Cambridge, giving the people of greater Boston several quality museums to choose from. It follows that both museums would do well to differentiate…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: A Guide to Earth History

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 4, 2026

Should you ever visit the historic Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know), be sure to drop by the superb Ironbridge Book Shop. There you’ll find a huge range of classic Pelican paperbacks for sale, a series created by Penguin in 1937 to provide some low-cost intellectual stimulation for the masses. I visited back in November and managed to pick up A Guide to Earth History, which stood out to me for a very obvious…

Podcast Snow Notes: Episnowed 46 – Prehistoric Planet Ice Age Extravaganza

Podcast Show Notes December 29, 2025

In the season of Santa and weather so bleak, Three natural history nerds take a peek At young ancient mammals, so fluffy and twee As seen on the new show on Apple TV. In landscapes so snowy and icy and barren They go on adventures, instructed by Darren. Some get dehydrated and some weather-beaten, Alas, all too few of the babies get eaten. Is the show a success, or is it too hokey? Did the BBC trade in old David…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (Kingfisher My First Encyclopedia) – part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art December 9, 2025

By popular request – and by that, I mean literally a single person asked for it – here’s another little look at Dinosaurs, published in 2000 as part of Kingfisher’s My First Encyclopedia series, although all of the content dates to 1994 (and it shows). As the last post featured a lot of work by Ann Winterbotham, it’s only fair that the work of the other illustrators gets an airing this time. Don’t say I don’t spoil you, Andrew McLeod. While…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 45 – Heinrich Harder and Julianne Kiely

Podcast Show Notes November 30, 2025

Gemma, Natee, and Marc are back for another attempt at entertaining prehistorically inclined people with carefully edited commentary and interviews with people who actually know what they’re talking about. In this episode, David Armsby’s back and better than ever, Darren Naish’s hair is slicker than ever, and Gemma interviews palaeobotanist and artist Julianne Kiely, who’s here to save us all from painfully generic and/or inaccurate flora in palaeoart. Will Gemma dare challenge Julianne’s assertion that plants are cooler than animals?…

Spinosaur Tales – review

Book Review November 23, 2025

Back in 2016, Dave Hone (for it was he) wrote The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, a book all about the best little clade of theropod dinosaurs that there ever was. Earlier this year saw the publication of Mark Witton’s King Tyrant, a book also dedicated to tyrannosaurs and one species in particular (can you guess?). Now, the two have joined forces to produce a book about…spinosaurs! Well, they’ve surely written enough about tyrannosaurs at this point. What’s more, it’s unsurprisingly rather good, although I…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Famous Dinosaurs Playing Cards

Vintage Dinosaur Art November 21, 2025

Themed playing card sets are a dime a dozen, offering a fun spin on the standard deck that we’ve all seen thousands of times. As we at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs know, there’s no better theme than dinosaurs! The Heritage Playing Card Company, purveyor of innumerable themed decks, clearly knew this and released a set of dinosaur-themed cards back in 2002. This was a time of Jurassic Park sequels, Walking with Dinosaurs, and so much more iconic dinosaur…

A Graveyard of Dinosaurs

Attraction Review November 6, 2025

When the days get shorter and leaves start to fall, there’s always a zoo somewhere in the Netherlands that gets taken over by dinosaurs. In previous years, I’ve covered dinosaur events at ZooParc Overloon and the former Dierenrijk, now Eindhoven Zoo. This year, to my mild surprise, it was the turn of our biggest and best zoo, the legendary Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem. Of course, the general quality of Burgers’, combined with the pretty great animatronic dinosaurs on display at…

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