Crystal Palace, part II

I feel it incumbent upon me to open this appendix to Marc's Crystal Palace Park report by explaining to our readers that being referred to as an 'adorable mammal' is perhaps one of the highest compliments one could earn from him (grumpy misanthrope that he is)*.

With that in mind, here are a few more adorable mammals and other miscellaneous tidbits from the park which didn't quite make it into Marc's post.

Grouped closely together as one enters the Cenozoic in the Dinosaur Park trail are a family of Palaeotherium -- out of whom I only managed a picture of this individual above -- and a trio of Anoplotherium (below). Though they have been situated at one end of the lake in such a way as to evoke feelings of visitors happening upon them in the wild, their location and the growth of the surrounding vegetation does tend to leave them overlooked in favour of the more charismatic Mesozoic beasties, which is something of a shame.

I can't resist sharing more pictures of the Megatherium, even though Marc has already mentioned it. It's just, well, adorable. Obviously. And I can't help feeling that it looks for all the world as though it might have sprung out of a Miyazaki film.

My Neighbour Megatherium

Or, I don't know, Pliocene Princess Mononoke, or... something.

Nor could I lose the opportunity of sharing more pictures of the Megaloceros family. I mean, come on, one picture of them could hardly have sufficed. Did I mention how fond I am of cervids?

To bring us back to the dinosaurs, however, the park entrance directly by Crystal Palace station features this dinosaur train mural.

Whilst another appropriately themed one greets visitors on the side of the park's caf�.

Finally, Marc mentions not having taken a picture of the turtle-shelled dicynodonts in his post, so here is mine to hopefully remedy that. I'm afraid it's only their back view, but the plentiful daisies unfortunately prevented any good views of their heads from other angles. At least they're accompanied by several resting mallards.

*I'm kidding. Mostly.

Crystal Palace, finally

Eventually, one simply has to make the pilgrimage. Frankly, I'm not sure how I managed to delay it for so long. For anyone with an interest in palaeontology - and especially for those with an interest in palaeoart - a visit to Crystal Palace Park is simply a must. More than that - it's unavoidable. You will end up here, one day, staring up at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' concrete monstrosities. Here is the Land Where Ugly Life-Sized Dinosaur Models Began. And it's quite wonderful.

Most readers will be familiar with the backstory (and David's done it before), so I'll try and be brief. Crystal Palace Park in London is named after the eponymous building, which was bought up and rebuilt here following The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. A series of landscaped gardens were created around the Palace, with the Dinosaur Park being one of these. The models were created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his team, with the scientific advice of the brilliant anatomist and evil bastard Richard Owen. Among the creatures created were the famous Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, but also a whole host of non-dinosaurs, including Palaeozoic amphibians and reptiles, Cenozoic mammals and, of course, marine reptiles.

The models have survived more-or-less intact into the present today, which is utterly remarkable given how exposed they all are. Replacement parts have been created here and there, but these are, for the most part, the same bizarre beasties that our Victorian forebears gazed upon. These days, the models have become icons of scientific progress - that is, of how far we've progressed since the 19th century. Of course, given how little the earliest palaeontologists had to go on, it's quite surprising that the sculpts make any sense at all. But they do make some sense.

For example, although aware of their reptilian character, Owen was clever enough to realise that the dinosaurs must have had upright limbs like modern mammals and birds. Today, the 'elephantine lizards' he helped shape look laughably inaccurate, their nose horns the best-known example of how a simple anatomical error can result in a problem so glaringly obvious when writ large. However, at the time - with no clue as to just how different from today's animals a large ornithopod was - these were pretty sensible and solid attempts. (Apparently, Owen also knew that the nose horn might be a mistake - but as any palaeoartist today will tell you, a little conjecture is completely necessary.)

All that said, we can only wonder what might have happened if Waterhouse Hawkins had Gideon Mantell as his consultant, as was originally intended. Supposedly, Mantell had already figured out that the dinosaurs didn't look quite as Owen envisaged, particularly when it came to their limbs and posture. Unfortunately, ill health meant that Mantell had to turn the job down.

Although the Iguanodon often get all the attention, the park's gigantic Megalosaurus is perhaps its most impressive model of all. Resembling a hulking croco-bear with enormously powerful and muscular limbs, it's a world away from the svelte biped we envisage nowadays. The shoulder hump is a particularly curious feature, and some have speculated that it might be the result of Owen being privy to material now referred to Becklespinax (the hump, in reality, being from vertebrae nearer the hips).

