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.

Maybe Dinosaurs were Stone-Age Robots?

Found this gem in an old issue of Texas Monthly. Archaeologists? Artifacts? I'd think we were dealing with a young-earther if it wasn't for the 60 million year timeline. It kind of suggests a cool theory I wouldn't mind seeing pop up in the crank literature: so-called dinosaur fossils are actually the remains of giant stone-age battle-robots. They proved to be so destructive, so dangerous, that they were dismantled and buried. Modern science unearths and studies them only at great peril...

SGU 5 x 5 on T. rex Collagen

While rifling through the Skeptics Guide to the Universe archive, I ran across one of their 5 x 5 podcasts dealing with the dinosaur-bird link. The episode briefly summarizes the study which analyzed the amino acid sequence in collagen found in a T. rex femur and found similarities to that of chickens.

The SGU does cover dinosaur news pretty often, owing to the fact that dinosaurs are really cool and deserve of the attention. This episode contains one of my favorite SGU quotes yet. The show as a mild running feud among the hosts about which are badder, birds or monkeys. To avoid the appearance that the bird-dinosaur link might tip the scales in birds' favor, Rebecca Watson clarifies that it "...just means that some distant cousins of birds might have, at one time, been able to kick a monkey's butt."

Good quote, but I have to disagree. She's obviously never had to look one of these gnarly dudes in the eye.

Image by Malnino, via Flickr.

It's a Phillipine, or "Monkey-Eating" Eagle. Birds win, end of discussion.

UPDATED 2/10/10: Still working my way up through old SGU episodes, and came across number 53. Indeed, a listener has brought the Monkey-Eating Eagle to the attention of Rebecca and the late Perry deAngelis. Typical of birdists, they reject it out of hand. Disgusting.

The Fighting Pterodactyl

Keeping with yesterday's post about the brand-spankin'-new Pterosaur.net, here's a bit of pterosaurian trivia.

Meet the Pterodactyl fighter plane.

This blurb comes from the November 1934 issue of Popular Science. From what I've been able to find, there were several experimental flying-wing aircraft in the Pterodactyl series, developed by Westland Aircraft. None of them went into production, though it appears that the mystery engineer cited above thought that they could be of use in battle. I'm guessing he thought wrong?

The Pterodactyl shared page 22 with another doomed idea: the piece next to this one details a plan to pave the streets of Minneapolis with triangular cast iron tiles - though this may have been an elaborate plan to fry an edible egg on a hot day. Zing!