Vintage Paleoart: Rien Poortvliet's Journey to the Ice Age

Many of us probably know Rien Poortvliet for Gnomes, which is an undisputed fantasy/fantasy illustration/speculative biology(?)/well, spec-bio-adjacent masterpiece.  But he had many other beautiful books to his credit and among them, surprisingly, is a work of Paleoart:  

Journey to the Ice Age, published in English in 1994 by Harry N. Abrams is every bit as beautifully crafted as Gnomes and once again, Poortvliet's love and careful observation of the natural world shines through.  The paintings are based on his thoughts wandering while sitting in his hunting hide.  

A highlight of the book is it's focus on prehistoric people.  I'm especially fond of the series of paintings speculating that the first human to ride a wild horse was either very brave, very stupid, or some combination thereof and also somebody triple-dog-dared them.

And now, the mammoths.  Poortvliet had a few mammoth specimens on hand, like hair and a vertebrae; tactile reminders of the beasts, so they are never far from his mind.  This is a very beautiful book and I'm happy to have stumbled upon it.

A Veritable Herd of Animated Dinosaurs!

As you may have guessed, I like dinosaurs a lot.  I like animation a lot.  And I love animated dinosaurs.  So the past couple of weeks have been awesome in that respect.  Firstly, the first episode of David James Armsby's "Dinosauria" is out and it is beautiful!

Armsby also posted this incredible making-of video and I don't know what impresses me more: the cancelled "All Days" series, the sculpture, or the "Dinosauria" series scrapbook.

And there's a teaser for the upcoming second episode.  Baby Troodons!  Fuzzy Pachyrhinosaurs!

And on top of all this, Dr. Mark Witton joined the "Fantasy/Animation Podcast" for an episode about "The Land Before Time", where they discuss the strangely intertwined history of dinosaurs and animation and the film's place in the Dinosaur Renaissance.

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Art of the Day!

I can't believe it's already the penultimate day of Sci-Art September.  What a great time!  I shared a lot of mostly paleoart and hopped on the "Dinosauria" fanart train:

On the Deleted Scenes from "The Land Before Time"

 I promised you animation and dinosaurs, didn't I?

That nearly a million dollars worth of content was deleted from the original "Land Before Time" is one of the greatest legends of that small but significant border town between paleoart and animation where I live.  Exactly what that content would have looked like was a big mystery, but this nice brief documentary from the channel Scribbles to Screens clears quite a lot up.  And while it does end on a sad note of we're probably never going to see the actual footage for ourselves, there's a lot of excellent rare animation art that has been found, and it is wonderful to see.  (A highlight is the concept art of the Oasis scene, where the Crown-Heads turn out to be victims of a Great Nomenclature Mixup.  A very long time ago, for some reason, Troodon was first described as a Pachycephalosaur.  And so the Crown-Heads are Pachycephalosaurs... with distinctive large talons.)  We also get a nice overview of the history of Don Bluth and his studio, which is always fun to see.

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Let's Watch "A&E's Dinosaur: The Tale of a Feather"

Get a drink for this one.

Being the final episode on a series-length dinosaur documentary is never a fun time.  Because this is The Extinction Episode -- mostly.

Because as the title "Tale of a Feather" suggests, it's also about the evolution of birds from POSSIBLY MAYBE the smallish theropod dinosaurs.  Remember, it's 1991 and this is still a pretty outrageous theory.  It's also surprisingly frustrating to watch because John Ostrom has been in this series and they never get to naming which specific group of smallish theropods gave rise to birds and ahh, you guys are so close ahh ahh!!!

But never mind that because my.  God.  The.  Ending. 😵😱😰

You're not ready for how this dinosaur documentary ends.  I sure wasn't.  Let's not keep you in suspense any longer.  Here it is:

@babbletrish

The finale of the ‘91 A&E Dinosaur series. It’s… special. ##dinosaur ##documentary ##Weird90s ##wtf ##waltercronkite ##Dinosauroid

♬ original sound - BabbleTrish

 

I reiterate: what?

The longer version isn't going to help at all but here it is anyway:

 

@babbletrish

The full ending of A&E’s Dinosaur, in case you wanted to see the full horror of Dinosaur TV.##dinosaur ##documentary ##Weird90s ##wtf ##Dinosauroid

♬ original sound - BabbleTrish

 

They really ended this with Bioparanoia / the climate and/or nuclear apocalypse is inevitable and Dinosauroids.  Completely devoid of context Dinosauroids yet!  Like we never get the usual, "here's a very weird theory this one guy has and here's the statue they made of it", we just get... this.  Whoever dreamed up this ending has Cortical folds the depth of the Marianas Trench, not least because they ended with "Somehow after humans destroy themselves the dinosaurs will take over" and thought the people watching this would all be okay.  Incredible.