Seemingly as if to further accentuate this model's hopeless inaccuracy in the face of modern science, the Megalosaurus has now sprouted some foliage, which hangs limply down from its mouth. Or maybe Ken Ham broke in and wedged it in there.

The Hylaeosaurus, with its slightly sprawling posture, is closer to just looking like an oversized lizard than the other dinosaurs. It sports a replacement fibreglass head which, unfortunately, is rather difficult to photograph (hence the above 'rear end shot'). Given how ankylosaurs have suffered in palaeoart over the years, it's probably fair to say that this model isn't so different from depictions that appeared 100 years later.

Unknown to (or unnoticed by) many people, the models are actually grouped together according to the time period in which the animals lived. From one end of the lake to the other, they progress from the Permian, through the Mesozoic, and then on into the Cenozoic. This way, all the Jurassic marine reptiles are grouped together, but Mosasaurus is sequestered elsewhere. The plesiosaurs are recognisable, although their necks bend and twist in impossible ways, while the large ichthyosaurs lack dorsal fins and have newt-like tail tips. It's tempting to think that the exposed scleral rings are just another unfortunate inaccuracy, but they may have been an intentional anatomy lesson; such an interpretation is given more credence by the exposed 'pavement' of bones in the flippers (as above).

Just up from the plesiosaurs are a pair of marvellous, fearsome-looking Steneosaurus. The animal was a marine crocodyliform, and is known from some excellently preserved fossils. As such, Owen's interpretations aren't a million miles away from the modern view, although they owe a lot to the living gharial. The above photo also depicts what appears to be a coot (Fulica altra) nest under construction, carefully watched over by a grimacing, serpentine plesiosaur.

Back down in the Permian, the star attractions may be smaller, but they're no less strange for it. The mutant toads hanging around by the lake are in fact labyrinthodonts, which were imagined to be entirely tailless. Their appearance is fascinatingly bizarre, as if someone grafted the megalosaur's head on to a frog. Weirder still are a group of shelled dicynodonts, which Owen imagined to be turtle-like (unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a decent photo). From the Permian end of the lake, one has a marvellous 'time tunnel' view through to the dinosaurs at the far side, and the lush (if not entirely appropriate) greenery that's grown up around the models in recent years lends a suitably primordial feel. Er, if you ignore all the flowers.

Beyond the end of the tunnel, adjacent the boating lake, are positioned a handful of different Cenozoic mammals. (Many more were planned for the park originally, but funding ran out - a shame, as the proposed Glyptodon would no doubt have looked fantastic.) A Megaloceros family provides a visually striking focal point, and - because the path wraps around them - it's possible to view them from any number of different angles, and take in all of the wonderful details. In the below photo, a pair of American tourists (I'll get to them in a minute) are carefully examining the mighty Megaloceros male.

Around the corner we have Megatherium, another impressively large creation. The tree it's hugging, in classic Megatherium/hippy fashion, is in fact the original Victorian specimen (now rather dead). According to signage in the park, the tree once grew enough to knock the sloth's arm off, and it now bears a replacement limb. It's difficult to photograph the Megatherium's face, but it really is quite adorable, as I'm quire sure the real animal was. I mean, they're just great big mounds of cuddly fuzz, if you think about it...and ignore the bloody great claws.

Speaking of adorable mammals...I was lucky enough to share my visit with none other than Chris DiPiazza of Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs fame, along with Niroot and our mutual friends Nancy and Huseyin. Much joyous geekery ensued, as I'm sure you can imagine, and I'd like to sincerely thank one and all for the day. Cheers!

Mirror shades. Just typical.

And finally...various (generally excellent) signs around the park show 'contemporary' (i.e. modern) depictions of the prehistoric creatures. Most of these aren't too bad, but the 'modern' pterosaur is proper horrorshow. Check it out, unless you're a pterosaur expert, in which case I'd advise closing this page and backing away from your PC at once. 'Til next time!

