So TetZoom 2021, which occurred about a week ago and ran all day and into the night, was an absolute blast! This was the second ever TetZoo Convention I've ever been able to attend and I really really hope they keep the online/livestream portion of the show. Handy Sketchbook on my knee, I took a lot of notes on the presentations and here they are, though considerably cleaned up:
One of the highlights of the show was getting to attend the Paleoart Workshop, which I wisely snapped up tickets for as soon as I could. And so I drew this beautiful Kronosaurus along with our teacher Mark Witton. What an awesome experience!
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:
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.
It's almost 100 degrees out! It's so hot, why don't we take a journey to the desert!
Okay, this one's a real oddity. I only learned about "The Great Dinosaur Hunt" (a 1993 Goodtimes home video release, not to be confused with the identically titled "Infinite Voyage" and, er, "Postman Pat" episodes) recently on Twitter and since it was a dinosaur documentary I somehow never saw, I needed to watch it. Three nights later (!) I'm here to tell the tale.
"The Great Dinosaur Hunt" covers the China-Canada Dinosaur Project, an expedition that started in 1986 and carried into 1991. And it is a fantastic example of what I can only accurately describe as a pre-"Jurassic Park" dinosaur documentary. First off, it really did take me a while to get through. For a 90 minute film, this is s-l-o-w. The focus is on paleontology itself and the truth of the matter is, paleontology is an awful lot of wandering through the desert hoping to find something, anything. And boy did I feel that vicariously.
Another interesting thing about this documentary is there's almost no animation. There are a few animated sequences showing living dinosaurs in action, all traditional and by the fine National Film Board crew. The scene showing the world through a young Troodon's eyes is particularly lovely and I long for a whole short like this.
Of course as soon as they mentioned Troodon, and because Dale Russel is one of the paleontologists involved, I knew our old friend the Dinosauroid would make an appearance. I'm honestly starting to wonder if they were required to mention this thing in every dinosaur documentary from this time. Think of how weird that is; like if every marine biology documentary spent a few minutes on Initial Bipedalism (link goes to an old TetZoo article where sadly the illustrations are gone, but brace yourself for a wild ride anyway.)
And because this mostly takes place in China, the very droning narrator
really loves droning on and on about dragons and how the dinosaur scientists are Unearthing the Mysterious Dragon
and did you know that the ancient Chinese found dinosaur fossils and
thought they were from dragons? And that in Asia they use the same word for
"dinosaur" and "dragon"? And and and...? (Turns out this is all, to put it succinctly, Kinda Racist Nonsense TM. I f-in' knew it. 😒)
Other than that, this is a pretty nifty look at a legendary expedition. I'm glad to have had my attention brought to it. Now I need to jump in the lake.
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Art of the Day
So. I knew about the “We’re not sure how Azhdarchids moved on the ground, did they walk on two legs?” theory but I
A. did not know there was a sculpture depicting this or that
B. it looks... Like This.
Anyway, this was all I could see. A vision that haunted me all that night, so I had to draw and share.
Boy, I really wish we had subtitles for this one, but I'm glad to get to watch it at all. Here is the rare 1990 Japanese documentary based upon After Man:
This wasn't too hard for me to follow even though I couldn't understand the narration. It mostly reiterates the big points in the book, like that no niche in nature stays empty for long and that the ancestors of the animals we know today would've looked very odd to us. We get to see a lot of Phil Tippet's animation from "Dinosaur!" Dougal Dixon gets to visit the real lands and animals that inspired his imagined ones, which are brought to life through some wonderfully Harryhausen-esque stop-motion animation. This is all delightful to watch but I really long for an English-language version, especially so I can better understand the sequence where we encounter our old friend the Dinosauroid as well as Dixon's... different... take on the concept.
Fortunately, we do have English subtitles for the "After Man" music video. This was part of a program of short educational music videos called "Minna no Uta", kind of the Japanese equivalent of "Schoolhouse Rock". Understanding the lyrics doesn't answer that many questions, but I really like the designs for the creatures here.
April is shaping up to be an insane month. I've got a lot of family commitments, including my cousin's wedding, and I'm not even sure if I'll be able to go to Boston Comicon at all! This is the point where I'm going to have to start posting things whenever I can instead of regularly.