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Help me feed the birds!  I want to be among the last to get eaten when they take over.

Art of the Day!  Gosh what would an intelligent dinosaur look like?  We just don't know.

Let's Watch "A&E's Dinosaur: The Tale of an Egg"

"The Tale of an Egg" turns our focus to dinosaur life-cycles and behavior.  Baby-rearing, migrating, fighting, and feeding.  All the things that are fun to speculate and fun to illustrate/animate/puppet.  It's the most kid-heavy episode as well, which makes it a lot of fun.

Somebody start a band based around David Weishampel's Parasaurolophus trumpet already.

Next time: brace yourself, it gets weird.

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(ahem...)

Art of the Day: some more current loud dinosaurs.

Let's Watch "A&E's Dinosaur: The Tale of a Bone"

This week's episode of "Dinosaur" mostly focuses on the Bone Wars.  But what I really love about it are all the interviews with dinosaur artists.  We meet Eleanor Kish and Steve Czerkas and the Dinamation crew.  And -most exiting of all- Ray Harryhausen!  We get a clip of "Gertie the Dinosaur" as well as some of Harryhausen's animation.  John Sibbick and David Norman (they of the famous "Norman-pedia") give interviews and they turn out to be mainly responsible for what the puppet dinosaurs look like here.  I thought they felt familiar.  Also, this happens: 

@babbletrish

Another wonderful moment from the ‘91 A&E Dinosaur series. ##dinosaur ##documentary ##Weird90s ##wtf ##waltercronkite ##NewYorkCity

♬ original sound - BabbleTrish

Next time: Eggs!  Like real eggs, not the one in that one confusing pain reliever commercial.

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(Polite little cough...)

Art of the Day!  A Kestrel and Barn Owl from a Museum of Science livestream.

Let's Watch "A&E's Dinosaur: The Tale of a Tooth"

July is going to be a very busy month here at Babbletrish Lodge.  So this feels like the perfect opportunity to watch a documentary series I'd never seen in it's entirety before. It's true, somehow I hadn’t watched the 1991 A&E "Dinosaur" documentary series until just this month and it is a real treasure.  It's another fantastic example of what a dinosaur documentary looked like before "Jurassic Park" and "Walking With Dinosaurs".

Look.  I know I say "They don't make 'em like this anymore" an awful lot, but they REALLY do not make them like this anymore.  We are never going to get a pure gold nugget of a moment like this ever again:

@babbletrish

I haven’t watched the 1991 A&E “Dinosaur!” series until today and so far it is a treasure. ##dinosaur ##documentary ##Weird90s ##moodwhiplash ##SingingKids

♬ original sound - BabbleTrish

Turn the volume up.  You could guess what kind of music scores this scene and you’d be wrong.  I guarantee.  (You also might just hear me chuckle.)

Part One, "Tale of a Tooth", is about the early days of dinosaur paleontology.  There's period costumes, more strange music choices, wonderful puppet dinosaurs, and Dr. Bob Bakker pulls a wooden sword on Walter Cronkite.  And there are vintage commercials, most of which I'd completely forgotten about.  Next week, the Bone Wars!

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So you may have noticed the shiny new donate button on the sidebar but just in case you didn't:

Art of the Day!  Cornell Birdfeeder sketches

Let's Ring in the New Year with "Along the Moonbeam Trail"

As a fellow admirer of crows once sang in a song that has been drilled in the tooth of my memory since high school, maybe this year will be better than the last.  God I hope so.  I at least intend to blog more, when I can; anything that strikes my fancy and is also too weird and/or wonderful NOT to post about.

Case in point: "Along the Moonbeam Trail".  This is a short silent film recently restored to the best of the editors' abilities (here's hoping they find the ending).  I'd like to thank Tyler Greenfield for posting a clip on Twitter because it's honestly astounding that I've never seen it or heard of it.  It has everything!  It is not my Entire Aesthetic (for one thing, I'd have more than one [1] major female character and she'd do more than being a Deus ex Machina), but it's about as close as a movie from this time period could hope to be:

Everything about this is great but I'm torn between the random witch, the "pterosaur" who's really one of the first movie dragons, and the stegosaurus and his cute skink-tongue.

