Guest Post: The Music of Walking with Dinosaurs

Once again, we welcome Rohan Long to the blog for a guest post. Rohan is a zoology teaching guy at University of Melbourne. You can find him on Twitter @zoologyrohan and listen to his new musical project, Bronzewing, at bronzewing.bandcamp.com. You may recall his post last year almost a year ago, reviewing Crichton's The Lost World. This time, Rohan came to us with the idea of discussing the music of 1999's seminal CG documentary Walking with Dinosaurs, and we happily accepted the offer.

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When you start to unpack it, Walking With Dinosaurs is a strange beast; a fictional animated series earnestly presenting itself as a nature documentary. The series’ aesthetic cues are drawn foremost from the BBC school of classic documentaries – and with good reason; if the creators strayed too far from the genre as it’s traditionally presented, the spell would be broken, and the audience may well ask itself why Kenneth Branagh is playing Attenborough over a bunch of puppets and primitive CGI. Unsurprisingly, the first incarnation of the show, released in 1999, was also aesthetically and musically influenced by cultural juggernaut Jurassic Park which was released six years earlier.

Ornitholestes from 1999's Walking With Dinosaurs. Somehow, Benjamin Bartlett avoided the obvious choice of producing a punk theme for this critter.

When it comes to establishing the feel of a real nature documentary, the soundtrack must surely be one of the most crucial elements. The score by Benjamin Bartlett draws from similar stylistic touchstones to the show’s visual aesthetic – a little John Williams here, a touch of Edward William’s 1979 score to Life On Earth there. It must have been an interesting brief for a composer as most importantly, the soundtrack was required to sound like a nature documentary soundtrack. As with the overall look of the show, if the soundtrack didn’t fit the established expectations of what a nature documentary should sound like, the illusion of authenticity would be shattered. So in a sense, this soundtrack can be thought of as a work of pastiche.

I bought the soundtrack CD in the early 2000s but didn’t actually listen to it until much later. Let me set the scene: I was working on a dinosaur dig with which I have a long association and was relaxing at the end of a very hard day. For the second time in as many days I had been working “in the hole” – manually extracting big chunks of rock from the fossil layer with sledge hammers and chisels so the rest of the crew could break them down, looking for fossils. That night, a combination of very strenuous work and a couple of quality Australian lagers had brought about an almost zen-like state of calm stillness in me. The crew was watching the WWD episode that features the dinosaurs from our site (because of course that’s what you’d do after looking for dinosaur fossils all day). I’d seen this episode quite a few times by this point, but this time something clicked. The music cut through to my receptive mind and I appreciated it for the first time.

The music that first captivated me that evening was from the episode Spirits of the Ice Forest about the polar dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia with which I have a warm familiarity. The main motif comprises a sweeping middle-eastern section which then gives way to some icy, atmospheric textures. The follow-on track Antarctic Spring develops this theme and the incorporation of some delay-affected tuned percussion makes it sound a bit modern and cool.

I think Bartlett is using a stereotypically middle-eastern sounding scale on these pieces as musical shorthand to symbolise a generic “other” – you know, because Australia is weird because it’s different to the northern hemisphere! Perhaps it would have made more sense for these themes to have incorporated elements of our actual indigenous music. It’s kind of lazy and very Eurocentric, but I enjoy the music on its own merits so I mostly forgive Bartlett for this.

One thing Bartlett does very well is huge, affecting pieces that make full use of the orchestra. Islands of Green for example, uses slow-building swells of strings interspersed with steady, rhythmic bass notes and a shimmering celesta to illustrate the hardships of marine reptiles in the late Jurassic. Cruel Sea from the same episode is more stripped back but has a similar feel, this time with strings, orchestral harp and brass forming a slow, melancholy waltz. These pieces work very well as standalone songs, as opposed to tracks like say, Torosaurus Locks Horns or Canyon Of Terror which are purely dramatic tension delivery devices.

I think Bartlett does a great job on this unique project, but there are weak spots. On the Time Of The Titans episode he seems to be trying to emulate the feel of William’s themes for Jurassic Park and like Williams, lapses into obvious grandiosity and unnecessary whimsy when scoring the sauropod scenes. Minor complaints aside, the soundtrack works as a very listenable album of music in addition to scoring the series very effectively.

You might notice that the first track mentions in parentheses that it is narrated by Kenneth Branagh. Happily (or disappointingly, depending on your view), Branagh only appears on that first track, the rest is unspoiled by narration. Mind you, although I think that track clashes somewhat with the rest of the album, I’ve got to admit that it does make a great opener for mix CDs – *orchestra swell* Imagine you can travel back in time, to a time long before man...