So because this may be the last new post for (horrors) a week or two, I've got a special treat. I've talked about this documentary a lot in the past but I do not think I ever sat down to watch it in full to discuss it in detail. Well, it's late at night and I'm bored, so...
When I was about seven years old, this show melted my face off. Now I wasn't keen on the old movie footage (mostly because I didn't know who Ray Harryhausen was yet) or the scenes where Christopher Reeve is walking around in the museum or even the interviews with the paleontologists. Nope, I was AAAAaaaall about Phil Tippet's animation. And hot dog, does it look better than like 70% of the effects in feature films today.
More importantly, this was the first piece of animation I ever saw where the dinosaurs were allowed to act like normal animals in their own environment instead of some kind of fantastic monsters out to kill all humans. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal today. Indeed, around last year, dinosaur-involving media had got to the state where "Dinosaur Revolution" was controversial because -horrors- some of the animation was exaggerated and silly. But it was downright flabbergasting to my young mind and I loved the film for it.
Other fun things to notice:
* - The aforementioned vintage film clips. They run the gamut from stone-cold classics like "The Lost World" and "King Kong" to some of the aforementioned Ray Harryhausen's stranger offerings to... not-so-classic things like the weird remake of "Gertie the Dinosaur", "Baby", and "Caveman".
* - The interviews with all the paleontologists, mostly because everyone is so young!
* - The school group making stop-motion animated films. Holy cow, they are so quotable. "Brontosaurus is a sweet guy". Indeed.
* - Overall, the reminder of what dinosaur popular culture was like in a pre-"Jurassic Park" world. I kind of want to build some fanciful animals out of repurposed scraps of metal, don't you?
* - Most notably, this documentary takes a turn for the very strange in the last twenty minutes or so:
In quick succession, there is a long discussion of cryptozoological animals that MIGHT be dinosaurs but probably aren't, and anyway plesiosaurs aren't dinosaurs and we just heard Bob Bakker explain that sauropods do not work that way so never mind. Then there is the very briefest mention possible of the dinosaur-bird connection. This is ended as swiftly as possible so that Dale Russel can talk about your friends and mine, the Dinosauroid.
So, basically, "Okay there MIGHT be real dinosaurs around today and that would be awesome except that the two ones we're talking about here are probably mythical creatures. Oh wait, yeah, birds are dinosaurs, so there's that. But since nobody could possibly wish for that to be elaborated on here in 1985 when it is still a pretty mind-blowing concept, let's talk to this dude about his deeply embarrassing Human Alien thing!"
Mind you, this wasn't like the Disneyland Paris equivalent of Stacy/WDW Information Channel. This was a souvenir video people could buy in order to remember their trip. Or, rather, the very strange trip this one overdubbed family had, I guess.
What with Donald being such a major character in this video, here is some more fanart of him. This one as you can see is much weirder and is partially inspired by Donald, mostly inspired by our old friend Dale Russel:
Continuing our journey through Peterson First Guide: Dinosaurs, written by John C. Kricher and illustrated by Gordon Morrison, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1990. As I mentioned previously, this slim volume is a treasure trove of paleoart memes from the era, most of which look very strange today and which are handily pointed out by Peterson's trademark "look for this in the field" arrows.
The little drawing on this page point out the distinctive "Field Marks" of large sauropods, circa 1990: one big claw on the elephantine forefoot, high nostrils, and an overall shrink-wrapped face. Ayuh. Far, far more interesting, however, is the big main illustration. It's basically the AMNH Barosaurus with a few dramatic additions to make it more awesome.
By the way, I cannot for the life of me find any information as to when the AMNH Barosaurus display was unveiled and it's not for lack of trying. I'd have loved to find an article recounting some of the uproar over it's unveiling; it's the "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" of dinosaur mounts.
We'll see another illustration based off an exhibit that caused an uproar later...
Ah, Saltasaurus. At the time, this guy was the weirdest sauropod we knew about, so he got showcased in dinosaur books an awful lot. His "niche" has essentially been overtaken by the admittedly more fun for artists to play with Amargasaurus.