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Art of the Day!

I painted this back in 2018 and I'm reposting it here to bring this wonderful magical energy into 2021.  Happy New Year!

Let's Read _The Ultimate Dinosaur_!

So, how was your weekend?  No, don't answer that!  How about a kind of Vintage Paleoart post?  I haven't done that in ages.

Over the summer, I read The Ultimate Dinosaur and talked about it on Twitter.

Published in 1992 by Bantam Books, edited by Byron Priess and Robert Silverberg, and featuring art and writing by an astonishing variety of people, Ultimate Dinosaur is a pretty wild ride.  It's right smack in the middle of the Dinosaur Renaissance and mere months ahead of the release of "Jurassic Park".  It's also remarkably "All-Yesterdays"-y in some parts.  Right away, it has a veritable roller coaster of an opening, with lovely decorations by William Stout:

You got a problem with Muppets, Dodson?

The book is divided into several chapters, each of which contains lots of paleoart, a factual (for 1992) essay about life in the Mesozoic, and a science fiction story.  The latter makes this one of the more unique dinosaur books of all.  Most of the stories involve dinosaurs or are at least... dinosaur-adjacent, like Dave Wolverton's "Siren Song at Midnight", illustrated below by William Parsons.  

It was Mer-May, when I read the book so of course this art caught my attention.  There are indeed Mermaids in the short story, as well as Euparkeria, which covers the prehistoric animal requirement.  The actual story is about the coming climate apocalypse and wars over the few remaining natural resources.  Fun!  And yet not the biggest bummer of a story in the whole book!

I mentioned that there are some moments in the book that I can only describe as "All Yesterdays"-y.  They mostly occur in the scifi stories, which almost lend themselves to "Hey, what if dinosaurs were a lot stranger than we ever suspected" speculation.  The weirdest such speculation, mentioned in two stories even, is one I would have never expected: Lactating Dinosaurs.

The above excerpt comes from Gregory Benford's "Shakers of the Earth", a story about our old friend Seismosaurus, then just recently described.  And in it, the big diplodocus can suckle her babies.  Which she also cares for at all.  (Side-rant: Anyone who grew up with "Jurassic Park" and still has a problem with feathered maniraptors can A. get off my lawn/blog, like what are you even doing here anyway, and B. ask themselves how us "Baby" and "Land Before Time" era 80's kids are coping with modern discoveries of sauropod reproductive strategies.)

And this excerpt comes to us from Barry Malzberg's bizarre "Major League Triceratops", where the titular dinosaur ends up being weirder than expected by specifically NOT lactating.  I don't think I've ever come across this theory before or since.

Anyway, it is still 1992, and so according to this excerpt from one of the nonfiction essays by Don Lessem, Therizinosaurs and Deinocheirus were almost certainly brutal killing machines:

And since it’s 1992, the question of bird ancestry is... exactly that.  Still even a question, I mean, like in this essay by Ralph Molnar.  Megalancosaurus, if you're wondering, has a beaky face and those pesky collarbones - and otherwise looks very like a weird(er) Chameleon.  But what really slays me is the "sometimes inane" comment:

Look at these 90’s raptors from Doug Henderson from the adjacent page!

They come ahead of one of the strangest stories in the entire book, Ray Bradbury's "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?".  It starts out very Dandelion Wine-esque and super nostalgic and cute:

Aww.  Ben will then go on to sharpen his teeth, eat extremely rare meat, scare the dog and the cat out of their minds, and mutter in his fevered sleep about primeval Antediluvian demon-reptiles waddling, rampaging, and nightmare-kiting in the deep.  His Grandpa intervenes by bringing the boy to a much more wholesome obsession like, I dunno, trains. Yeah, trains!

This story is copyright 1983, not 1953.

Which brings us to Harry Harrison's "Dawn of the Endless Night", here illustrated by the always awesome Wayne Barlowe.  It's haunting, and the biggest bummer in the whole book and no I am not forgetting the nonfiction chapters about the actual K-P Extinction.

So... speaking of things that were actually published in the early 80's but feel like they are from decades earlier, welcome to my West of Eden rant.  This short story is kind of, if you turn your head and squint, a prequel to the series, explaining why some small parts of the fantasy world are ruled by mammals and humans while dinosaurs and intelligent lizard-people rule everywhere else.  Teenage me had a very strong need to find the novels.  Seriously, intelligent lizard-people!  With a female-dominant culture!  And because they’re semi-aquatic they use sign language, which doesn't rely on sound, and biotechnology, which is a tech breakthrough that doesn't involve setting things on fire or putting wheels on them!  Goodness, there was real thought put into this!  Holy moly there’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA in the back!  A big thick fantasy novel with such insanely detailed world building that there's an encyclopedia in the back!  This is going to rule!

