Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs! The 1987 Childcraft Annual - Last Hurrah

There's probably a good point at which to stop posting about the same 1980s children's dinosaur book, but it isn't before you've covered any hadrosaurs. Therefore, please be welcoming of one last round of the Childcraft Annual, and of John Rignall's delightfully coloured bright-eyed lambeosaurines. It's a lovely day to be sporting a solid orange head crest, having tangerine dreams and admiring the smoking scenery.

I'm not sure quite what it is about this pair - other than the wonderful skin patterns, of course - but I really like them. I think it's down to the eyes - staring, expressionless discs suitably reminiscent of birds and certain lizards. Aside from that, the shading is quite excellent, while the lack of an obvious keratinous sheath over the beaks lends them something of a retro air.

Happily, Rignall also provided an illustration of (the head of) Tsintaosaurus, in all its suggestive red rocket glory. It's almost a shame that we won't be seeing any more of these (or the boring flat-nosed incarnation), but at least we have a rich artistic record. Since Rignall avoided aping Sibbick, we're spared the, uh, resonating chambers, but the fork at the end of the crest is an interesting touch. To top it off, there's a wee juvenile in classic cheapo dino toy tripod pose. If it weren't for the nubbin-like incipient crest on the baby, this could almost be an illustration of Tsintaosaurus posing with an action figure of itself.

Now, it's often been suggested that the moon landings were faked, mostly by people who think that the Americans were left smarting so badly by Sputnik that they were willing to plough billions of dollars into a dusty film set and a team of snipers to keep a watchful eye on Neil Armstrong day and night. I don't believe they were, although I could well understand NASA being put off by the thousand-strong army of nesting Maiasaura that they almost certainly expected to be waiting to greet their astronauts. A decent effort by Patricia Wynne, but a little foliage wouldn't have gone amiss. Also, the head crests have been doubled up, but everyone does that.

While scenes of good mother lizards hanging around a dustbowl are quite typical in books like this, it's less common to see a Tenontosaurus just standing around looking chill. But here we are. This is a quite gorgeous piece by Jean Helmer, not least for the wonderfully textured and patterned skin of the animal, which manages to completely alleviate any pitfalls in having to go monochrome. While obviously depicted eating, the creature still seems poised and alert, ready to run at the first sign of a man with a big beard and a cowboy hat ordering an army of dewlapped deinonychosaurs to attack, my pretties, attack.

Fellow ornithopod Iguanodon is having none of that peaceful, frond-chewin' nonsense. Edward Brooks' illustration of Mr Stabby is clearly Sibbick-inspired, although he manages to make the attacking theropod look like even more of a clueless dolt. I simply love the description in the text of the potential for a gang of Iguanodon to get all stab-happy on a theropod - to the point of thumb-spiking it to death. Geeze, guys, you're already rather more massive than they are - can't you just trample 'em?

Brooks also provides a rather Kishian illustration of Saurolophus, but said hadrosaur isn't the intended star of this piece. No, that would be the disembodied arm creeping in stage left. Therizinosaurs are so ubiquitous these days (no toy line is complete without one, no matter how hideously deformed), it's hard to remember a time when they were so utterly mysterious - when they would conceal themselves in copses of trees and slowly reach out...and touch you. Brrr. Nice work from Brooks.

We'll round off our look at the Childcraft annual with some delightful papercraft, courtesy (in this case) of George Suyeoka (with photography by Ralph Brunke). A Suyeoka piece precedes each section of the book, providing a wonderfully stylised and eye-catching introduction to a given geological era. One simply doesn't see the likes of this very often - I really like it. You can't beat a bright blue Diplodocus.

The Cretaceous piece is notable not only for possibly the only solid yellow Corythosaurus ever to grace a printed page, but also the amusingly naive-looking tyrannosaur gorily devouring a carcass in the top left. The Triceratops, meanwhile, appears to draw on Sibbick's Normanpedia work.

And finally...a guide to different dinosaur groups, by Bill Miller rather than Suyeoka this time. When compared with Suyeoka, Miller draws more on retro palaeoart, and there is an awkward collision of old and new that's very '80s; a pasty-shaped stegosaur and sprightly, erect-tailed nodosaur share a page. Using a different colour for each clade is a neat idea (even if 'prosauropods' and ornithopods are a little close), and the book's attempts to introduce evolutionary relationships to kids are quite admirable (as previously noted). Bonus points to you if you immediately spotted the ornithosuchid hiding among the theropods - proof that 1987 was a Long Time Ago. Which makes me very old. Vintage, even. Sob.

Next time: something else! I might even review Dinosaur Britain, since people keep mentioning it. Feel free to comment with your thoughts!

Mesozoic Miscellany 77

In the News

Interested in the evolution of ankylosaur tail clubs? Of course you are, and you're in luck. Victoria Arbour's new research is all about it.

Matt Bonnan announces the publication of Pulanesaura, a new sauropod from South Africa dating from the early Jurassic - an important time in the evolutionary history of the clade.

Around the Dinoblogosphere

At SV-POW, Matt Wedel deigned to write about a "stinkin' ornithischian."

The Dinosaur Toy Blog reviewed the LEGO Velociraptor.

Trish Arnold trained her wit on Walking With Dinosaurs 3D during a recent live tweet session.

At Laelaps, Brian Switek interviewed paleontologist Robert Gay about his experiences teaching natural history to high school students.