GAAAAAAHHHHH

The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi - review

Following the success of 2012's Dinosaur Art, Titan Books have evidently noticed the public's appreciation for palaeoart - not just as an eye-catching way of padding out a kiddies' dinosaur book as in the bad old days, but as art for its own sake. In what I can only hope will become a series of titles featuring the work of today's prominent palaeoartists, Titan now present their latest stupendous coffee table compendium - The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi. It's quite the stunner, and I could happily rant about it all day long (in an interminably rapid manner while flapping my hands about), but I'll try and keep it brief.

NB: I should hopefully have some more images for the review soon. I'll upload them when they're available (my e-mail conversations with the publisher are a little slow moving, which is my fault, not theirs). In the meantime, check out Dave Hone's interview with Julius Csotonyi and Steve White for more pics (the interview's very good too!). All art is of course � Julius Cstonoyi, and should you use it without permission, a flock of angry dinosaurs will descend through your bedroom window and peck you while you sleep.

While slightly smaller than Dinosaur Art, this is still a hefty book; even so, it often proves too confining for Csotonyi's more panoramic works, many of which luxuriate over vast fold-out spreads. While the bulk of the book is divided into Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic sections, there was never any doubt as to who the cover stars would be - quite literally. And so we are treated to a truly eye-popping, wonderfully composed cover, as a gorgosaur attempts to snatch a baby Spinops from right under the parent's nose (while putting itself in serious danger of being pummeled). Csotonyi's great skill is in portraying the athleticism of these animals through dynamic, exciting poses, while also convincing us of their enormous heft, and making them appear completely at home in their surroundings. Csotonyi's worlds are not the cartoonish, volcano-strewn theatre backdrops of old - they're true palaeoenvironments, allowing us a glimpse not just at long-vanished creatures, but the complete world they inhabited. In that regard, he stands among a very few of the world's truly great palaeoartists.

Csotonyi's careful approach to reconstructing prehistoric habitats pays off nowhere better than in his Palaeozoic scenes, which take on a truly bizarre, very alien appearance - as well they should. So often depicted in drab, sandy landscapes, it's still startling to see the likes of Edaphosaurus and Dimetrodon at home in lush forests of gigantic ferns and club-mosses. For those of us who are enthusiasts mostly of Mesozoic reptiles, it's easy to forget just how weird things were back still further in time. Csotonyi's achievement is in not just describing, or even showing us that world, but really taking us there.

Csotonyi works mostly in digital these days, and has increasingly made use of photo-composites in his work. While he remains very good at a technique that is terribly easy to get horribly wrong, I must confess to still enjoying his pure (digital) painting work a lot more; it looks so much more 'of a piece', and actually convinces us more of the scene's reality. Admittedly, some of Csotonyi's best photo-manips are quite difficult to detect as such, but all too often the technique results in a disjointed sky or (in one rhino-starring incidence in particular) foliage. Still, Cstotonyi's use of photo-compositing shows signs of improving with time even in this book, and the painted elements of his work remain utterly gorgeous.

Amid all my fawning, it's probably worth mentioning a little something about the broader content of the book that I am ostensibly reviewing. While the unabashed purpose of the book is to showcase Csotonyi's art in all its glossy, excellently reproduced glory, the reader is given a little more to chew on than a gallery of pretty pictures. The majority of pieces receive explanatory labels (and often rather more than that), either from Csotonyi himself, Steve White, or a host of scientists, who will have typically published on one or more of the animals featured in a given piece. In such a way, the artworks are given a broader scientific context, one that was often missing in Dinosaur Art. Many of the pieces are also accompanied with preliminary roughs, sketches and earlier revisions, which provide a welcome glimpse into Csotonyi's process, in addition to fascinating 'what if' alternative versions of some of the best works. Thanks to the range of works on offer, it's also possible to see Csotonyi's work evolve over the years (thankfully, his primary-less dromaeosaurs are now a thing of the past).

One of the best examples of these elements coming harmoniously together is in a section looking at Csotonyi's fish-eye view of an Apatosaurus knocking over a tree (apparently inspired by a chat with Dave Hone). Here is a complete insight into the scientific thinking and speculation, artistic process, and the gradual and painstaking development of this particularly unusual and challenging piece. A number of different works are given this treatment, and it'll all prove highly engrossing for anyone interested in the business of great palaeoart.

