Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs - Living Monsters of the Past (Part 1)

Here's a book that I bought some months ago, only for it to disappear under a pile of quirkier, more remarkable tomes acquired from eBay. It's very typical early '90s fare (1993 specifically), authored by palaeontologist Michael Benton (who writes a popular book on dinosaurs aimed at a young audience every morning over breakfast) and illustrated by a number of artists, but mostly John Sibbick. However (and quite apart from the fantastic cover), I may have unfairly overlooked it. The Sibbick pieces on their own are worthy of a VDA post, and it's exactly those that I'll be looking at here.

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!

---

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.

---

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

Patronizing Paleoart

How do paleoartists support themselves? It's hard enough for any artist, and illustrating ancient taxa and environments is a niche pursuit. Add to that the significant investment of time, equipment, and research effort required to make an original piece of paleoart that can stand up to scrutiny, and the challenges are obvious. It's damned hard to make a living doing it.

Some have taken to Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows for monthly pledges from a base of patrons to supplement, and hopefully sustain, careers. Having seen a number of my comrades take to Patreon over the last year or so, I've delved in and assembled a list of all of the paleoart Patreon campaigns I could find. Since there's not a huge list at the moment, I also included other dinosaur-related projects that deserve attention. Please feel free to add any in the comments that I may have missed.

Mark Witton

Mike Keesey

Angela Connor

Brian Engh

Stevie Moore

Darren Naish

John Conway

H. McGill

Natasha Alterici

Duane Nash

Chris Kastner

Abigail Hamaker

Nicholas Nikopoulos

Rebecca Groom

Brian Switek

A Dinosaur A Day

---

Not all of these are Scientific Illustration in the strictest sense, but I'm of a mind that creative work that honors contemporary paleontological science and thoughtfully depicts ancient life in a way that provokes curiosity should be part of the conversation. Can a work like Mike Keesey's Paleocene spark an interest in paleontology even though it features talking animals? Of course it can.

Paleoart is part of the larger effort of paleontological outreach, and is therefore dependent on how much money flows to publishing researchers and their institutions. In an ideal world, researchers would earn enough to live comfortably and their work would be sufficiently funded to pay illustrators enough to do the same. While it's true that we arguably have more paleoartists turning out work than at any other point in history—flooding the market as it were—we also live in a time of unprecedented discovery and description of new taxa. The public deserves to have richly illustrated paleoart accompanying many of these publications, and scientists and artists deserve the compensation to fill that need.

Until we're closer to that ideal world, most paleoartists who hope to make a career of it have to add self-promotion, business management, and website development to their already-full plate. To sell their wares, they may choose one of many print-on-demand services like Zazzle, Society6, Redbubble, or DeviantArt. If they are able, they may choose to produce and fulfill prints on their own, with the risks and labor inherent in that.

Thanks for reading! I hope this post sends a few pledges these folks' way. While I've been busy enough with freelance projects and work that I've not been able to devote much time to LITC lately, I have a couple paleoart-related projects on the burners, with which I hope to address the needs of paleoartists and the sustainability of the craft as a field. Stay tuned for more on this over the next several months.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs, National Geographic, January 1993 - Free poster bonus!

Those of you with a nostalgic fondness for the January '93 issue of National Geographic featured in the last post will likely recall the free poster to be found within. Happily, the copy of the magazine that I bought on eBay arrived complete with said freebie, in all of its glossy, double-sided 1990s glory. One side of the poster displays a map of North America in the Late Cretaceous, surrounded by groups of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs illustrated by John Sibbick; the other features 'Dawn on the Delta', a lovely panorama starring Anchiceratops and painted by Robert Giusti. Let's look at the Sibbick side first of all, and specifically this delightful group of hadrosaurs, because the whole thing won't fit in my scanner and my photographs of it are terrible.

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.

Dinosaur Hearts button sets now available!

Over at the Mammoth is Mopey website, we're running a promotion through Valentine's Day. Every book comes with a free set of five "Dinosaur Heart" buttons, mounted on a glossy "I Heart You and Dinosaurs Too" Valentine card. If you already own the book but would still like to pick up a button set, not to worry. They're available separately, as well!

Mammoth is Mopey and the Dinosaur Hearts button set

Jennie and I assemble every set ourselves, and they look terrific, if I do say so myself. If you'd like to place an order for Valentine's day, international orders should be placed by January 31 and domestic (U.S) orders by February 9.

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.

---

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.

---

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!