Postscript: If you’re interested in this music or soundtrack composition in general, have a read of this in-depth interview from 2000 with Bartlett on the process of composing and recording the music for WWD.

Romancing the Tyrant: A review of "My Girlfriend is a T-Rex" Volume 1

I'm happy to bring Tommy Leung aboard today for this guest post! They'll be reviewing the comic My Girlfriend is a T-Rex. A bit about today's guest contributor:

Tommy Leung is a parasitologist / zoologist who writes a blog called Parasite of the Day where they write about newly published research from the field of parasitology. They have also written about dinosaur parasites and parasites in the fossil record. Additionally they're an illustrator and you can see some of their work here. You can find them on Twitter @The_Episiarch.

Take it away, Tommy!

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My Girlfriend is a T-Rex* is a comic / graphic novel series by artist Sanzo (さんぞう). It was originally published as an online webcomic under the title "T-REXな彼女 / T-Rex na Kanojo" and was later licensed for an English release by Seven Seas Entertainment. At its core, it is a tale of boy meets girl, but girl is a large carnivorous theropod dinosaur (sort of). While such a story would usually end rather quickly (and bloodily), in the case of My Girlfriend is a T-Rex, it turns into a tale of blossoming interspecific romance and funny dinosaurian hijinks.

The cover of Sanzo's "My Girlfriend is a T-rex."

In the world of My Girlfriend is a T-Rex, half-human-looking dinosaurs (imagine Centaurs or Mermaids, but with dinosaur bits in place of the horse or fish parts) live in our society, kind of like an urbanite monster girls / boys version of Dinotopia. The explanation for why the dinosaurs look the way that they do was that they had evolved to look more attractive to humans in order to survive in the modern world (a case of evolutionary mimicry?). It is an extremely silly premise, but this series makes no pretence at being anything more than a (largely) slapstick comedy featuring dinosaur monster girls / boys, and it often pokes fun at its own absurdity.

The two main characters of this series are (seemingly) ordinary college student Yuuma Asahikawa who, while taking out the trash late one night, encountered Churio, a female Tyrannosaurus rex who was riffling through the garbage. Despite the best effort of Churio to try and convince him that she is a big scary dinosaur, Yuuma looked past her sharp claws and scaly skin, and fell for her tyrannosaurian charm. Since this fateful encounter, Churio gradually made a switch from scavenging on the streets and sleeping in an abandoned factory, to becoming a somewhat more functional member of society.

The design of the dinosaurian characters in this series places it firmly within the “monster girl / people” subgenre along the likes of A Centaur’s Life, Merman in my Tub, and the very popular Everyday Life With Monster Girls / Monster Musume in featuring half-monster half-human characters in the main cast. Given My Girlfriend is a T-Rex seems like just another comic amidst many released in recent years that features the monster people gimmick, does it have what it takes to distinguish itself from the rest of the monster mash?

There are two main reasons that My Girlfriend is a T-Rex may appeal to a slightly different audience than the usual crowd who would be interested in such monster girl titles. First of all, whereas most other monster girl / people series have mainly featured mythological beings such as centaurs, merfolks, and lamia, My Girlfriend is a T-Rex is unique (as far as I am aware) in having dinosaur-based monster girls in such a slice-of-life setting (if you don’t count Bird Cafe! I guess…) - this alone may pique the interest of Palaeontology / Dinosaur Fans, which I’m guessing includes many readers of this blog. Secondly, it seems largely free of the kind of sexually suggestive (“ecchi”) content found throughout some monster girl titles such as Monster Musume, so My Girlfriend is a T-Rex may be more accessible to readers who find the more risqué aspects of Monster Musume to be off-putting.

Being the titular dinosaur of the series, most of the humour in this comic derives from Churio's antics as she attempts to adapt to modern society and all its trappings. A fair share of the jokes revolve around Churio not fully understanding her own strength as a tyrannosaur, or her instinctive responses to the situations that she finds herself in - which often comes across as being like a mix between a stray puppy and Godzilla. It is worth pointing out that unlike Churio, most of the other dinosaur / pterosaur characters in My Girlfriend is a T-Rex seem to have fully integrated with human society; they have jobs, pay bills, and live generally normal lives, and the human characters in this world seem to take that as a given. So Churio seems to be just a feral outlier.

