Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Mysterious World of Dinosaurs

Contrary to the beliefs of some - who seem to think that I collect these books by holding a net out of the window and reciting an arcane incantation until obsolete illustrations start falling from the clouds - I do actually physically own the vast majority of the books I review in Vintage Dinosaur Art. As time goes on, finding fresh old books and not paying through the nose becomes increasingly difficult. Praise be, then, to the Amnesty International book shop in Brighton, which is where I happened to find this gem of a book on sale for a single quid. Stumbling across something like this, and being able to walk out of the shop with it in my clutches, is a real joy. And believe me, this book is a corker.



The unmitigated, gleeful pulpiness begins on the cover, where a tyrannosaur with a rather salamandery face is depicted effortlessly snagging a (rather small) Pteranodon from the sky. Or Pteranodon is shown to be a hopelessly careless flyer, depending on your point of view. It's the kind of dino-kitsch that I can't miss from a mile away. Can the rest of The Mysterious World of Dinosaurs (1980) be this wonderful? Of course it can.


The majority of the illustrations in this book are by W Francis Phillipps, who proudly signs each of his works...while notably failing to add 'after [insert name]' on each occasion when he is clearly, uh, borrowing from another artist. Typically it's Burian, although the above illustration, depicting Allosaurus attacking one of those cheapy hollow sauropods you decapitated as a kid (just me?), seems to be based far more on a classic work by Knight. (EDIT: Terry N Thielen, on Facebook, reminded me of a Rod Ruth painting that this is a dead ringer for. Of course, it's not like I reviewed Ruth's work before...oh, wait.) The painterly (take a shot!) style is certainly attractive, and Phillipps is excellent at evoking a forbidding, ominous mood in his pieces; the muted, swampy browns and greens are both sombre and primordial, not to mention very reminiscent of Burian. It's a shame, then, that he doesn't really know his dinosaurs much. At all. Case in point: the next time Allosaurus appears in this book, it is depicted sneaking up behind a happily browsing Stegosaurus. But wait...isn't that...? Hang on a minute!


Up from the depths! Thirty stories high! Go go iffy perspective!

Fortunately, Allosaurus looks a little more like a normal (non-mutant, non-rubbery) theropod in the next scene. Unfortunately, that theropod is a tyrannosaur.



There's an awful lot to love about this image, and I might just have to have it printed on a t-shirt. I mean, Stegosaurus is often depicted flailing its spiny bits around in the faces of assailing theropods - after all, what else is supposed to do? Sprout pointy teeth and attack with the other end, too? But of course! In this scene, it's hard to tell who's attacking whom - which has a lot to do with the look of relish on the face of the stegosaur, angry eyebrows and all. It's all Allosaurus' fault for taking that oddly spreadeagled approach, which looks like it would be about as effective for attacking opponents as a member of the Brazilian football team.


Rather more successful in the predatory stakes is (not so) Sexy Rexy himself, here depicted in a guise about as aesthetically pleasing as a Range Rover Evoque. Classic old school palaeoart tropes on show here are the generic head that pays little heed to the skull, including uniform teeth; the lumpen, wrinkly body; and the upright posture. It's also - yet again - depicted tackling Styracosaurus, an animal from millions of years prior. Still, the massiveness of the thighs is at least a step up from the weed-o-muscles depicted in earlier artworks, and that lighting is fantastic. Just look at the gorgeous sunset reflecting on Rexy's chops! You can almost feel it. Lovely.


As an aside, there are very few depictions of bones in this book. (Hey, bones are boring, right? Who needs 'em?) One exception is this painting of a T. rex skull that has gone, er, a little awry. Clearly, the artist had reference material available to them, as the basic shape is there - but they might have been better off just pulling off a tracing job. That mandible...yeesh.

But back to the life restorations. Rexy might be a little tubby, but he has nothing on Gorged-o-saurus (below), who resembles the lovechild of Godzilla and that weird turd monster he battled once. The overall shininess of this creature's latex-like hide and its rotund shape are both reminiscent of some of Burian's work, although Burian tended to avoid the mistake of giving his theropods 'wide gauge' hips. I should point out again, however, that that background really is quite something; imagine a Wayne Barlowe dinosaur in there, and you'd have an instant classic.


Gorgo's gormlessness is matched by Iguanodon, here depicted in classic upright guise, and with erroneous extra teeth. The overall look of the creature is, again, highly reminiscent of Burian, while the obligatory dewlap is a trope that probably originated in Neave Parker's work. Nice sky, mind.


