Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Usborne Book of Dinosaurs

Whenever I mention Luis Rey in the context of being a palaeoartist whose work I'm rather fond of, I am normally met with a wrinkled nose, an arched eyebrow and an exclamation along the lines of 'really!?!'. Certainly Rey has his fair share of detractors, and one of the most common criticisms of his more recent work is that he's taken leave of his senses in Photoshop, cloning dinosaurs here, smearing photomanipulations there, and generally making a bit of a mess. There seems to be a quite widely held opinion that Rey's work is better when he sticks to paint and pencils. With that in mind, hopefully even the most ardent Rey-o-phobes will be interested in (and maybe even appreciate) seeing some early Rey � from 1993, in fact � in The Usborne Book of Dinosaurs.

Rey's style has remained consistent over the years � bright colours, dynamic poses, and chunky hornlets are definitely the order of the day. The cover tyrannosaur is instantly recognisable and quite lovely, with a convincing weightiness (no shrink-wrapping here) and excellent attention to detail, particularly when it comes to musculature and superficial details such as the birdlike elastic skin between the toes. (And so my worrisome theropod foot fetish is exposed yet again.) Through fortuitous coincidence - namely, the arms are facing the right way - it's actually aged rather well.

Inside we find a Coelophysis in a rather similar pose, decked out in a dashing red-and-black colour scheme (�Coelophysis looks very bright here,� an accompanying caption notes), complete with non-more-Rey yellow mouth. There's a dynamism to this piece that's quite lovely. It's also occurred to me that depicting Coelophysis with catlike slit pupils is something of a trope � it's entirely a stylistic choice, but one that seems to be followed by quite a number of artists. Whatever � I like the rather mad, staring look that Rey imbues it with.

Rey's recent foray into the territory of feathered Tyrannosaurus was met with disdain by some, inviting unfavourable comparisons with hypothetical enormous, bipedal porcupine hybrids and Sonic the Hedgehog. (I can see why, although they ain't so bad. You've at least got to love a bold take.) In light of all that, it's interesting to revisit the rather more sleek 1990s version, complete with chunky facial crustiness and nodular torso decoration. Rey's Rexy is particularly notable for its gorgeous legs � I mean, really, they're right up to here. Gigantic thighs and drumsticks that could keep every McDonald's in the US supplied with chicken nuggets for, ooh, a good five minutes or so � marvellous. Plus, bonus retro-'90s Spinosaurus as a bonus! And of course Spinosaurus was significantly smaller than T. rex, especially when convenient for action figure ranges.

Some of the most impressive creations in this book are, peculiarly enough, also the most obviously scientifically obsolescent, and also show up the sort of dross that we gladly lapped up in other books in the early '90s. Rey's 1993 Deinonychus seem so remarkably birdlike for their time only because Rey actually paid attention to the animal's skeleton; much as with Barlowe's Oviraptor, their appearance is less awesomebro reptilian killing machine, more unfortunate plucking victim. In Rey's case, this aspect is accentuated by the seemingly naked skin on the body, even extended to what appear to be 'goosebumps' on the thighs. One gets the impression that Rey would've feathered this dinobird, if not for the wishes of the publisher. (These days, he would flat-out refuse to paint such a thing, and indeed, by his own admission, he has.)

An interesting aside: although Rey has since ditched this look for a more turkey- or vulture-like take on Deinonychus, this colour scheme lives on in his illustrations (and models) of Velociraptor.

As per usual, if it's feathers you be wantin', you'd better weigh anchor at the Archaeopteryx page; the Urvogel is typically found failing to fit in with a bunch of dirty pterosaurs, as here. Because flying animals. One might well expect a Sparkleraptor given Rey's usual bold tendencies, and the great man surely delivers. This Archaeopteryx appears to be taking part in a carnival parade � it'd surely be more at home in Rio than in Solnhofen. �It ran along like a small meat-eating dinosaur,� the caption informs us. Well, I never...