In sum, this is the type of palaeoart book that we've all been waiting for - the sort that has only very rarely been seen before. It's a celebration of Csotonyi's work, of course, but it's also a celebration of the art of restoring extinct animals more broadly. The price tag (�25 in the UK, $34.95 in the US) might seem hefty at first, but you definitely get what you pay for - this is a wonderful book that you'll be poring over for weeks, and referring back to for years to come.

Up From The Depths

Godzilla is not the film that you are expecting. It is not a remake or reboot of the 1954 Gojira. It is not a horror movie, although it has leanings in that direction, and it is not a monster fight movie, although monsters do fight in it. It's something a bit more interesting.

But how interesting, exactly?



In 1999, a terrible event obliterated the Janjira nuclear plant in Japan, ruining the life of chief engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and driving a wedge between him and his young son Ford (Aaron Tyler Johnson). Fifteen years later, and Joe is apparently a conspiracy nut, convinced that the Janjira event was but the first of many. This theory, unsurprisingly, is ignored by basically everybody, especially Ford, who's now a bomb disposal tech for the military with a wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and family of his own in San Francisco. But when Joe's snooping around the ruins of Janjira lands him in trouble with the Japanese government, Ford reluctantly flies in to bail him out. Before Ford leaves Japan, though, Joe insists that they go back to Janjira one more time. Against his better judgement, Ford agrees.

There's something very weird about the ruins of Janjira, though. For one thing, there's no fallout. The nominally radioactive area is essentially inert. When both men are apprehended by government officials yet again, the mystery deepens, as they are brought to the former site of the nuclear reactor. It's been converted into a facility to hold something, a strange organism that presiding scientist Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) calls a MUTO, or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism. At present, it's only an egg. But the arrival of Joe and Ford Brody has coincided with increasing flickers of activity from the entity, and at the worst possible time, something massive emerges, destroys the facility, and takes off toward San Francisco. At roughly the same time, another, larger MUTO emerges from a similar facility in Nevada, where its egg had been stored in a nuclear waste depository. It too is headed for San Francisco, and what's worse, the two creatures are apparently calling to each other.

It doesn't take much insight to see that nothing good can come from a situation like that. But as luck would have it, something else is stirring in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, brought out of hibernation by the MUTO's calls. Something bigger.

 Much, much bigger.

It�s hard to shake the sense that Godzilla is going to be a wildly polarizing film. In some ways, that�s a relief; most modern blockbusters are engineered to be as inoffensive as possible, with bland direction and basically inoffensive storytelling, with every decision made with an eye toward giving the audience what they want. This is especially true of franchise films, which have developed a nasty tendency to function less as movies and more as feature length advertisements for their own sequels.

Godzilla doesn't do that. As directed by Gareth Edwards, the film is defined by distinct choices on both the level of craft and storytelling. Every shot feels engineered to produce the most stunning image. Scenes build in scale as the camera moves, initially teasing us with the unseen, then pulling back, revealing unexpected components, layering suspense into every shot. The direction, the cinematography, even the musical score�all show a surprising (and almost Spielberg-like) level of restraint.

That restraint extends to the film's star. The film is very careful about when, where, and how it deploys Godzilla. He's actually present throughout the movie, but at first, all the audience sees are the spikes on his back, jagged and huge as a line of distant cliffs. The rest of the creature is teased in fragments, often shrouded in fog or dust, and when Godzilla stands revealed at last, it�s an appropriately powerful moment. For much of the movie, Godzilla is simply too big to be fully seen, a choice that does more to sell the monster as a force of nature than all of Watanabe�s awestruck dialogue. He's a mountain on legs, stoop shouldered and impossibly huge, so large that the glimpse of his tail swinging through the mist is remarkably ominous.

The film's greatest weakness are its human characters, who's primary use seems to be to underline how large Godzilla is. There's some solid theory behind this: the film fairly obviously wants to depict how meaningless people are in the face of such immense forces, but the script's need to delay Godzilla's appearance necessitates that we spend a good deal of time with the actors. it compromises by focusing fairly narrowly on people for about the first third, before pulling the scale of the story back in latter portions of the film.   Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen and Julie Binoche all make the best of their underwritten roles, investing them with as much gravity and character as possible, but the film eventually forgets about basically all of them. The one character consistently onscreen is Aaron Tyler Johnson's Ford Brody, who is the walking definition of 'serviceable.' Neither an especially interesting actor or a character, Brody ends up feeling like a living version of a scale silhouette. It's not inconceivable that a different performer could have sold the character as an interesting person, but Johnson doesn't seem inclined to try.  He's there to give a human face to the titanic struggles around him, and nothing more.