Aside from Churio’s shenanigans, some of jokes in this series are references or parodies of dinosaurs (at least as they are perceived by the general public) and various dinosaur-based media. For example, those with a keen eye will spot a very obvious reference to Jurassic Park during a conversation between Churio and her friend, Torika, who is some sort of Velociraptor. Also the personalities of the dinosaur characters usually reflect the common popular perception of the dinosaur species that they are based upon. With that said, there are some moments where the character interactions move beyond “Archetype X based upon dinosaur species X” which give those characters a bit more depth.

While the main focus is on Churio and her interactions with Yuuma, there is also a cast of both human and dinosaur / pterosaur supporting characters who get their share of story. One noteworthy side character is Kram - a socially awkward ankylosaur who has difficulty communicating with people and conveying her emotions. Also, her best intentions are often thwarted by her own heavily armoured body. Kram’s more introverted and introspective personality acts a nice contrast to Churio’s blunt and impulsive temperament, and I hope we will see more of her in the next volume since she has appeared only in one chapter so far.

On a side note, the translation assumes that the reader has some familiarity with Japanese honorifics such as kōhai (underclassman / junior) and oniichan (“big / older brother”). While such words are familiar enough to regular manga readers or anime viewers, it might take a bit of getting used to for those who have not been exposed to such material. But, it should not be too difficult to work out what their English equivalents might be given their context.

My final verdict? My Girlfriend is a T-Rex might be one of the more accessible monster girl titles available as it avoids some of the tropes of that subgenre which people may find off-putting. While the humour in this series isn’t all that sophisticated, it works and I found it to be a really fun read. You should definitely check it out if you like the idea of a light-hearted, fish-out-of-water (or tyrannosaur out of Cretaceous?) slice-of-life comedy with a dinosaurian twist. Or if you are curious about the monster girl subgenre, but find Monster Musume too lewd or A Centaur’s Life a bit too weird, you might want to give this one a go instead, and spend an afternoon with some cute dinosaurian monster girls.

Overall score: 75/100

*Yes, I know the proper way to abbreviate Tyrannosaurus rex is T. rex - but that is the series’ official title.

Guest Post: The Pocket-Sized Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Today we welcome back guest blogger Rohan Long of the University of Melbourne, who joined us in February for a look back at Crichton's The Lost World novel. This time, he shares some cool relics from paleontology in the Victorian era.

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Every reader of this blog must surely be familiar with the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. These were the life-size dinosaur models made around 1854 by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in collaboration with Richard Owen and placed in a naturalistic, outdoor setting in Crystal Palace Park. They were the very first dinosaur models ever made. The story of these magnificent and ground-breaking models has been told extensively elsewhere, but I’d like to share with you slightly lesser known versions of these famous sculptures.

From their inception, Hawkins and his supporters saw the sculptures as being primarily educational and accessible to everyone – not just the educated elite. Hawkins thought of his dinosaurs as ‘one vast and combined experiment of visual education’. The sculptures were envisioned not as mere spectacle, but as a public educational resource to improve the mind, for all classes of Victorian society. The dean of Hereford, Richard Dawes, a cleric and educator, suggested to Hawkins that small-scale models of the dinosaurs be made for the purpose of scientific studies in schools and other educational institutions. In the spirit of inclusiveness, Dawes said:

‘He should be glad to see those models multiplied at a price which would enable them to be introduced into village and ordinary school, as every one could not visit the Crystal Palace, and he therefore hoped that specimens like those before them might be rendered attainable by those in remote and secluded districts, who would not have the advantage of witnessing the splendid and gigantic illustration of the extinct creation of the early ages of the world which would be there exhibited.¹

Knowing a good merchandising deal when he saw it, mineralogist James Tennant struck an agreement with Hawkins to produce the models, along with a series of six posters depicting the prehistoric animals that had been sculpted. Tennant, capitalising on the lucrative market of well-to-do gentlemen naturalists, and had built up a successful business selling fossils, shells, minerals and the tools needed to collect them. (By 1854, Tennant laid claim to the impressive and unique title of ‘Mineralogist to her Majesty’). Small- scale models were produced of the dinosaurs Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, the aquatic reptiles Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus (combined as a tableau), the pterosaur Pterodactylus, and "Labyrinthodon," an obsolete name for the temnospondyl amphibian Mastodonsaurus.

Hawkins' Iguanodon in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

Hawkins' Iguanodon in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

In addition to these models, replicas were made by Henry A. Ward, an American professor of natural science and dealer of in fossils, bones and other scientific specimens. Ward was advertising the models from at least 1866 and sold them from his business, Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester, New York. According to Ward’s catalogue of the time, a full set of the five models could be purchased for $30, or individually from $5 to $10.²

We have two of these small-scale models in our Tiegs Museum Zoology Collection at the University of Melbourne, an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus. They were donated to the collection sometime between 1916 and 1921 by trail-blazing zoologist Associate Professor Georgina Sweet. Due to the university’s historically close association with the British scientific establishment, I suspected our models were Hawkins’ originals rather than Wards replicas. After some detective work I found that although the two model types are very similar in their shape, there are differences in the models’ colouration. Ward’s models are a coppery-brown colour, with a green plaster underside. Our models, and all of Hawkins’ originals, are painted a glossy black, while the exposed plaster underside is a mottled white, grey and green.