Rey's eye for an arresting perspective is put to good use in what otherwise might have been a rather hackneyed image of Maiasaura, stuck with a nest full of bawling, pop-eyed sproglings as per bloody usual. The mother's enormous head appears to loom out of the page at us, a trick also used (albeit more literally) by John Sibbick in his Nat Geo pop-up book. Note also the pesky (I presume) troodont, yet again caught short ahead of the village fete, or perhaps just feeling extra-broody.

Speaking of heads looming out of the page...there's something quite unnerving, in the best sort of way, about having a sauropod peer in for a closer look at the viewer. Having been conditioned to view sauropods as 'gentle giants' analogous to loveable giraffoid moo-cows, it can be disconcerting to be reminded that they would have possessed that 'otherness' that all reptiles have from our mammalian point of view. This perspective emphasises the sheer strangeness of sauropods. You can't see it in this scan, but Rey also gets his hands and feet right � by no means a given back in the early '90s. The nostril placement is very retro, of course (if normal for the time), but you've got to love the snazzy colours.

A head-on perspective also suits Pacychephalosaurus, naturally, and Rey's illustration draws attention to the extraordinarily broad hips, as well as the fantastically spiky surface of the creature's skull. This illustration is worth comparing with a similar Rey piece in the Holtz-o-pedia; of the two, I think I prefer this one for its more straightforward, ground-level look at the animal, although the other one certainly boasts the more dazzling patterning.

 

And finally...Triceratops has at it. This is an absolutely gorgeous spread, and is perhaps all the better for its reining in of some of Rey's excesses � apart from where they are quite at home, namely on that stunning frill. The fine superficial details in the animals' scaly, folded skin, remarkably vicious-looking beaks, and rows of osteoderms are also to be commended. Some aesthetic tropes on show here may have since gone out of fashion (and I did notice the slightly shrunken hand), but this remains beautiful stuff, and proof � one would hope � that Rey's Worth It.

Coming next week: nothing from me, 'cos I'm off to the Netherlands where I hope to spend as much time drinking Belgian beers as possible. But I'll be back...

The Society of Palaeontology Fanciers

I have this compulsion that occasionally rises up, demands attention, prompts feverish work, and subsides until it sees fit to return. I am compelled to design the kinds of paleontology-inspired apparel, stickers, and whatnot that I'd like to wear. I'm kind of picky when it comes to graphic shirts, you see, and when I visit a big museum I'm always hoping that they'll have designs than hit me in my sweet spot. Let's call it graphic simplicity. If you've been hanging around here, you may remember me sharing such designs here in the past - I Left My Heart in a Prehistoric Age, Dinosaur Hearts, and of course the set of minimalist family crests that I came to call Cladistic Heraldry.

If this kind of stuff hits your sweet spot too, well, I've got some damn splendid news. I recently created a set of designs and I think they're pretty nice. I call the set The Society of Palaeontology Fanciers, and like the other projects I mentioned above, it gives to the chance to proclaim your allegiances to extinct taxa to the whole world.



These are all seven of the first batch. The impetus for the set came when I was doodling, and started playing with minimalistic renderings of stem-birds. I have to say that as I worked on the design above, of a vaguely deinonychosaurish animal, it was freeing to not to have its damned arms sticking out. When it comes to artistic renderings of animals closely related to modern birds, I find I am less and less satisfied with artists staying close to skeletal contours. In my doodling, I came to challenge myself to find a way to an iconic rendering of just such an animal. I didn't want it to be easily confused with a modern bird; or if it was on first glance, I want it to inspire a double take. Once I felt that I'd achieved it, I was in full-throttle design mode and I played with various non-avian dinosaur forms. Each took on a life of its own. One of the fun challenges of these sets I like to do is to resolve drastically differently scaled animals into a cohesive series. Once my dinosaurs were done, I was compelled to do a trilobite, specifically the Cambrian Oryctocephalus.

I'm flattered by the fact that when I do projects like this I get a lot of "do such and such!" or "what about whatchamataxon?" comments. I certainly want to do more. Before I do any more for extinct critters, however, I'm working on a set in hopes of doing a tiny bit to help extant raptors from going extinct. These I hope to realize as genuine embroidered patches which will be sold in the Indiana Raptor Center's new gift shop, and maybe down the line I could even have the capital to make patches of my paleontology designs, as well.