The fighting, by the way, represents the most risky choice the film makes. The camera constantly cuts away from the preliminary scuffles between the MUTO pair and Godzilla, preferring to move toward a shot of the battle happening on a television, or a panoramic view of the devastation wrought afterward.  But there's method in the madness here as well. The dirty little secret of most kaiju movies is that monster fights are kind of dull after the first fifteen minutes. It�s hard to vary the situation much when your combatants are larger than the landscape around them, and harder still when much of the fighting is essentially two huge animals tearing into each other. Pacific Rim gave it a good try, but even that colorful film dragged toward the end. Godzilla prefers to save the impressive stuff for the finale, and as a result not only does the last third of the film give us our best looks at the star, it gives us a fairly continuous moving battle between all three of the film's monsters. It may not be enough for some audiences, but it goes a long way toward making the film's climax an actual event instead of the longest tussle in a series of fights.

In spirit, Godzilla has much more in common with later Godzilla films than it does with Gojira. That is lacks the metaphorical heft of the original isn't really a surprise. The majority of later Godzilla films did the same thing, pulling away from the horror in favor of characterizing the monsters. As a result, the character of Godzilla has been pulled in contrary directions for years, often in some strange ways. Is he a horror visited upon Humanity by our own arrogance? Is he a protector of the natural world? Or is he simply an animal that is largely indifferent to us?

The film does its best to reconcile these separate threads, albeit in ways that are more subtle than effective. A careful viewer will notice that Godzilla was awoken by humanity, and will probably piece together that his atomic fire came from the concerted attempts of the military to nuke him into submission in 1954. But the lack of a central thesis about where Godzilla comes from leaves things feeling a bit muddled. The character has always drawn strength from the central clarity of his creation myth, even when his motives are unclear. But here, Godzilla simply appears without much in the way of explanation, a choice that may be an attempt to add mystery but that results in a lack of coherence.

Once he's onscreen, though, his characterization is pretty straightforward. He does his thing without the slightest interest or attention to us. The other monsters are his goal, and he pursues them with a single-minded focus across the world, destroying anything in his way with nary a thought, ignoring the attempts of people to either help or hinder him. This version of Godzilla isn't an unstoppable juggernaut of vengeance. But he does feel something like a god: an  immense force that does as it likes, keeps its own council, and explains itself to nobody.

At bottom, then, Godzilla feels like a pointed effort to make a Godzilla movie that both works on its own terms and feels different from past installments. It doesn't entirely pull it off, mostly due to the blandness of the central human character and some coherency issues. But any effort to subvert modern blockbuster tropes is commendable, and the sheer level of craft involved makes the movie pretty enjoyable in its own right.  As the first in an inevitable series of Godzilla films, this is a very fine start.

The Illustrated Triassic Club

Oscar, Darwin, and Wallace

Several readers may recall Marc's having covered Blackgang Chine's The Triassic Club before. After our return this Easter to view the newly installed robosaurs of Restricted Area 5, I decided to finally complete this little project which I had actually begun a year ago, that of accurately illustrating the gentlemanly trio (which, for me, also meant accurate period garments, naturally). This was not only overdue but was especially necessary, since the inclement weather during the latter part of our Isle of Wight visit prevented me from drawing a dinosaur on Shanklin beach as I did last time.

All the drawings are art card size at 2.5 x 3.5 inches (so you're viewing them larger than actual size on screen). The lord and master of the trio, Darwin the Allosaurus was the first to have been drawn and completed last year. Louche, aristocratic and lasciviously suave to reflect his voice and speech. 'Come in. Oh, do come in...'

In completing the others this time round, I found myself unintentionally drawing them in greater detail and spending longer on each. Other than Darwin himself, we're never told which specific dinosaurs his companions are. Oscar the pianist is presumably an ornithomimosaur of some sort. He seems to have effectively become an extant ratite in this drawing, which is especially unavoidable when all one sees is his head and neck. I replaced the beer glass of the original model with a tankard. Whilst I've tried to keep the eyes of the others fairly avian in terms of their visible components, I deliberately drew Oscar's with a distinct iris and sclera to keep the wild-eyed, permanently alarmed expression of the original. It was too comical not to.