Hawkins' Megalosaurus in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

Hawkins' Megalosaurus in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

While I was researching these models, I visited the collections of the Melbourne Museum to see their own Iguanodon (also a Hawkins’ original). A geologist friend of mine was there with the collection manager. He heard about my project and scoffed cheerfully; “Why are you interested in those things? They’re wrong!” This is a common reaction to these dinosaurs and I think it’s short-sighted. If I was writing this in the eighties, I’d be correcting Hawkins’ assumption that Iguanodon was quadrupedal and reconstruct it instead as the awkward, kangaroo-postured biped we all know and love. But paleontological research has brought us full circle and Iguanodon is again considered predominantly quadrupedal, albeit more lightly built than the Victorians had envisioned. Any student of the history of paleontological illustration should be wary of the notion that current reconstructions aren’t every bit a work in progress as their predecessors. Imagine how silly all of these featherless dinosaurs are going to look to the next generation of dinosaur devotees.

Footnotes

1. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘On visual education as applied to geology’, Journal of the Society of Arts, (London), vol. 2, 1853–54.

2. Henry A. Ward, 1866, quoted in Jane P. Davidson, ‘Catalogue of casts of fossils (1866) and the artistic influence of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins on Ward’, Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 108, nos 3–4, Fall 2005, pp. 138–48.

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You can catch up with Rohan on Twitter @zoologyrohan and listen to his new musical project, Bronzewing, at bronzewing.bandcamp.com.

Guest Post: A Look Back at Crichton's Lost World

Today we welcome Rohan Long to the blog to offer his insights about The Lost World novel. Rohan is a zoology teaching guy at University of Melbourne. You can find him on Twitter @zoologyrohan and listen to his new musical project, Bronzewing, at bronzewing.bandcamp.com. Take it away, Rohan!

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The Lost World, published by Michael Crichton in 1995, must have been one of the most anticipated literary sequels of all time. And yet, it seems to have been forgotten almost instantly.

The basic plot (spoiler alert?) is that mathematician Ian Malcolm has teamed up with palaeontologist Dr. Richard Levine to find a remote, isolated region where non-avian dinosaurs have escaped extinction. The appearance of a number of unusual animal specimens leads them to Isla Sorna in Costa Rica. They are joined on the island by field biologist Sarah Harding, a couple of engineers who designed their gear and two precocious high school students – you can almost see Spielberg standing over Crichton’s shoulder at the computer, cajoling him to add some kids to the cast. Unbeknownst to our team, they are followed to the island by unscrupulous geneticist Lewis Dodgson and his team of expendable dinosaur chew toys who are attempting to steal the animals for their own nefarious ends (again).

Writerly advice? Illustration © David Orr 2016.

In contrast to Jurassic Park’s amiable Alan Grant, Crichton writes Levine as an irritating pedant, albeit one with the fierce intelligence to back it up; “the best palaeobiologist of his generation, perhaps the best in the world”. Yet it’s hard to believe that a brilliant, world-renowned scientist would think that a remnant population of living dinosaurs is a plausible scenario. This is fringe stuff; the sort of thing only taken seriously by young Earth creationists and cryptozoologists. Levine even puts forward Mokele-mbembe – a folkloric sauropod from the Congo beloved by both aforementioned groups – as supporting evidence for his ‘lost world hypothesis’, a suggestion more befitting a recreational sasquatch hunter than a world authority on palaeontology.

Malcolm’s stated reason for being on this expedition is that it will allow him to work out the cause of the Cretaceous mass extinction. This is basically a silly idea and Crichton is coy as to how exactly one would make this deduction. The majority of the dinosaur species on the island weren’t even alive during this era. Ok, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Parasaurolophus and Pachycephalosaurus were right there at the KT boundary, but how is the behaviour of say, Procompsognathus - extinct around 145 million years earlier - going to contribute to this theory? There’s a constant nagging question plaguing the book - why on earth would Malcolm willingly place himself on yet another island full of blood-thirsty dinosaurs - and this flimsy premise for a science experiment cannot and does not fulfil this narrative shortcoming.

