Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs, National Geographic, January 1993

The last time I looked at an old issue of National Geographic, it was from 1978, when the ideas put forward in the Dinosaur Renaissance were starting to take hold in the popular imagination. Fifteen years later, and Vol. 183, No. 1 shows just how much progress had been made. What's especially fascinating about this issue of Nat Geo is that it not only looks at the current state of the science, but also how dinosaurs were enjoying a resurgence in popularity among the general public at the time, in turn offering an insight into contemporary trends in palaeoart. Which means John Gurche. Lots of John Gurche.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Ranger Rick's Dinosaur Book

Ranger Rick Magazine has been around for over 40 years, delivering nature stories with great photography and art to the children - who are, Whitney Houston taught us, the future. Trish Arnold shared some scans from 1984's Ranger Rick's Dinosaur Book with the Vintage Dinosaur Art pool at Flickr.

Eleanor M. Kish contributed this Triceratops, which nicely illustrates the now-out of favor sprawling forelimb position.

She also did this nice Hypacrosaurus, a good illustration of cryptic coloring in a dinosaur, though it does suffer from "noodle neck" syndrome, a common occurance in old representations of hadrosaurs.


Kish has several dinosaur titles to her credit, but very little work online. Hopefully I'll come across one of them so I can give her an entry of her own.

Here's an Archaeopteryx by John Gurche, whose giant Sue painting at the Field Museum is one of my favorite Tyrannosaurus paintings. In the photo comments, Trish makes note of the fact that this dude looks exactly like a bird with a lizard head.


Mark Hallett, interviewed this week at Archosaur Musings, did this wonderful painting of a group of pesky mammals congregating at a ceratopsian skull as the Paleogene began.


Rodents, marsupials, carnivores. Wondering what the heck they're going to do with the place now that they have it to themselves.

Dinoramas

It's the beginning of a new week, which means I have my weekend podcasts to keep me and my Wacom tablet company. The most recent episode of NPR's Science Friday featured a roundtable discussion on the relationship between paleoartists and museums in the creation of exhibits, primarily that old standby the diorama. It mainly dealt with human evolution, but there was a smidgen of dino-talk as well.

One of the guests is paleoartist John Gurche, whose work you may recognize from the huge painting of Sue at the Field Museum and the cover of Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies. It looks like it's anthropology that butters his bread, but he does feature some low-res previews of dinosaur art on his totally old-school website.

From gurche.com, © John Gurche

Gurche also did the 1989 USPS dinosaur stamps. So pretty, you may want to drink your coffee from them. A sheet of them isn't too expensive, either. Reminds me, I've had my Gurney dinosaur stamps in safekeeping for quite a while. Maybe it's time I frame and hang 'em.