Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Amazing World of Dinosaurs

The admirable effort of a single writer/illustrator, The Amazing World of Dinosaurs comes to us from the amazing world of 1981. It was a primitive age, when Donkey Kong was the cutting edge in video game entertainment, Bruce Dickinson had only just joined Iron Maiden, and popular palaeoart stood at an intriguing juncture. On the one hand, artists' work still owed much to the classic depictions of 'great fossil lizards', but there was nevertheless a conscious move towards more recognisably 'modern' restorations, spearheaded by the likes of John McLoughlin (who coined the phrase 'great fossil lizard' when referring to the outdated ideas he railed against). But I've said as much before. The Amazing World of Dinosaurs is interesting because it combines the old, the new, and the occasional foray into the bafflingly, spectacularly, book-crashingly wrong.