Throughout the novel, there’s an unearned air of absolute certainty from the scientist characters. We hear Harding explaining exactly what the predator-prey ecology should be like on the island, Levine authoritatively identifying dinosaurs to species level based on a glance – how could they possibly know this stuff? Crichton was by no means a stupid man, but half way through The Lost World I felt like I was reading Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Novel. A vast amount of the dialogue is clearly intended to make the reader think, ‘Wow! These people are so smart!’ – and that’s certainly how I responded when I was younger – but this time around I found it grating and unwarranted.

In the later years of his career, Crichton showed a tendency toward scientific conservatism and denialism. Knowing this, it’s hard not to pick up on passages in The Lost World as precursors to this kind of thinking. One of Malcolm’s early speeches about the nature of evolutionary thought contains noticeable creationist talking points – even quoting Hoyle’s famous line about evolution being as improbable as ‘a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747’. The final statement of the book, spoken by engineer Thorne, but it could have easily come from Malcolm or Levine, basically states that because people used to believe in phlogiston and the like, all science is fantasy and can’t be trusted.

I’m critical of The Lost World, but I have enjoyed revisiting it. I realised that this novel contained some of the most evocative scenes of life at a university and as a field researcher that I had read as a young person. The descriptions of Levine and Malcolm’s research and meetings at academic institutions in California, the passages about Sarah Harding’s work on hyenas and her struggles as a female scientist; these really stuck with me as a teenager. That’s what I’m hoping to take away from this re-reading and not the silly caricature of science so inevitable of mass-produced pop culture.

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And as a bonus treat, I really dig Rohan's Bronzewing album, so take a listen.

Guest Post: Yes, Your Velociraptors Must Have Feathers and Other Concessions to Reality

In this guest post, we hand the microphone to Daniel Bensen, who is here to bring a novelist's perspective to the topic of accuracy in media portrayals of extinct animals.

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Let's talk about the giant lizards in Jurassic World. Their tails droop like noodles, their skins are scaly and wrinkled, hanging off prominent bones. Their hands curl in front of them as if ready to dribble basketballs. They hiss and spit, and glare at the world through slit-pupiled eyes, their skulls as bony and gnarled as dragons'. Jurassic World's lizards are scary. They're distinctive (and copyrightable) on the screen and in toy stores. They're lucrative as hell. And they're wrong. They are less similar to real Velociraptor than the ones in the original Jurassic Park movie 20 years ago.

Universal Studios had a good reason for using giant lizards rather than real dinosaurs in Jurassic World. They didn't want to make just any old dinosaur movie, they wanted to continue the Jurassic Park franchise, and Jurassic Park raptors look like this. If the special effects people made raptors that look like that, they would have been off-brand—unrecognizable to the public, and (since you can't copyright what a real animal looks like) terrifyingly public domain. Even worse, a real Velociraptor wouldn't have worked symbolically. The movie doesn't need a real animal. It needs a key to the lock in your brain that opens a door marked "here be dragons."

If Jurassic World was called "Dragon World," that would be the end of this essay. Why not give the public what they want, after all? What does it matter what symbol we use to denote "dinosaur" in our brains? Well, none. We don't have time machines. We're not going to meet real dinosaurs, so the question of what they really looked like will only ever be academic. There is a bigger problem, though, and that's the fact that movies play just as fast and loose with real, present day reality.

The angry "hey, that's not accurate!" feeling I get when I watch Jurassic World hits me at other times too. The female CIA agent who helped track down Osama Bin Laden looks like this, but in the movie based on her work, she's played by an actress who looks like this. Why did the casting director make that decision? Because Alfreda Frances Bikowsky's face doesn't press the "pretty, tough-girl" button as hard as Jessica Chastain. In The Avengers: Age of Ultron, there's a small Eastern European country where people write in Cyrillic, but speak accented English to each other. No such country comes even close to existing, but if they spoke Serbian, how could we sympathize with them? If they wrote in English, how would we know they were foreign? In Interstellar, climate change has made human life on Earth impossible, except the main character still tends crops growing in the soil under an open sky, because if he didn't, the movie wouldn't press button in our rains marked "farmer." When we watch movies, we aren't actually seeing CIA agents or Eastern European countries or climate change, any more than we're watching anything like real dinosaurs. Instead, we're seeing symbols.

Except we are very bad at remembering the difference between symbols and reality. Doctor-turned-statistician Hans Rosling put together a quiz about the state of the world. Who's rich and who's poor? Who's peaceful and who's violent? What countries are better to live in than what other countries? He gave the quiz to people on the street and found that the answers they gave describe a world in which the US and a handful of western European countries huddle at the center of a vast wasteland of desperate, dangerous, funny-talking foreigners. That's a world that exists only in movies, and yet most of the people Rosling quizzed mistake it for reality. What happens when these misinformed people vote? What happens when they march off to war?