Now, over the years, I've since noticed that most reviews of West of Eden focus on the world-building and not, say, the fantasy racism.  Or fantasy sexism.  Or actual real-life racism and sexism.  It is, as the kids say, pretty cringey for it's time.  Anyway, how about a strange illustration by frequent Dougal Dixon collaborator Philip Hood!  I don't think context will help.

As I said, The Ultimate Dinosaur is so very unusual that I can definitely recommend grabbing a copy if you can.  It also makes me long for more books combining fact, fiction, and art.

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Art of the Day!

Fanart of the Universal Osprey!

Let's read Dahlov Ipcar's _The Wonderful Egg_!

I am genuinely upset that I am just now learning who Dahlov Ipcar was.  Here is a woman illustrator who lived right in my backyard and whose art has the beautiful colors of Mary Blair, the stunning patterns of M. C. Escher, and the whimsical creatures of both.  She passed away recently at just shy of 100 years old and I'm just now learning about her.  So it goes.



But never mind that now. I know about her now, and my life is the better for it. And in my research, it turns out that Ipcar wrote and illustrated a dinosaur book. The Wonderful Egg was originally published in 1958 by Doubleday and Company Inc.  This reproduction was published in 2014 by Flying Eye Books, and it is as close to the original edition as possible.



I have to say, this is as good a reason as any to write a book about anything.



So this is very definitely a book about dinosaurs for children in the late 1950's.  The palette is brown and green because Real is Brown and, between dinosaurs and all those cartoon turtles and alligators, there is something in the human brain that just wants big reptilian things to be green.  The appearance of the various animals is dubious, but I'm willing to let it slide because I just love this art!  Click for big.



The book sets out to find the identity of a mysterious egg - eggs being the one given commonality between every animals that lived in dinosaur times.  I know, but we're going to ignore it for now.  Look at this jolly Triceratops!  He's pretty remarkable for the time, walking fully upright with tail and head held high.  I want to ride on him.



This Stegosaurus is a little dated but I love him so much!  That smug smile! 



These Pteronodons really are awesome for their time.  The one in the back is a little "Flew right off the set of 'Fantasia'"-ish, but the fellow in the foreground has a proper beak and everything.



I'd have sworn the Ornithomimids in the background came from a book written decades later.  The one in the front is a little flopsy in the tail area, but I like that he's about to munch on some tasty artichokes.



I really have nothing to add to this dude except that of all the 50's Tyrannosauruses I've ever seen, I think this guy is my favorite.  He is at least in the top percentile.



We get a montage of hadrosaurs including this deeply-odd-to-modern-eyes Parasaurolophus.  I do like those pink paws though.



Now I know Mosasaurs in reality looked more like a lizard trying it's damndest to be a whale, but look at this guy!  This is the best old-school toothy sea-dragon Mosasaurus I've ever seen.



And in staggering contrast, the wonderful egg finally hatches and we have ourselves an Archaeopteryx illustrated as a proper bird in 1958.  That's amazing!  Heck, there are recent depictions of the poor critter that cannot shake the "lizard with feathers" cliche.  This is beautiful!

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Art of the Day!



I've been so taken with Ipcar's work I just had to do a Master Study.

Let's Update Our Knowledge of Dinosaurs... in 1993!

Oh boy. This one is a doozie.



June 11, 1993 was the premier date of the original "Jurassic Park" movie, which means that today is it's 23'rd birthday.  To celebrate, let's take a look back at this Time Magazine cover story meant to not only get us hyped for the movie, but also to bring people up to speed about dinosaurs.  It's all old news to us (woah, dude, birds are a kind of dinosaur?!?) but the illustrations are quite lovely.








There's also a neat article about "Jurassic Park" where we're reminded that the special effects team was kind of terrified that their creatures wouldn't be convincing, that paleontologists were on the whole very enthusiastic about the film, and that poor Tianchisaurus (nee Jurassosaurus) might have the most ghastly species name of any animal, extinct or extant.



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Art of the Day!

Last month was Mer-May! Here's a cute Mer-Fay and her nymph buddy.