Vintage Dinosaur Art: George Solonevich

A George Solonevich Compsognathus

George Solonevich, a Russian political dissident, escaped the Soviet Union and eventually had a successful art career in the United States. He is well known for his space illustrations; here are some created for the Golden Book Planets: Other Worlds of Our Solar System.

Solonevich worked in various styles, from grotesque portraits to those subdued, technoutopian space paintings. The dinosaurs in 1965's Dinosaurs and More Dinosaurs fall on the grotesque edge of the spectrum. See the Ceratosaurus featured on the book's cover: an oily, brutish monster. You can imagine touching it and winding up with a hand smeared in grease.


The cover model: Ceratosaurus.

These two early theropods aren't too cuddly, either. Creeping things with spindly legs and beady eyes.

Coelophysis and Podokesaurus: A pair now thought to be one in the same.

Of course, a mid-century dinosaur book wouldn't be worth the glue that binds it if it didn't include at least one submerged sauropod.

A Dicraeosaurus, snorkling. Do fish blow bubbles?

More information: Roanoke College has an online gallery of their collection of Solonevich art. For the really curious, you can check out a short video about him, dating from 1991.

Dear Melanosomes: Thanks for Fossilizing!

Over the last 24 hours, the interweb has gone all aglow with the announcement that paleontologists believe they have determined the color of the feathers on a small chinese theropod. Dr. Michael Benton and his team at Bristol University examined the fossilized feathers of Sinosauropteryx and found them to contain cells with pigment-bearing organelles (check out Benton's video here). What's more, the structure of those organelles indicate that the feathers were rufous colored. I'm reminded of the brown thrasher who lurks around my yard in the summer.

This is very cool, but it's important to note that we still don't have a comprehensive idea of how exactly melanosomes - even in living birds - relate directly to color. And, of course, this will only allow us to "color in" dinosaurs whose feathers were preserved by fossilization. Still. Awesome. And Carl Zimmer, who has been covering this since the first analysis of fossilized feathers was made public last fall, promises us more cool news to come.


Illustration by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing. From Bristol University.

Read more:
Bristol University press release
Archosaur Musings
Dinosaur Tracking
Discovery
NY Times

The Mysterious, Intriguing, Utterly Cool Alvarezsaurs

Yesterday at Archosaur Musings, Dave Hone made a brief post about what he thinks is going to be one of the dinosaur clades to receive some major light this year: the Alvarezsaurs. Today, guest-blogger Jonah Choiniere continues the alvarezsaur love with a history of the study of this strange group. Hone promises a major post tomorrow which will accompany a paper to be published in science, a paper announcing a new Jurassic alvarezsaur from China described by Coiniere.

Personally, I'd be thrilled if 2010 is as good to the alvarezsaurs as 2009 was to the tyrannosaurs. The alvarezsaurs are very birdlike group of small theropods, members of the maniraptors, found in Europe, Asia and the Americas. But, as maniraptors go, they actually aren't very closely related to birds. And the basal (more "primitive") members of the group are actually less birdlike. This means that the birdlike features the alvarezsaurs would evolve, especially the deep, keeled breastbone, were examples of convergent evolution, separately evolved for their own purposes. The reason birds have such a deep breastbone is that it's needed for the attachment of the flight muscles.

The forelimbs of alvarezsaurs, on the other hand, are not exactly winglike. They are short, strong, with a pronounced first claw. This claw was so favored that some of the alvarezsaurs, such as Mononykus, have evolved only one finger. Some, like mongolia's Shuvuuia, have drastically reduced second and third digits, which were likely useless in life. This feature, plus what seems to have been a flexible snout, has led to the widely accepted view that this group of dinosaurs were specially adapted to an insectivorous niche, using their powerful little arms to dig into termite mounds, probing for yummy little morsels with their snouts. More color added to our picture of dinosaur lives.


Mononykus reconstruction at AMNH, photo from wikipedia user Ivan Akira.

Paleo Plushies

Solid. Cartoonist, illustrator, and toymaker Megan Baehr, who runs an Etsy shop called Nonesuch Garden, has begun creating a series of dinosaur plush dolls. The first two are a Stegosaurus and a Triceratops, and she says that she is working on more, inluding a Brachiosaurus. I'd love to see how she pulls it off. They really are more works of art than toys.


Jenski the Stegosaurus, via Etsy


Tertia the Triceratops, via Etsy

Megan has crafted a menagerie that ranges across the animal kingdom and beyond, including mythical creatures. Bully to her for digging into the Mesozoic! You can also check out her creations on her Flickr stream. Her comics and illustrations also reflect a major paleo interest, so be sure to take a good, long gander.

Field Museum on Flickr

My favorite museum from childhood is on Flickr.