More of the dinosaurs drinking from streams mini-meme! I repeat: Tianyulong would have blown peoples' minds back then.
The Iguanodon is known for having a hilariously wrong initial reconstruction that hosted what was undoubtedly an amazing party and for having permanent Hitch-hiker Thumb. That's it.
Man-in-suit Edmontosaurus (and the almost prescient use of Edmontosaurus to represent every large crestless hadrosaur save one lucky lady we'll see very soon) notwithstanding, I love the illustration of Saurolophus' Amazing Inflatable Face, here stated like it's an indisputable given. Have I ever shared my favorite-ever take on this paleoart meme?
Skipping ahead a little, today's kids will probably remember when Anantotitan and company were replaced in all dinosaur books with Edmontosaurus, just like I remember when Ankylosaurus was phased out in favor of Euplocephalus. Except Ankylosaurus was never merged into another genus so...? (I bet it's because Euplocephalus is easier to draw.)
So the only thing differentiating Maiasaura from other hadrosaurs is that she will always always always be shown attending her nest. Note her weird "sad moose" face and that bumpy crest thing between her eyes.
Maiasaura and Protoceratops. Stuck-At-Nest Buddies. And note the weird, almost beakless Psittacosaurus.
Time for my favorite-ever illustration in the book:
Chasmosaurus is chillin' like a villain, maxin' like Michael Jackson, livin' like Thanskgivin', and gellin' like a felon. He's like MA-gellin, he's so gellin'.
There's no real acknowledgement that birds are dinosaurs here. So these Terror Birds are kind of stuck in as an afterthought. Their illustrations are *tiny* (easily covered with an American Quarter) and I don't even know what Phorusrhacos is supposed to be doing.
Heading to a different group of Avemetatarsalians. The illustrator here seems to have been given a small note card describing these three pterosaurs. I love that Mohawk-thing on Quetzalcoatlus. I also seriously like how Pterodaustro here acts more like a Skimmer than a Flamingo, as usually depicted.
Illustrations of Mososaurs were stuck in a kind of time warp for so many years. Most of them looked less like a big ocean-dwelling lizard than a weird dragon-thing with a snazzy back-fin. And speaking of dragony things...
Swan-necked plesiosaurs! It's truly amazing how long this meme has stuck around, isn't it?
I include this illustration of Tuatara for two reasons. First, he is included in the book as a "Living Fossil". (Aren't we technically *all* Living Fossils? And if your physical form hasn't changed in many many millions of years, shouldn't that mean you WIN at natural selection?) Second, I wish I could find it again, but more than one of my childhood books touted this poor unsuspecting creature as "A real living dinosaur!"
Oh, the playground grief that caused me. Bully: "Why do you care about dinosaurs anyway? They're all DEAD! Who gives a crap?"
Trish as a Lass: "But they're NAAAAWWWWT!!! There's this one little cute thing that nobody's ever heard of that lives in New Zealand and and and..."
Lucky kids today, all you have to do is point up.
And while we are on the subject of Things That Make Me Drink, here's the very last page of the book. Brace yourselves.
So... another otherwise serious and straightforward dinosaur field guide (see also this) has a nice long entry on the 80's equivalent of the ArtisticTriassicKraken (especially in that it's initial unveiling caused an uproar, the media went nuts with it, and many paleontologists had to emphasize that this kind of thing is not what most of them do with their time). What a note to end on, right?
My reaction when seeing this page in the guide for the first time was essentially,
"What?
"No, really, What? "WHY?!?
"But if...?
"Then...
"No.
"No, just no."
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Art of the Day!
My struggle to capture the colors of autumn on canvas.
Today, I jump back on the older paleoart bandwagon. I can't believe how many books I have to review here. We'll start with one that's been requested a few times.
The Dinosaur Data Book was published circa 1990 by The Diagram Group. Illustrators include Grahame Rosewarne, Ashley Best, Darren Bennett, Brian Hewson, Pavel Kostal, Lee Lawrence, Paul McCauley, Philip Patenall, and Micky Pledge (whew).