 I initially wondered if I could turn Wallace the butler into an Ornitholestes, given that his generic theropod appearance seemed to afford free rein, but I was reminded by Marc of the sickle claws on his feet. A dromaeosaur, then. I think he became my favourite drawing of the three. Though the new(er) audio recording of his voice is that of a squeaky, fretful, hapless underling, Marc informs me that he originally possessed an altogether loftier tone. I tried to reflect that slightly supercilious yet put-upon expression. 'The Master is expecting you. He's always expecting something. And guess who has to get it for him? Me, that's who!'


As a bonus, I thought I may as well share this, too. You are already familiar with our saurian portraits, but here are our avian ones (because I can, and because confusing people seems to be my fort�). Marc (the magpie) and I enduring that aforementioned inclement weather on Easter Sunday.

Have No Fear, My Darling Dear; This is What Happens in the Mountains.

Some of you guys may know of Brian Engh. Brian, A.K.A Historian Himself, is a freelance paleoartist, a rapper, and an filmmaker. He's got a self-released album, Earth Beasts Awaken, and an upcoming album Gather Bones. He's also been releasing music videos like the one below, "Bagheera," fairly regularly on his YouTube page. They're worth watching, even if you aren't a huge fan of hip hop; they're short an d very well made, filled with powerful imagery and weird, off kilter performances.


In this latest video, In Mountains, Brian brings us on a strange voyage into a frozen, primeval forest, where some ancient spirit has marked the snow with images of long forgotten creatures. And what he finds inside the mountain could spell the end of the world.




The video was directed and produced by Brian himself, and as you can see, it looks gorgeous. It's also the first in a series, all of them promising more prehistoric mayhem. I'll be interviewing Brian about both his paleoart and music soon, so if you like this, hang tight. There's a lot more coming.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Day of the Dinosaurs

Lampoon me if you like for digging up an obscure book from the early '90s and treating it like an ancient relic, but one look at that cover will confirm that this is a tome from a completely different time. For where would one see such lizardy, Burianesque Iguanodon, tail-dragging, sour-faced sauropods, friendly, frog-mouthed Dimetrodon, and horribly dessicated pterosaurs, all united together on the front cover, these days? The Day of the Dinosaurs might only be from 1991, but it certainly makes 1991 seem like a Very Long Time Ago.

The cover alone is fantastic, conveying a lost world in which hackneyed, discarded palaeoart tropes roam the earth in all their brown-grey splendour. Compositionally, it's excellent in a way I can't quite put my weirdly clawless finger on. The Iguanodon almost seems to be saying, "Oh yes, that's right...dinosaurs". Except, of course, a lot of the animals here aren't dinosaurs. And the Diplodocus might have at least three knees. As if that matters.

As with so many books of the genre, The Day of the Dinosaurs is structured around a series of panoramas, depicting multifarious lifeforms at different points in Earth's history, mostly in the Mesozoic (for obvious reasons). Given that artist Chris Forsey is tasked, as is typical, with uniting an awful lot of different animals in one scene and making it look natural, I think this view on the Triassic is actually rather nicely done. The inclement weather adds a great deal to the atmosphere of the piece (how often do you see a rainbow in palaeoart?), while the shuffling herd of rhynchosaurs in the background help disguise what might otherwise have been Now That's What I Call Late Triassic Megafauna. Note the Stuttgart-style Wide Load Plateosaurus to the right of the scene.

Unusually, Forsey's Late Jurassic scene sees comparatively humble Camptosaurus take the starring role, looking as if it had just walked in from a mid-'80s Sibbick piece (that aspect isn't so unusual). The foreground also features some 'wings...but with hands!' Archaeopteryx and curiously dumpy Compsognathus that probably shouldn't be hanging around in North America, while the showstopping sauropods are shunted back. Again, there is a lovely atmosphere about this scene; a primordial world of peaceful animals going about their business, rather than predators hollering at everyone and making a mess. The wonderful sky certainly helps.