Anyhow, if you're moved to pick up a shirt or two, these are available in the base colors above, as white designs on dark colored shirts, or as black designs on light colored shirts, so no matter your preferred style and color, there should be something to your liking.

Mesozoic Miscellany 64

In the News

Atopodentatus! Atopodentatus! What in the heck is going on with that crazy mug? Brian Switek and Jaime Headden both sum up this Triassic marine reptile and its bizarre split, needle-toothed maw.

Gobivenator isn't as weird as Atopodentatus, but hey. New troodontid from Mongolia. More from Dave Hone, Everything Dinosaur, and Nobu Tamura.

Around the Dinoblogosphere

So, this silver age comic called The Wanderers once featured a dude morphing into a gloriously ugly Deinonychus. For the sole purpose of getting Biblical with a female Deinonychus. When do we get to the point that Hollywood is desperate enough to make this?

Dr. Michael Ryan's Palaeoblog is back!

At the Integrative Paleontologists, Sarah Werning drops some learning... about the blossoming world of paleontology podcasts. Please note that we also added a list of these to our sidebar. Also, Andy Farke discusses dinosaurs and chocolate.

The CBS Sherlock Holmes adaptation Elementary recently featured some consarned black market fossil rustlers. Switek's got it covered.

Dr. Bakker answers a burnin' question about the feet of Dipsy the Diplodocus at the Beyond Bones blog.

Luis Rey's artwork was featured in the closing credits of Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, which is great for Luis... only they didn't like, credit him. At his blog, Rey lays out all of the work that was featured. Also, in case you haven't heard, there is going to be a Cretaceous Cut of WWD3D on its Deluxe Edition 3D Blu-ray, so you may now applaud, hoot, holler, fist-pump, or stoically nod in approval. Whatever it is you do.

Mark Witton wants to write about the crocodyliformes of the Wealden Supergroup, so he's going to do it, dammit. Whether you like it or not!

Matt Martyniuk wants to write about the recently proposed Bohaiornithid clade of enantornithes, so he's going to do it, dammit. Whether you like it or not!

At Paleoillustrata, Stu Pond wrote about the beginning of his life as a PhD student, including much reviewing of literature for his research into Polacanthus foxii. Good luck, Stu!

Trish Arnold is awesome, so she created dinosaur versions of the popular Wuzzles� characters. If you're not on Twitter, she's reason enough to join.

Paleoart PickIn honor of Stu Pond and his studies, let's go with Polacanthus, shall we? Here's the most accurate one I've been able to find in an exhausting, eye-bleeding twelve hours of intense internetting. It's the work of Bill Swets, a retired fireman in Fort Collins, Colorado, who used to operate the Swetsville Zoo, populated by his own metal animal sculptures. Here's Polly Polacanthus.


Photo � Paul Turner, via Flickr.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Animals (Brooke Bond Picture Cards)

Back when I were a wee lad, I were an avid collector of the various prehistory-themed picture cards that were given away with PG Tips teabags, Jacobs' dinosaur-shaped biscuits and the like. It's a practice that seems to have gone the way of PG Tips' ill-advised chimp-fronted advertising campaigns, but one with a long and noble prior history (with the caveat that the idea stems from the inclusion of picture cards in fag* packets, of course). Teabag peddlers Brooke Bond, who themselves owned PG Tips before being swallowed by sinister corporate behemoth Omnicor...uh...Unilever, produced a number of picture card series back in the day. Prehistoric Animals dates from 1972 (according to my dodgy internet-based research - the album itself isn't dated), and just how well some of the illustrations have aged may well surprise you.

This doesn't apply to the covers of course, although they are by a different artist to the cards themselves - namely, Michael Bell, N.D.D., M.S.I.A. (as he is credited within). While the unusual art style is to be welcomed, the front Tyrannosaurus and back Cetiosaurus (below) are straight-up Neave Parker knock-offs. Eye-catching enough, but rather lazy - not to mention retrograde. Even by the '70s, Neave Parker's tubby, often sprawling creations were showing their age.