We live in a complicated world, more complicated than we can probably understand. It's tempting to wallpaper over variegated reality and lump all changes, exceptions, and shades of meaning into a monolithic symbol. Young woman = pretty, Eastern Europe = war crimes, farmer = dirt, dinosaur = lizard-monster. I urge you storytellers out there to resist the temptation of symbols, however. We ignore reality at our peril; like a Velociraptor, reality is most likely to attack when you're not looking.

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Daniel M Bensen is an English teacher and author. His new book, Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, is about accurate dinosaurs and what happens when you forget that other people are real. It also has particle beams and tyrannosaur hunts and a wedding!

King Craptor's "Jur-Ass-Kick World" Review

In the interest of providing another opinion on Jurassic World, which is something the world sorely needs, we at LITC are giving a guest post to one "King Craptor."

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I liked that movie so much I gave it the title "Jur-Ass-Kick World"! The dinosaurs were mostly strong and it was very exciting to see the people die. I liked it that dinosaurs died to, like the brontosauruses that died, those were better dead than alive, and it was exciting to see how dead they were.

I liked the mean pterodactyls that attacked the people. Those pterodactyls were pretty scary. I liked the mean mossasaurus that ate the pterodactyl. I liked that the babysitter died. I don't like to admit when I'm wrong, but I sure was wrong about pterodactyls. I thought they sucked but they didn't suck. They were badass. VERY COOL.

Indomnus was the show stopper of course! I was excited every time that naughty freak showed up on the screen to wreck havoc. I was sad when mossasaurus killed it, but I know that the mean guys will make another Indomnus. Maybe a bunch of them! I liked the raptors best when they were chums with Indomnus, I don't know what kind of crazy juice they were drinking to be buddies with Starlord anyway, I had a hard time suspending my disbeliefs about that. THANKS HOLLYWOOD.

If I have to pick which people were my favorite people were the mean people with guns. I don't know why more people aren't mean, it's fun to watch. But I still get to see all those people get ripped up by dinosaurs and it is entertaining.

Jimmy Fallon tickles my funny bones, so that gyroscope scene was just extra gravy on the whole cake for old King Craptor. I still want him to be ripped to meat pieces by a gross killer dinosaur though.

So over all, I approve, go see the move already! It's the opposite of garbage! Double A+!!

Vintage Dinosaur Art Guest Post: Dinosaurs! Magazine

Today, we welcome back Marc Vincent, who contributes his second entry in the Vintage Dinosaur Art series. His first, which was posted just over a month ago, was well-received, and I'm sure this one will be just as popular. So, without further ado...

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I've unearthed a childhood relic from the darkest recesses of my parents' loft – the first issue of Dinosaurs! magazine, carbon dated back to the halcyon pre-Jurassic Park days of 1992.

Dinosaurs! was published by Orbis Publishing, with venerable palaeontologist and Iguanodon fan Dr. David Norman as consultant. It ran for no less than 104 issues, lasting into 1995 – quite impressive, even if the 104th issue was an index. Many of the dinosaurs featured in the magazine during its run were pretty new to science – again, impressive for a kids' magazine. Admittedly, some of the animals profiled turned out to either be completely different from how they were initially perceived – Majungasaurus was pictured as a pachycephalosaur (and named “Majungatholus”) - or chimeric cock-ups like “Ultrasauros”, Jim Jensen's 'biggest dinosaur EVAR'. But still – not bad.

While I could wax nostalgic about the magazine all day, it suits this blog's focus to look at one issue alone – and why not the very first? As has been noted here before, early 1990s dinosaur art often looks, to modern eyes, like a strange blend of traditional, phylotarded 'monsters' with more modern ideas of active, dynamic animals – and so it is with the first issue of Dinosaurs!.

First – the front cover. Never mind the dented tyrannosaur hogging the limelight – it's only shaped in that strange way because it had a pair of similarly-strangely shaped 3D glasses stuck on top of it. Note instead the rather odd T. rex head at the top, complete with what look like capacious cheeks, and get used to it 'cos it pops up again repeatedly inside (what exactly is meant to be going on with the cervical vertebrae I don't know). Look at the price too – a mere thirty pence! Of course, that would be at least four thousand pounds in today's money.