Overall, the book is very, very similar to A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (to the point where I recommend re-reading my review of it). There's no indication as to which artist drew what and most of the illustrations are in a fairly generic style. I was confident in scanning this book, as it's soft cover was well-reinforced, but I apologize if some of the images are still a little off. They're all at Flickr (contributed to the wonderful Vintage Dinosaur Art pool of course) so you can click them for larger versions.
As with Field Guide, I'm going to be focusing on the stranger illustrations. I think this one is indicative of the book as a whole: it's got a very strange looking reconstruction of a prehistoric creature and a deeply strange indicator of scale. This poor 80's Quetzelcoatlus is about to be rear-ended by that airplane!
Odd scale markers are the book's forte, really. Get used to seeing the cat, the hound, and the man in a suit often. I haven't the slightest idea why Chaoyoungosaurus (sp) is drawn with a dotted line. Either the remains of the animal were fragmentary (which makes you wonder why they bothered to include him at all) or little ceratopsians were capable of becoming invisible.
And with that in mind, Hilarious In Hindsight depictions of dinosaurs who were poorly understood back in the late 80's is why we are here today. This little fellow is Noasaurus, a dinosaur I remember well from being mentioned many times in guides like this at the time but who doesn't get much press today. The big deal about Noasaurus was the fact that this at first appeared to be a dinosaur who looked an awful lot like a dromeosaur, but was not at all closely related to them. That's convergent evolution. Today, Noasaurus is classified as a small abelosaur. Which is to say, if you hate feathered raptors, Noasaurus is here for you.
Or perhaps not, because current reconstructions of Noasaurus look... different.
Speaking of maniraptors, this Oviraptor doesn't look half bad for a book published in 1990. She's half-naked, but the crest is right as is the beak (I'm sorry her face got a little washed out in the photograph), and it looks like the artist even made an attempt to avoid the dreaded kangaroo hand trope.
Here's a very speculative Deinocheirus and his famous crazy long arms. It almost looks like the artist was stuck between the then-recently popular "with arms and claws this long, it HAD to have been a horrible murderbeast!" theory and the current "actually, these look more like scaled-up arms from one of those little sissy-pants ornithomimids" theory.
Hey, speaking of assuming that an animal with really huge arms and long, long claws MUST have been a horrible murderbeast...
Yeah. I like to think the lady next to him is thinking, "You guys are going to be SO floored when it turns out these things actually looked more like Big Bird." This is a pretty obscure Therizinosaurus reconstruction that I referenced in this piece.
Meanwhile, Segnosaurus are still in Team Prosauropod in this book. I can hear the lady snickering still. She is, by far, the best character in the book, if only because she shows up in the craziest illustration. We'll get to that soon, but first...
Whaddup, Syntarsus? If you can't read the text, it explains how Syntarsus is often shown with feathers and that some scientists suppose that small theropods would have benefited from feathers "if they were warm-blooded". This is in spite of the fact, the text goes on, that no dinosaur has been found with feathers except for Archeopteryx, "usually thought of as a bird". Ow... my brains...
As you may have noticed, there weren't many offbeat illustrations of non-theropods. Nothing really stood out as strange... until I saw this Stegosaurus. Love those shoulder-spikes. The text provides no reasoning at all behind this reconstruction, and it's especially strange given that the most outrageously spiky stegosaurs were yet to be fully described.
And now, as promised, the weirdest illustration in the book:
"I say, horrible Anthropocentric alien-thing, have you the time?"
I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture of the whole thing now, but this was actually part of a two-page spread of "fictional dinosaur species", mostly from The New Dinosaurs. Really. Because guides of modern mammals have two-page spreads of unicorns and centaurs and jackalopes and sidehill gougers and drop-bears and hoppopotomi and elephunkeys and platypus-bears. I hope you can see my facepalm, publishers of the Dinosaur Data Book, because I am doing it as hard as I can.
So, Dale Russel's Dinosauroid has been given more attention in this book. I've collected so many examples of this, I might as well plan on a future post where I show all the examples I have of perfectly normal and serious documents on dinosaurs which suddenly and out of nowhere include this thing. Lord knows why, I guess the concept really captured peoples' imagination for some reason. (By the way, "redesigned"...? )
Once again, I visited the local library. Once again, I came back home with some dinosaur books from the awkward age of paleontology maybe right before the dinosaur Renaissance was picking up speed.