Perhaps the most blatant Burian rip-offs of all occur in the book's sauropod section. Not only is there a snorkelling brachiosaur that's a straight-up (mirrored) copy, the below 'brontosaur' is also derivative of a Burian painting, with a few modifications. Still, I love the head. Is this proof that artists working on copycat palaeoart in the late '70s and early '80s had the foresight and anatomical intuition to realise that sauropods' fleshy nostrils likely resided near the ends of their snouts, in spite of the bony nasal openings being above the eyes? No.


And finally...Archaeopteryx. Because you've got to have Archaeopteryx. It's a fairly typical effort that includes the usual slight misunderstanding of how primary feathers attach to the hand. Aside from that, and the oft-utilised blue/green colouration, and the strangely curving mouth (moreso on the one I had to crop out), it's not too bad. I haven't mentioned the text of this book yet; perhaps I should have done, for not only is it dramatic and slightly florid in the tradition of vintage kiddies' dinosaur books, it also features such wonderful lines as this:

"It [Archaeopteryx] was about the size of a pigeon and although feathered, had reptilian scales on its legs..."

I suppose if you don't count feet as part of the legs...there's still not a great deal of evidence that Archaeopteryx had scaly legs. Not to mention the fact that the legs are feathered in the illustration. Birds: someday, nobody will have a problem with the idea that they're reptiles.


And that's all for now. But I haven't finished with this book yet; far from it. Next week, zombie pterosaurs, and Knightian plesiosaurs rise again!

27 comments:

  1. I think I might still have my copy. There's a lot of Burian copies in this one, but I really do enjoy this art. Sometimes I feel like that Gorgosaurus looks.

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  2. That's an amazing Gorgosaurus ... kind of looks like it should be on a West End stage ... "Good lookin', so refined. Say, wouldn't you like to know what's going on in my mind? "

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  3. Before you have that image printed on a t-shirt, Marc, I hope you'll seek permission of Mr. Phillipps first? ;) (I know you're probably joking, but, you know... Artist's reflex)

    Looking forward to more on this book. It really was a great find.

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    1. I was joking, yes. But if I were to get it on a t-shirt, I'd definitely try and track down W Phillipps.

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  4. What I'm wondering is how the same artist can make the same dino (Allosaurus) look so completely different 3 different times in the same book?

    -Hadiaz

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  5. The Allosaurus attacking the Brontosaurus looks strikingly similar to the Allosaurus painting in Album of Dinosaurs. http://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2013/06/vintage-dinosaur-art-album-of-dinosaurs.html

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    1. Yeah, that was brought up on Facebook, too; I've made an addition to text. Can't believe I forgot that. Duh.

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  6. I think that Gorgosaurus's DNA got spliced with a sea elephant.

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  7. Thanks Marc, another absolute classic. Some of the art is rather evocative. That Gorgo with his seal snout is gorgeous, so sleek and black and shiny like a, er... sleek, black, shiny thing.

    However, the battling Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus (yes, yes it is - just look at those arms) is a bit of a nod toward one Maurits Cornelis Escher as far as the warped perspective goes. The theropod's head is in front of a plate about half-way along Steggy's back but behind the end of his tail. Meanwhile Steggy tests out his newly-acquired gnashers half-way up Rexy's tail while stopping him from running away by standing on the end of his tail with his far-side foreleg.

    Archy's fingers - eek! Creepy.

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  8. That cover art is wonderful, though I do have to wonder how Rexy got a Pteranodon in its mouth with the pterosaur being in THAT pose. Why was it flying on its back while looking down? What on earth happened there? No wonder it ended up in some disproportionally large theropod's maw.
    Is that Gorgosaurus standing in front of a glacier? That's something I''ve never seen but appeciate.
    I also think you missed a detail on the Stegosaurus. Take a close look at its back plates, specifically at the shoulders. This is a very convenient Allosaurus-step-here-please arrangement, created by leaving out two of the plates and displacing them so that the animal gets a quadruple row of plates around the shoulders.
    Finally, about the Iguanodon dewlap: That one goes further back than Parker. It was present in the very first depiction of an Iguanodon ever, when Owen still thought he had a giant iguana at his hands. Because iguanas do have dewlaps. Let me emphasize: The very first depiction of a non-skeletal dinosaur ever produced was an Iguanodon with a dewlap. So yeah, older than Parker. Slightly.