Attenborough and the Boyish Grin

Mostly thanks to pesky time constraints, I won't go in to too much detail about the BBC's latest dino-docu, Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur. Examining the discovery of what might just be the largest titanosaur (and therefore dinosaur, and therefore land animal) yet, it briskly chronicles the discovery, excavation, analysis, and reconstruction in a way that's made all the more compelling by the lack of sensationalism and CGI bullshit. (OK, there's a little CGI, including a brief clip recycled from a Walking With Dinosaurs spin-off. But really, it only enhances the tale.) Our companion through this wonderful voyage of discovery is David Attenborough, a man for whom the word 'venerable' was invented, and who is so likeable that he comes close to single-handedly redeeming the British people. (But not quite. Sorry, everyone.)

The second best thing about the programme is that it's about bones. So many dinosaur documentaries in the last couple of decades have shied away from focussing on the bare bones, even though that's (largely) what we know Mesozoic dinosaurs from. This is a reminder that the fossils can be the stars of the show by themselves, and not just the spectacularly huge thigh bones, bigger than men, but everything down to the tiniest eggshell fragments.

I've seen it mentioned that the show doesn't quite go far enough in linking modern birds with Mesozoic dinosaurs, and that's quite true. They're described as the "closest living relatives", which is true, but too little is made of their evolutionary kinship. On the other hand, I was just grateful for all the marvellous anatomical adaptations of sauropods to huge size were being carefully explained to a lay audience.

The best thing about the show, of course, was when Attenborough walked in on the fully reconstructed titanosaur skeleton in a warehouse, and grinned and giggled like a wee lad in a sweet shop.

Copyright The Beeb.

Fantastic.

Mesozoic Miscellany 82

So... this was supposed to go up on December 18, and life junk kept me from wrapping it up (the intended date of publication will be meaningful in terms of some of the seeming non sequiturs in the descriptions, which I don't feel like cutting). So forgive the slightly older than usual linkage here. Still, stuff well worth checking out. I'll try to have another, fresher round-em-up soon. Been a bonkers end-of-2015 and start-of-2016, work wise.

In the News

A barfed-up pterosaur! Presumably it was not digested over 10,000 years, finding a new meaning of pain and suffering. Andy Farke and Brian Switek have the rest of the story.

With a name like Hensonbatrachus kermiti, think you could guess what kind of critter it was? Hint: it's not a Kowakian Monkey Lizard. Royal Tyrrell Museum has the tale.

New species of ankylosaur from Australia? This deal keeps getting better all the time!

Azendohsaurus had an interesting change in phylogenetic placement; more from Jaime Headden at The Bite Stuff.

Around the Dinoblogosphere

"You seen that new garish Velociraptor?" "Yeah, the Dino Toy Blog was telling me about it... they say it's quite a thing to see."

Pixar's The Good Dinosaur came out at the end of November, and Marc Vincent and Jaime Headden offered reviews.

Luis Rey took a look at a new CollectA Spinosaur which seems to be inspired by one of his recent depictions of the beast - at least in the wrist.

Look mammals so old to young eyes? Guardian science blogger Elsa Panciroli examines the debate over the phylogenetic placement of the haramiyidans.

Heinrich Mallison paid a visit to Juramuseum Eichstätt and how is it? Well, it's certainly no wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Mark Witton followed up his first wonderful Tanystropheus article with a second, exploring what sort of lifestyle the sum total of the protorosaur's anatomy seems to add up to.

At SV-POW, Mike Taylor has written a touching personal tribute to Jack McIntosh, a legend in the study of sauropods who passed away last month at the age of 92. Abydosaurus mcintoshi and Brontomerus mcintoshi are both named in honor of Mr. McIntosh.

Paleoart Pick

I love Franxurio's work; I feel like we chase similar muses, but in our own ways. Check out this beautiful poster wrapping up his #Dinovember illustrations. Love the use of hand lettering, too.

Dinovember without Dinosaurs by Franxurio, available at Redbubble.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Presenting Tyrannosaurus rex

While best known for her spectacular work with Dale Russell on An Odyssey in Time, the late, great Eleanor 'Ely' Kish remained active in palaeoart throughout the '80s and into the '90s, although many of the books she illustrated are now quite obscure. This would be one of those. In fact, this was one of those cases where I saw an intriguing-looking book appear on eBay for the first time, only to obtain it and realise that I had it as a kid. Given that, it unsurprisingly concerns everyone's favourite hungry hungry horror. May I present Presenting Tyrannosaurus rex.