Therefore, I declare April to be 80's (and some 90's) Paleoart Month! Each week, two posts will focus on one or more dinosaur books (or perhaps other things...) from this era, and the third will focus on something totally different having nothing to do with dinosaurs at all (ie, Monday's Disney short post; start taking bets on whether we'll see our first gardening post of the year this month). Because -can you believe it- not everyone is interested in old dinosaur art! Some people don't even care about dinosaurs at all! Can you imagine! This week's book is a seminal work called A Field Guide to Dinosaurs: The First Complete Guide to Every Dinosaur Now Known. It's copyright 1983 by Diagram Visual Information, Ltd. and written by David Lambert. The book is illustrated by (hang on to your hats) Joe Robinson, Grahame Rosewarne, Sean Gilbert, Ashley Haddock, Brian Hewson, Richard Hummerstone, Janos Marffy, Eitetsu Nozawa, Max Rutherford, and Jerry Watkiss. There is, sadly, no indication whatsoever as to what artist drew what illustration. All the illustrations are pretty generic anyway, but there are some interesting sights to see indeed.
Please note that, as with many books you'll see this month, this is a very, very old library book that looked like it had been through a lot. I didn't want to risk "killing" it in my scanner so I relied on my camera instead. I apologize if some of the images are blurry. They're all at Flickr (contributed to the wonderful Vintage Dinosaur Art pool of course) so you can click them for larger versions.
I'm including the Table of Contents because they can stand as proof of a very weird old paleontological trend. You might remember back in my revisiting of Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs, that it was pretty much taken as a given that all large theropods were thought to be related and all small theropods were thought to be related. But not to each-other, I mean; they were thought to be two completely separate groups of animals. (Imagine if house cats and foxes were considered to be closer relatives of each-other than to lions and wolves.) Now you see this strange trend in action. Also note that Herrerasaurus is classified as a Prosauropod?!
One of the "highlights" of this book is that you can make a drinking game out of every drawing that appears to have been traced off a more famous piece of paleoart. Yeah... say what you will about Greg Paul's recent tantrums, but when you look at art like this, you see the man has a point. This is the single most obvious rip-off. Than again, Charles R. Knight gets stolen from all the time.
John C. McLoughlin... not so much. It is kind of funny how his very weird, fringe-ish theory about Triceratops is even acknowledged though. And if I may tangent into speaking of weird theories...
I don't think this image of Stenonychosaurus (now known as Troodon, though friends call him Mr. Conductor XD ) is a rip off any particular piece, but only because this is basically the default 80s!Troodontid illustration.
But wait, what's that in the corner? Is that... Oh God dammit. Oh no...
Why? What the eff is this even doing in here? Stupid goddamn anthropocentric alien-thing, what the hell?
OK, seriously. It's surprising how often you see the Dinosauroid, Dale Russel's stupid stupid "thought experiment", appearing in otherwise fairly serious (if wildly outdated) 80's dinosaur books. Imagine seeing a random and not-elaborated-upon-at-all line drawing of an imagined steampunk airship (with maybe a tiny line about "this is what air travel COULD have been like") in an otherwise fairly serious guide to the history of flying vehicles and you have an idea of how jarring this is.
Dang, I need a drink... oh, hey! It's our old buddy Syntarsus! Oh, it's wonderful to see you again, ol' pal ol' friend ol' buddy ol' person we are on a first-name basis with! For the curious, the text simply says something about how some scientists think it had "feathery scales". Yeah. Also, they actually say that their drawing is "after Bakker". Huh.
This is getting a little lengthy, so I'll end this post with a Protoceratops that looks distinctively William Stout-ish...
And your favorite and mine, the amazing Kiss-guanodon! We'll continue exploring the Field Guide on Friday. If you can't stand the wait, hit the "Hilariously Outdated Paleoart" tag below. Additionally, and by a happy coincidence, Dinosaur Tracking has a series of posts on dinosaur comics from around this same time, and Art by Angie praises the beauty of Hadrosaurs.