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    1. Aye, but I swear that many of the earliest depictions of the Dollo-style 'kangaroo Iguanodon' (which might as well have been of a different animal) were sans dewlap. (I also think it's a bit unfair to say that Owen thought he had a 'giant iguana' on his hands. Oversized reptile, yes, but he could see they weren't like any reptiles alive today...even if he got the look rather...off.)

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    2. My bad, I meant Mantell, back when he only had some teeth to go by. That was quite literally a giant iguana. Going through my oldest books (30's-50's), I realize bipedal Iguanodon appears with a thin, scaly neck with nothing even close to a dewlap, so you're probably right.

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    3. So that sent me on a search and I came across Heinrich Harder's Iguanodon from 1914 which does have something going on at its throat, but the online reproductions I found of it are too small to decide wether that is a dewlap (Harder seems somewhat fond of those, his Mosasaurus does definitely sport a dewlap and is probably the weirdest specimen of its kind I ever came across). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iguanodon_Heinrich_Harder.jpg

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  9. Everyone wants to know about Dinosaur. It's also - yet again - depicted tackling Styracosaurus, an animal from millions of years prior. Still, the massiveness of the thighs is at least a step up from the weed-o-muscles depicted in earlier artworks, and that lighting is fantastic. Just look at the gorgeous sunset reflecting on Rexy's chops! You can almost feel it. Great.
    Football

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    1. Spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam,...

      You, Sir, are a scoundrel and a blaggard.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. One gets the impression Philipps is halfheartedly wasting his talents here. Anyone knows what he did when not painting dubious dinos?

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  12. Poor old Iguanodon looks like he's got a bad case of 'conifer's revenge'.

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  13. I will have nightmares with that blobby, petroleumish, red pig-nosed creature...

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  14. LOL, That Gorgosaurus looks like the unholy lovechild of Godzilla and Hedorah indeed

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  15. If the assortment of images here is to be believed, I used to own a/the German edition of this book as a kid, with a very different cover (I believe it was a slightly adjusted version of the Allosaurus-Stegosaurus ouroboros you posted). I don't remember the title, but I do remember the very evocative and menacing imagery. Cool to see these pictures again after all this time, quite the blast from a past.

    By the way, I remember the lauded Struthiomimus painting posted here http://chasmosaurs.blogspot.co.at/2012/02/vintage-dinosaur-art-i-spy-dinosaurs.html is also from this book, as is the Ankylosaurus.

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    1. Right, it was this one: http://www.amazon.de/Dinosaurier-Urmenschen-Illustrationen-Francis-Phillipps/dp/B00539ADAU It came with additional material and pictures of cavemen and Pleistocene megafauna and all that.

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  16. God I love this place. I just stumbled across it tonight, and it's everything I've ever wanted from a paleo-site. I get physically ill sifting through all of the "accuracy" fetishism of every other dino site, that gives no consideration to the researchers and artists that put us where we are now. I understand the need for educational materials etc. but I fully believe that archaic dino-art is has just as much artistic merit as a form of fantasy escapism. As long as we're up front and honest about that, I think tail-draggers and fossil restorations can peacefully co-exist, in the same house even!

    And then along comes LITC, a dinosaur website with a sense of humor about the giant freakin' bird monsters that we'll never meet anyway. A place that treats the people as if they were just as important as the dinosaurs. As an artist (and I use that term loosely) that's all I've wanted: for people to examine the person who presents the information as much as the data itself. All paleontology is biased by human perception, so the people are a pretty important part of that equation I'd say. Especially the artists that spend their precious time depicting animals that will be considered irrelevant and quaint in five years' time. Plus, I stumbled across articles covering artists I DEEPLY respect, and never would have expected like Barlowe and Ross Campbell. So, thank you, for being a respite of sanity and mirth in a hobby that's far too often callous and unwelcoming.

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    1. Thank you so much for this comment - we do indeed strive to put forth the qualities you find so welcoming, and it's nice to have a bit of confirmation that we achieve our goal, at least from time to time.

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  17. Oh goodness, I literally spewed coffee all over my laptop screen when I saw that Gorgosaurus. He either looks like the mutant illegitimate child of a kangaroo and a sea lion, or perhaps Barney after getting caught in an oil spill.

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  18. I still have my copy of this book from my childhood. That Gorgosaurus was one of my favourite illustrations in the book.

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