The earlier issues of Dinosaurs! featured illustrations by one Neil Llloyd. His Tyrannosaurus is undoubtedly modern in many respects, with its elevated tail, horizontal posture and bulging musculature – and yet, like so many 1990s dinosaur restorations, it nevertheless look historic. The proportions are all wrong, and the shape of the skull (with 'arches' over the eyes) and uniform teeth are very strange. Note too the elongated, spindly forelimbs, which prove that Jurassic Park was by no means alone in giving Tyrannosaurus twig-like forelimbs back in the early '90s.



Looking positively more retrograde is this Tyrannosaurus just a couple of pages further in, apparently licensed from an old Kingfisher book. Although the tail is elevated, this is a classically fat-bodied, under-muscled theropod with anachronistic prey (here, Parasaurolophus, also looking rather peculiar). Watching this fat old monster waddle around on its apparently atrophied legs certainly would've been a sight.



As well as profiling one dinosaur in detail each issue, the magazine also took a brief look at a couple of other genera. In the first issue we are served Avaceratops and Dicraeosaurus, both illustrated again by Neil Lloyd, who apparently was very fond of brown. I've selected Dicraeosaurus here as it's doing rather odd things with its (admittedly elevated) tail. What the hell?



Naturally, the debut issue included a guide on 'how to spot a dinosaur', which featured a charmingly old-fashioned 'dinosaur parade' to give an idea of the creatures' scale relative to each other and an apparently very short man dressed for a funeral (a pleasant coincidence, as he is about to be stepped on by an obese brachiosaur). While Edmontosaurus looks rather dainty, Tyrannosaurus has come off far worse, with fat legs, a bizarrely-shaped head and no neck. The bald Deinonychus, while commendably up and active, is also huge, even if one compares it with the other dinosaurs rather than the tiny man. The Pteranodon – which, by the way, they do point out is not a dinosaur – is a simple Burian rip-off.



More Tyrannosaurus I'm afraid. Then again, one really can't have enough Tyrannosaurus in a day. Every issue would feature the primary profiled dinosaur in a suitably dramatic artwork on the centre spread (called 'Giants of the Past'). Here Lloyd's strange Tyrannosaurus is savaging what looks like a Euoplocephalus, but is identified in the accompanying text as Ankylosaurus (the 1990s, eh?) - two brown dinosaurs in a brown world. The ankylosaur is probably just grateful to the T. rex for livening things up a bit – it looks like a rather drab world in which to live. (Of course, a swift blow to the leg would follow.) Present in the background but, alas, cut off by my rather small scanner are three generic small ceratopsians and three tail-dragging generic sauropods. Back in the early '90s, it was still pretty common to see sauropods trailing their tails all over the place, even if other dinosaurs had long since abandoned the practice.



Penultimately – part of a comic by Pat Williams, detailing the discovery of “Iguanodon anglicus” by Gideon Mantell. Did Mantell really scream “EUREKA!” when he found a scrambled collection of fossil bones? Was Baron Cuvier really that confused? Who cares – it's fun. Check out that 'modern' Iguanodon too. Wild.



Dinosaurs! played an important role in my childhood love of dinosaurs, and undoubtedly contributed to making me the man I am today. Sorry, Dr Norman. Here's your back page Q&A for the finale – cartoons by Deirdre McHale. The first issue featured sensible questions, but later on they were sent in by readers, so naturally they degenerated into things like “Who would win in a fight – Tyrannosaurus or Smilodon?”, which to his credit Dr Norman gamely answered (if you were wondering, he dodged giving a definitive answer, but hinted at Smilodon for the win. Yeah, right). Oh, and he told one correspondent that he didn't think there were any feathered dinosaurs. Tee hee.

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I'd like to thank Marc for submitting another tremendously entertaining guest post. Be a peach and keep up with him at the Dinosaur Toy Blog and Twitter.

Vintage Dinosaur Art Guest Post: Dinosaurs of the Earth

Today I'm happy to welcome Marc Vincent, who is contributing the very first Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs guest post. Marc one of the writers of the dependably enjoyable Dinosaur Toy Blog, posting under the handle mhorridus, which he also tweets under. He's done a bang-up job, I'm sure you'll agree.

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I rescued this rather charming, but apparently unwanted work (copyright 1965) from a second hand bookshop for the princely sum of 40 pence (about 65 cents USD). Much nerdy glee ensued, as it contains almost every pre-Dino Renaissance cliché you'd care to mention, from swamp-bound blobby sauropods to man-in-a-suit theropods shuffling menacingly about, looking for their zimmer frames. Oh, and all the dinosaurs look spectacularly, crushingly bored – as well they might, as apparently the Earth was just one giant savannah grassland throughout the Mesozoic, which must have got monotonous. Onwards then with Dinosaurs of the Earth (a Nugget Nature book from Collins), illustrated by one Sol Korby, online searches for whom turn up an awful lot of portraiture. Obviously he was just jobbing with the dinosaur thing, and the rip-offs of classic palaeoart are plain to see.