Happily, such an approach is not continued inside. In fact, both the illustrations and, especially, the text are very much up-to-the-minute for the early 1970s, and this is no doubt thanks to the involvement of one Alan Charig (M.A., Ph.D., F.L.S., F.G.S., F.Z.S.), Natural History Museum palaeontologist and a man who did an awful lot of good work in science communication. Even if he was strangely reluctant to accept the notion that birds were dinosaurs. But we shan't mention that again. The sauropods below might still be tail-dragging, but note Charig's description of them as living "on firm dry land", in addition to his introductory paragraphs presenting an image of dinosaurs overall as highly successful, active animals with keen senses and the verve to look very graceful in a painterly portrait.

The illustrations - by Maurice Wilson (R.I.) - are undoubtedly charming, with a very sweet, almost naive quality about many of them, helped in no small part by their tiny size. The miniature format does present its pitfalls, of course. Where animals share a page, the authors/illustrators have - for the most part - opted for creatures that could easily be distinguished by someone's grandmother peering through her fingerprint-smeared reading specs from atop an orbiting satellite. It's easy to see why when one considers the few cases in which this wasn't possible.

Thanks to the cards' miniscule size and Wilson's penchant for swampy greens, certain animals (notably the above pair of long-necked theropods shown in lateral view) end up looking uncannily alike. Still, it's a problem that's avoided for the most part, and you've got to love any book (or card series...or whatever) from the 1970s that manages to not only include a high-kicking Deinonychus, pictured alongside two angry beards...

...but also an impressively modern-looking, svelte, tail-held-high Megalosaurus. Given that Parker-esque hunch-backed genero-theropods overwhelmingly represented Megalosaurus' public image far into the 1980s, this illustration is not to be sniffed at.

Given this, one might expect Sexy Rexy to also be sexily flexing his muscles and swishing his tail about (in an unnervingly attractive fashion) but, alas, no - we're lumbered with a meat-flailing man-in-suit interpretation. All the same, I'd like to draw readers' attention to the floral changes taking place - from ferns and cycads in the Megalosaurus painting, to fir trees and flowering plants alongside Rexy. Not bad for a series of miniatures. Astute readers may also note inherent similarities with John Sibbick's peculiar Normanpedia meat-swinging upright T. rex, which - just for a change - this piece actually predates. Also, bonus Deinocheirus arms as a bonus. Its description as a 'gigantic carnosaur' might be amusing in hindsight, but at least Charig doesn't refer to it as a slashertastic killing machine.

As usual, I've spent an inordinate amount of time on theropods. Other, inferior dinosaurs do appear, of course, such as the ceratopsians Protoceratops and Triceratops (below). Side-by-side, they neatly show the evolutionary path of these animals from the Campanian to the end of the Maastrichtian. Although sticking doggedly with the nest-bound-Protoceratops meme, Wilson commendably ditches the sprawling limbs so typical of earlier restorations. His Triceratops, meanwhile, is obviously based on the terribly outdated mount at London's Natural History Museum (it only has three toes per foot!), and so appears more retro than it might have. Nevertheless, they're possessed of plenty of charm and Wilson crams in some neat touches, such as the osteoderms on Triceratops' back.

 And finally...while I've only covered dinosaurs here, there are plenty more animal clades to be seen, even if you're out of luck if tetrapods aren't your bag. Saurians are the real stars (just check out the front cover), but synapsids get a significant look-in. Among them is quite possibly the most upliftingly jovial depiction of Dimetrodon ever seen. Just look at that joyous smile! It's enough to make one wonder why the beast's normally depicted as a Permian land-Jaws. It's all negative publicity put about by temnospondyl enthusiasts, I'm sure. Anything to alleviate those permanent long faces.

I might have to disappear for a while, as I'm moving into a new home and then sodding off to the Netherlands for a week. Rest assured though that, like your highly suppressed but still niggling notion that all human endeavour is ultimately utterly futile, I'll keep coming back to bother you. Eventually.


*Cigarettes, if you please.