Still, there's plenty of nature red in tooth and (terrible) claw in the Late Cretaceous scene, which sees the popular anachronistic antagonists Tyrannosaurus and Styracosaurus take a break from puncturing one another to have a chuckle at a pair of gormless Deinonychus having a scrap. Rexy himself looks a little peculiar here, no doubt due to a slight lack of shoulders and his upper tooth row extending rather too far back (a common problem with theropods in this book). The Styracosaurus is somewhat odd too, but I just can't get over its bovine smile. D'awwww. Landscape-wise, while the ground's a little bare, I'm sure all palaeoart fans will appreciate the actual sloping ground (see Mark Witton's blog for context) and superb use of foreground foliage to create the sense that we are peering in surreptitiously on this strange world.

While there aren't too many full-colour illustrations outside of the full spreads, a few do appear to present more notable animals in a suitably dramatic fashion. Forsey's Allosaurus is unmistakably based on Sibbick's Normanpedia work, as is clear not only from its peculiar 'Michelin Man' skin texture and stocky limbs, but even the specific posture of its forelimbs and (fer cryin' out loud) colour scheme. The head appears to take cues from Sibbick's T. rex, what with its flesh-rippin' action and all. His Ornitholestes, meanwhile, is a rather generic small theropod, but we are at least spared any attempts at grabbing nearby feathery things. According to a nearby caption,

"Its name means 'bird robber'. Its fossil jaws are toothless which suggests that it probably had a horny beak like a bird, with which it snapped up insects and other small animals."

What...what!?!

The majority of the supplementary illustrations in The Day of the Dinosaurs are presented in a simpler, monochrome-'n'-green style. Here we have the quintessentially '80s sinister Troodon, its soulless cats' eyes all aglow, ever on the hunt for something cute and fluffy to snatch up with its grasping little hands. "It may well have been a fairly clever hunter, tricking and trapping its prey," we are told. On the other hand, it might well have been like the birdy feliney creature it is often drawn to resemble - not incredibly smart, but very good at it what did. Its business was chowing on your ancestors and expelling their hard parts in chunky nuggets, and I'm sure business was good.

Here, Sibbick's Protoceratops has foolishly turned its back on its nest, where its terrifyingly staring, hook-clawed, mutant progeny are bursting forth, ready to exact their revenge on Cretaceous Mongolia in a string of increasingly convoluted and improbable scenarios...

...While here, an army of retro-Iguanodon are on the march. Note the perma-flex elbows and, to the right, the now-rejected proposal that the smaller iguanodonts present at Bernissart were females. Said animals are now classified in different genera, never mind species, although some of the splits are, admittedly, pretty recent. While on the subject, this seems like a good idea to advance my hypothesis as to why so many ornithopods ended up buried in a pit together. While others have proposed death-by-flood or some sort of mass suicide, I'd like to put forth the idea that the animals were hammered on heady beer brewed by trappist Hypsilophodon, and plunged to their doom in drunken shenanigans gone tragically awry. Lab News, here I come!

Of course, it's not just dinosaurs in The Day of the Dinosaurs. You've got to have Dimetrodon in a book about prehistoric animals, and so here it is, showing off its inevitably burnt-orange sail to boring old Varanosaurus. Both of them look remarkably Burianesque.

Elsewhere there are pterosaurs, and boy, do they look weird. There's no cliff-hanging going on, but the animals' anatomy takes a few strange turns here and there, particularly as far as upper arms are concerned; what the Pteranodon's right forelimb is supposed to be doing is anyone's guess. Rhamphorhynchus remains hirsute in the tradition of olde-fashioned pterosaur restorations, but Pteranodon sprouts a simply magnificent chest-rug worthy of a 1970s tennis star. (It's a shame that the animal would be most suited to playing as the net.) For all that, though, Forsey knows his way around a cloudscape - it's quite pretty.

Equally, the vivid hues and swirling, bubbling action of this aquatic scene are well executed, even if this particular illustration feels the most like an attempt to shoehorn in as many different large animals as possible. The plesiosaur (apparently modelled on Cryptoclidus) has a rather generic 'insert reptile head here' noggin, but other animals fare somewhat better, and at least it's not shown doing something daft, like posing for the 'surgeon's photo' or basking on the rocks like a seal. For all its action and colour, I'm pretty fond of this illustration - a good one to go out on I think. Also, it features Henodus, illustrations of which always remind me of Gamera, and it's good to sign out with a smile...

Byeeeeee!