Last month I reviewed A Guide to Earth History, our first foray into the world of Maurice Wilson’s illustrations in quite some time. At the end of said article, I asked readers (we still have them!) to let me know where I might find more Wilson excellence, and Alexander Guridov duly answered – by sending me scans of Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles, first published “BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY)” in 1954, with this second…
Zoos and dinosaurs. I have written a lot about Dutch zoos and dinosaurs on these pages. Most zoos in my home country have some degree of dinosaur presence, in the shape of permanent or temporary model exhibitions, interesting homemade sculptures, themed playgrounds or psychedelic light sculptures. But there was one zoo that had a full blown small natural history museum – complete with mounted dinosaur skeletons – as part of its permanent collection, fully integrated with the zoo and featuring…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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.