The cover sets the precedent. It's better quality than the material inside, but then it wasn't painted by Sol – apparently it's borrowed from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. The upright, tail-dragging allosaurs aren't so bad for 1965, although bizarrely they are missing their first toe on each foot. Never mind, nobody'll notice.



The inside cover features this absolute doughball of a Styracosaurus – clearly, all that anachronistic grass hasn't been good for him - alongside a couple of wallowing generic sauropods. Yeah, it's going to be one of those types of books. The title page, meanwhile, features a bizarrely-angled flying tyrannosaur with the label “ALLOSAURUS” – and still no first toe!





Like so many dinosaur books aimed at kids, there's a bit of a preamble through the Palaeozoic before you get to the Mesozoic good stuff. Naturally, any populist dinosaur book/movie/attraction/toy range worth its salt will bafflingly feature Dimetrodon for no really good reason other than it looks cool, and so it pops up here, cheerily greeting a rather sullen-looking Eryops. Of course, this jocular state of affairs can't last long, and on the next page Dimetrodon has turned mean and, uh, mounted Eryops in a savage act of predation out on the pleasant rolling grassy meadow. Weird, for sure, but there's far stranger to follow.





The book is written as a 'journey' through prehistory (in a suitably matter-of-fact 1960s fashion). Arriving in the Triassic, we come upon some Plateosaurus – that aren't dragging their tails! - and a bizarre rat-like creature with long hind legs. Oh wait, that's Coelophysis.



Happily we revert to 19th Century-level palaeontology when we arrive in the Jurassic and find a chimeratastic “Brontosaurus” lurking in a pond of convenient depth. It's very obviously 'inspired' by a certain painting by one Charles R. Knight. Over the next few pages we are also introduced to Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus (which is using its trademark uphill body plan to, er, pluck reeds from the riverbank), animals we are assured “were so heavy that they had to stay in water most of the time...to support the weight of their bodies” as well as to keep well away from “the more intelligent carnivores on land”. The screaming you hear is coming from SV-POW.





Alas, poor old phylotarded Bronto is no match for Allosaurus, who casually strolls up and takes a bite out of its gamy neck.



Stegosaurus next, united at last on a double-page spread with Ankylosaurus, which lived a mere 85 million years in the future. The Stegosaurus is the standard hump-backed Burian-style affair, but the Ankylosaurus is a truly strange, squat, neckless armadillo-like beast. Admittedly it was still quite common to portray the animal in that fashion at the time, but that doesn't make it any less freakin' weird.





Moving on to the Cretaceous, and it's time for the hadrosaur “swimming party”. Oh yes. Not a lot to add to this wacky image of a toad-like Parasaurolophus and mutant Corythosaurus gaily going for a dip. Enjoy.

(And hey, “Trachodon” too!)





Finally, it's time to bring in the big guns, by which of course I mean Tyrannosaurus, here in full-on Godzilla mode. It's pretty hard to picture this fat old tyrant wheezing along after its hadrosaur prey, but here it is waddling into the horn of an anachronistic Monoclonius. You'd have thought that ripping off Chaz Knight's infamous T. rex vs. Triceratops painting would've been easier, but never mind – here's the once-popular centrosaurine instead, here described rather unkindly as an “ugly beast” and even “the most dull-witted animal of them all”. With wording like that, you just know it's going to end up as T. rex feed. And it does – although it looks rather unconcerned about the whole thing, just standing idly by while T. rex takes a nibble.





There's plenty more of the sludgy brown-grey-green Mesozoic world to discover in this wonderful book, but unfortunately my undergraduate thesis won't write itself, so that's as far as I'll delve for now. One last thing worthy of note – the entry for 'BIRDS' in the A-Z 'Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Animals' that appends the book:

“Birds appeared during Jurassic times and can be traced back to a common Thecodont ancestry with the reptiles.”

As if anyone would believe that these days! Ha ha ha. HA HA HA.

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Thanks again to Marc for contributing an excellent piece to the Vintage Dinosaur Art series. Be sure to follow the Dinosaur Toy Blog if you don't already. Besides fun writing on admirable and laughable toys, the group also manages to squeeze in some great anatomical information.

If you've got something you'd like to post about here, hit me up at the email in the sidebar. As always, share your own scans or photos of old dinosaur illustrations at the Vintage Dinosaur Art flickr pool.