Paleontology field work ain't all glamour and gorgeous badland vistas, Lisa Buckley reports.

At Prehistoric Beast of the Week, journey into the bowels of the AMNH with Chris DiPiazza.

Mark Witton recently announced his upcoming paleoart book, and has launched his own Patreon page.

An exceptional fossil mount at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was profiled recently by Ben Miller.

Paleoart Pick

The Saurian team released some animations of their new T. rex design, and it's a stunner.

The Saurian T. rex, �2015 Urvogel Games, LLC.

Read more about the redesign of their tyrant at the Saurian game blog.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs! The 1987 Childcraft Annual - Part 3

Having already looked at saurischian dinosaurs in my first two posts on the 1987 Childcraft annual, it's high time some ornithischians were allowed to show their controversially cheeked faces. There's some more Greg Paul art in this category, but why don't we start with something that proved popular on Facebook?

Commendably, an early chapter attempts to explain taxonomy and nomenclature to children - an impressively difficult task, given how poorly adults seem to grasp it. Naturally, this includes a few examples of dinosaurs that were named after things they resemble, including good ol' Psittacosaurus above. Unfortunately, Jim Channell's illustration of the animal appears to be in a serious funk, like it just saw a vision of the future in which Donald Trump's boot stamps on a human face, for ever. Nice neck folds, but poor Psittacosaurus could really do with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Also, it's got an ear where it really shouldn't be. Easy mistake.

Further down the ceratopsian family tree, the book naturally includes Triceratops, as illustrated by Colin Newman. Excellent idea to have them mostly just standing around eating plants and enjoying the (sloping!) scenery, even if there are a few perspective fudges (so where are the horns on the foreground individual coming from?). The animal dramatically facing the viewer is more than a little reminiscent of Sibbick's Normanpedia Styracosaurus, an image so striking that illustrators throughout the late '80s and into the '90s found it impossible to forget.

If you do want ceratopsian-tyrannosaur face-offs, however, Greg Paul's got 'em. And what an image. Just as with his apatosaurs, it's an (even more aptly) confrontational piece that isn't afraid to show off the animal's strange attributes to their fullest extent. It's surprisingly rare that ceratopsians are made to look intimidating - often, they're the noble knights in scaly armour, locked in combat with tyrannosaurian dragons - but the theropod here looks positively puppy-like against that brick wall of a frill. Wonderful stuff.

Paul also contributes an illustration of Pachycephalosaurus in a conspicuously modern guise (i.e. with a proportionately large head), in which the animals turn their domed skulls against an unfortunate young tyrannosaur, rather than each other. Unusual perspectives abound here, too; there's that tyrannosaur sprinting away from the viewer, of course, but there's also a Pachycephalosaurus viewed head-on, unfortunately cropped out here (sorry). Just as with Apatosaurus, the fat behind on his Pachycephalosaurus shows Paul's commitment to making these animals as weird as they really were, as well as his eye for anatomical detail.

While work from other illustrators can't help but pale next to Paul's in terms of anatomical rigour, there's still a lot that's charming about it. This spread, by John Francis, depicts a herd of retro-dino-book favourite and Prehistoric Beast star Monoclonius seeing off a perturbed tyrannosaur, who steals a nervous glance over his shoulder while hot-footing it back into the woods. Monoclonius is one of those dubious genera, like Trachodon, that was once referred to very commonly in popular books (there was even a Dino Riders toy), with illustrations usually based on better-known animals. Perhaps someone should design a t-shirt - "Trachodon&Monoclonius&Deinodon&Didanodon." I'm sure Matt Martyniuk would buy one.

Tyrannosaurs can't always be allowed to escape with their dignity intact, of course (see also: Walking With Dinosaurs, Jurassic Park 3), so here Rexy is subjected to a rigorous clubbing from a cross-looking ankylosaur. Although ostensibly Ankylosaurus, the animal is modelled - typically for the time - on other ankylosaurs, mostly Scolosaurus. Fittingly, this scene combines '80s-style tail-lashing ankylosaurs with old-school squatting ones; the posture of the individual on the right is reminiscent of those good old sprawling scolosaurs, even if the overall look is more up-to-date. I like how Francis has drawn Rexy with both of his overgrown chicken feet flying up into the air. That must have been some wallop.

Ankylosaurs aren't always so bothersome, and here Phil Weare has depicted a pair just hangin' around in a swamp, chewin' on some horsetails and that. It's calling itself Hylaeosaurus, but nobody's fooled; Hylaeosaurus was the brown one on the left.

And finally...I haven't featured any stegosaurs yet, so here's a luvverly bunch of kentrosaurs. It's a decent enough illustration by John Dawson, and the animals are noteworthy for having wide hips, straight limbs, erect tails, and heads raised off the ground (which is more than can be said of many of the Stegosaurus restorations in this book). The way the animals are arranged across the spread, with dead space in between, helps encourage the suggestion that we're walking among them. Yes. Followers of dino-fashion may have noticed that the Kentrosaurus' 'shoulder spines' are located closer to the hips here - this was in style back in the day, before other stegosaurs with shoulder spines made people reconsider. However, one does note that plateosaur enthusiast Heinrich 'Caudofemoralis' Mallison, among others, contends that the spike should stay a-swayin' on the animal's hips, and not without reason. There's rarely a settled deal in dinosaur palaeontology, after all..