Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs and more Dinosaurs - Part 2

Onwards with the second part of our exploration of this frequently unsettling book. Do take a look at part 1 and David's 2010 post on the artist (George Solonevich) for more background.

Dinosaurs and more Dinosaurs might boast a significant number of relatively obscure beasts when compared with similar books, but that doesn't mean it shies away from the staples. Here, for example, we have an Iguanodon, easily identified by its approving hand gestures. There's something particularly peculiar about the head on this beast - it seems to have borrowed the head of a theropod from a more sober book (in DaMD, it would have dozens of moray-like teeth and/or a snaking tongue). The oddly humanoid proportions of the forelimbs are, of course, entirely in keeping with contemporary depictions of the animal. All in all, this one isn't too 'out there'; it's not like it's scaling a tree trunk, flicking out a lizardy tongue and brandishing a feathered tail, for example.

Yeah, you saw that one coming, I know.  In any case, Hypsilophodon is hardly known for bringing the crazy; the poor little creature is normally depicted scurrying around (or running hastily away from) much larger, more awesomebro species. Sure, there was the infamous 'tree kangaroo' Neave Parker depiction, but even then it was just standing around, looking suitably placid and harmless. Leave it to Solonevich to make even this most innocuous of animals into a creeping, crawling nightbeast with many-jointed limbs, a feathered (or is that beaver-like?) tail and Venom's tongue. By comparison, the gangly, vertical Ornithomimus on the right looks very conventional indeed, and there is something quite beautiful about its lovingly 'sculpted' legs.

Speaking of the conventional versus the very unconventional, the majority of the book's ankylosaurs follow the era's rather dull tendency to produce squat, short-tailed, no-necked armadillo-turtles. This more unusual depiction, then, is surely to be welcomed, even if it looks still more outlandish. The bony nodules are superbly painted - it's almost possible to get a tangible sense of how rough this animal's hide is - but I'm sure you're nevertheless wondering what on Earth this thing is supposed to be. Well, it's Pinacosaurus (here identified as Syrmosaurus). Hey, at least it's got a nice long tail, right?

Now here's a fun exercise in pointless hypothetical alterna-history - what if, just as Waterhouse Hawkins was sculpting the mighty Crystal Palace monstrosities, someone had tripped over a hadrosaur skull weathering out of a hillside somewhere? What would have happened had Hawkins hurriedly incorporated it into his dino designs? I like to think that the result would have looked something like the above. I'm particularly fond of the melty feet and hugely thick neck and tail. Magnificent stuff.

While the above Anatosaurus (aka Anatotitan, aka Edmontosaurus) is furnished with the full-mega-portly-body treatment, only the head of Pachycephalosaurus is shown. There's a good reason for this, of course; Pachycephalosaurus isn't known from very much else, so any full-body reconstruction would be subject to a great amount of speculation, and might end up looking a bit freaky some decades down the line.

I love its angry little face. Bless.

If you want marginocephalians in all their glory, you'll have to consult the ceratopsian pages. The above animal has a masterfully textured toad body. Somehow, it's ended up with the (not all that bad, for the time) head of a Styracosaurus. I'm sure it's a mask.

Of course, bring in the ceratopsians, and you also have to present their perpetual foes. Opposite Styracosaurus we have the frightful Gorgosaurus, a cross between a hen, a snake and a Cornish pasty. The character that Solonevich brings to this hunchbacked killer pastry is fantastic; note also the way in which the viewer's eye is expertly drawn to that hideous, bristling maw. Nevertheless, there's only one animal we could possibly end on...

Disappointingly, Solonevich's Tyrannosaurus isn't particularly unusual for the time; there are definite shades of both Neave Parker and, especially, Zdenek Burian. This Rexy is a dead ringer for Burian's monochrome Gorgosaurus, in particular, right down to the gleaming, greasy skin textures. What the prey is intended to represent isn't mentioned. Dave Hone noted that its head looks remarkably like those on contemporary reconstructions of small pterosaurs like Rhamphorynchus; the combination of this mismatched head, extremely thin skin-flap neck and leggy bipedal body is a bit of a mystery. We can only assume that, as with so many of the other illustrations in this book, Solonevich just thought it looked pretty damn...interesting. And it certainly does.