This one is supposedly of Antarctosaurus, a titanosaur sauropod, but the notes indicate that this was taken on an expedition for Cenozoic fossils. A happy accident?



Here's a "brontosaurus" in construction in 1907.

There have been plenty of brief posts like this lately, which I'm not thrilled about, but I've started taking a french class and working seriously on my graphic design portfolio, so I have a bit less time to do the kind of research I usually like to do for LITC. But I do have some recent dinosaur papers that I'm reading to see if there's anything I feel up to sharing. And I'll be posting an interview soon, plus I've continued to find great vintage dinosaur art. So I'm not going anywhere. I just won't be pontificating over my head quite so much...

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Sinclair Dinosaur Stamps

Sinclair Oil, the petroleum company with the sauropod as its logo, used to give out sets of dinosaur stamps as a promotional gimmick. I scored four sets of three recently, in really good condition. Sinclair did many series of these; this set was apparently from 1959. Despite being labeled as "Dinosaur Stamps," they do feature other prehistoric critters such as the Permian beasts Dimetrodon and Lycaenops. I have not yet been able to figure out who the artist is.

Set 1


Set 2


Set 3


Set 4


These, and most of my other VDA images, are hosted on my Flickr account. Feel free to poke around there, as I tend to add them in batches prior to featuring them here. And some of the publications and collections have additional images I don't post here - for instance, for the sake of space, I didn't include my scan of the covers of these stamp books in this post.

I've also been doing a bit of house cleaning, and have reorganized my blogroll and links, separating them to hopefully make the lists more relevant. The links will continue to grow as I find new sites and remember old ones. If there are any that you feel should be represented here at LITC, please let me know by posting a comment or emailing me at chasmosaurs(at)gmail(dot)com.

Krentz Presentz Dot Com

If you're in the mood to see something completely solid and commendable, check out this here site. Super-talented paleoartist David Krentz is releasing instructional DVDs, aiming to teach kids art and science in one mighty blow. In the trailer for the first DVD, you'll see that as David draws different parts of his subject, dinosaur experts join in to define new terms, such as "recurve," "supination," and "stereoscopic vision." Dinosaurs are the perfect gateway drug to science, and I hope that this series takes off. The next one, which I assume is currently in production, will deal with those stalwart ceratopsians.

This is going to be the perfect gift for my nephew once he gets a few years on him. If only this had been around when I was a tyke.

Triceracopter

In 1977, a sculptor named Patricia Renick unveiled a piece called Triceracopter: Hope for the Obsolescence of War at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. It is literally the body of a decommissioned helicopter melded with a fiberglass Triceratops head and limbs.

The meaning of the piece is pretty clear - it plays off the durable old conception of dinosaurs as failed monstrosities, the most outlandish critters on the evolutionary discard pile. A bit on the nose, and while I disagree with dinosaurs being saddled with this reputation - no group of animals who dominated terrestrial ecosystems for 120,000,000 years has much to apologize for - you can't fault the craftsmanship. And the melding of organic and inorganic, animal and machine, is always arresting. Triceracopter would look pretty imposing in my front yard. If I had the dough, I might even buy it, as it's been on the market for about a year.

Lots of info on the piece and its creator on-line. Here's a 1978 Cincinnati Magazine article about the piece. Triceracopter also has its very own Facebook page and Flickr stream. Oh, and it has a sister named Stegowagenvolkssaurus. Renick, who passed away three years ago, was interviewed in 2003 by Sculpture Magazine. Finally, here's a post about her life's work at a blog called Terrible Tiramisu.

Minor-Saurs

The Weekly World News: where no half-baked joke is denied its column-inches.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Norman Nodel

Here's another obscure gem I picked up secondhand: I Can Read About Prehistoric Animals by David Eastman. The illustrator was named Norman Nodel. This site lists his real name as Nochem Yeshaya, and he passed away ten years ago. He spent much of his career doing the illustrated versions of classic books before moving on to his passion, working on titles meant for Jewish youths. Other than this book, he also did dinosaur illustrations for a book called The Giant Dinosaurs. He may have also contributed to a bizarre coloring book. As you can tell from Mr. Frowny Rex on the front cover, Nodel took a cartoony approach to his mesozoic subjects and set anatomical correctness aside.




"Bob. For the last time, get out of the carpool lane."

I apologize for that. I just exposed myself as a funny pages junkie.


Here, some poor, indistinct duckbill is overtaken by a three-fingered T. Rex who gets the bright idea to trip up his prey by stepping on its ponderous, floppy tail. Mr. Duckbill collapses; seemingly he's been dreading this moment for a long time. This is a common motif in old dinosaur illustrations. Maybe I'll collect some in a future post. It is, you might guess, a very improbable situation, at least for the fact that duckbills' tails were pretty stiff, buttressed by criss-crossing bony tendons.