Vintage Creationist Dinosaur Art: The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (Part 2)

     And we're back with more of The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible! I apologize for taking so long to put part two up; some rather more important life events have been taking up my time. We pick up where we left on in part one of this book, having just finished looking at the artistic depictions of dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden and in Noah's Flood. At this point the book takes a different tack, one common to many creationist works. The book suggests ancient dragon legends represent cultural memories of living dinosaurs, which would support the idea that dinosaurs did not live so long ago as commonly believed. Though an interesting idea, I think the author stretches it a bit when he attempts to connect specific legends to specific dinosaurs. One can easily see in this image, for example, that the dragon on the left has nothing to do with Ornitholestes. I could maybe see a possible connection between the middle dragon and Saurolophus, although the Saurolophus illustration they provide looks absolutely terrible. In my mind, the images on the right match best to each other, though a bit of a problem emerges. Though St. George's dragon as depicted here certainly looks a lot like the illustrated prehistoric crocodylian Rutiodon, it begs the question why it couldn't simply represent a modern crocodile instead (apologies for the cut-off image: I couldn't fit the book in my scanner properly).

A bit of a reach, overall.

     This picture portrays the ancient Babylonian hero Gilgamesh in battle with the monster of the cedar forest, depicted here by a somewhat chimeric sauropod (never mind that the monster was originally a lion). It appears to have the head of a Brachiosaurus and the body of an Apatosaurus, both very different varieties of long-necks. Also of note, sauropods had much more rake-like teeth rather than the crushing molars depicted here. Contrary to many depictions, sauropods did not chew, but stripped leaves off branches to swallow them whole. The feet should look a bit like elephant feet, and would not have the great beastly claws this creature possesses, but as this feature did not commonly make it into artistic depictions of dinosaurs at the time, we can give them a pass on this one.

"THIS IS BABYLON!!!!"

     Not much to say about this one, other than Tanystropheus necks do not bend like that. I'm not even referring to the dragon fresco; I mean the more "accurate" painting below. Tanystropheus had one of the most ridiculously inflexible necks in the history of the planet. Seriously, go look at the skeleton: it only has ten neck vertebrae! I like that the artist gave it webbed feet though. This fits with the presumed aquatic nature of this reptile.

*SNAP*

     This one makes me nearly as angry as the dinosaur hip debacle from the first book I reviewed. That is NOT in any way whatsoever what Edmontosaurus looked like. At all. It's one thing to gather supporting evidence for your arguments; it's quite another to start shoehorning in made-up nonsense. Edmontosaurus is best known as the generic duck-billed dinosaur, not a T-rex-handed prosauropod mimicking a meerkat. In fact, why on earth didn't the artist go with a prosauropod, like Plateosaurus? It's a much better fit, and won't make people think you're intentionally misrepresenting the facts to them when you get called out on stuff like this. This is the kind of half-brained foolishness that drives people away, guys.

UGH. Moving on.

     Here we have a decent-looking Triceratops which the text informs us portrays a dragon that was killed near Nerluc, France. I find this a highly dubious connection. I assume the text is referencing the story of the dragon Tarasque, which in traditional depictions looks more like Appa the Air Bison in a Koopa shell. I can't shake the feeling that the author did not want to draw attention to this fact, as he mentions the town of Nerluc changed its named in honor of the dragon, but neglects to mention either the dragon's or the town's modern name (Tarascon). The fact that Triceratops and its relatives are only found in North America and East Asia also deprives this connection of some credibility.

Not a terrible picture, though.

     I'm assuming this two-limbed creature is meant to represent a Tanystropheus, though who knows what it's doing so far from water. I'm guessing the illustrator was hoping the perspective would hide its lack of hindlimbs. The book lifts this picture from a (barely) animated scene in the accompanying film, hence the cardboard cutout appearance of the figure in this scene.

Egad!

     This scene has always stuck with me, I guess because I just found it to be sort of cool. I suppose there's a hint of Dinotopia in the idea of Chinese nobles using "dragons" (or dinosaurs) to pull their carriages. I'm not entirely sure what dinosaurs these are meant to be. Based on the body shape and skin texture, my first instinct is to say Scelidosaurus, but those spikes suggest otherwise. Possibly a Polocanthus pair? The anatomy seems a little mix-and-match, so it's hard to say.

Another chimerical sacrifice in the name of coolness.

     Here we have a rather pleasant image of a Rhamphorynchus flying near the pyramids. It's tastefully calm and peaceful, and the Rhamphorynchus is allowed to remain a part of its environment, rather than getting shoved up in your face. Overall, this feels like the sort of piece John Conway or maybe Douglas Henderson would produce if they were Young Earth Creationists (very high praise, if you don't know who they are. Check out their websites! You're in for a treat!).

That Rhamphorynchus looks reasonably accurate, to boot.

     Here we have a close-up of a Brachiosaurus heaed. It seems pretty decent: soft tissue seems to mitigate the extreme domed appearance of the skull, just as paleontologists believe it would have in life, though the nostrils fail to appear in their proper place in said tissue. We can give them a pass on this one, since again, paleoart conventions at this time usually placed the nostrils of Brachiosaurus directly on top of the dome. I'm not sure what's going on with its mouth; technically its lips seem to obscure the teeth, but there's a suggestion of large grinding molars rather than peg-like rakes.

I'm really nit-picking at this point, though.

     Here we have a very bored-looking Kronosaurus about to lazily munch down on a hapless plesiosaur. Not too much wrong with it, though perhaps the plesiosaur's head could use a little streamlining, and the Kronosaur's teeth should not go so far back down it jawline. The text refers to Kronosaurus as the possible identity of the Biblical Leviathan, which to my mind fits the bill much more closely than that flame-throwing Parasaurolophus from our last feature. This image had an inordinately strong impact on me as a child, given that it today seems rather bland and unexciting to me. However, back when this was my first introduction to the monster that was Kronosaurus, I simply gazed at this illustration in awe.

Not terrible, but not as good as it could be.

     That has to be the happiest little Saltopus ever! The beaming mother gladly receives a loving neck rub from... wait a minute, is that Nicholas Cage?!? I really think it might be. Was he a big deal at all when this book came out? He's got clothes on, so I don't think he's supposed to represent Adam... weird. Anyway, not much to say about Saltopus, other than it shows the age of this book (Saltopus was very common in 70's and 80's children's books, but has since receded from the limelight). I have no idea however what's going on with that... thing in the background there. It looks like the illustrator couldn't commit to drawing either a Plateosaurus or a... I don't know, Tsintaosaurus, maybe? In any case, it's yet another chimera, in this case of a prosauropod and some kind of hadrosaur, as best as I can tell.

Who Cage'd my dinosaur book?

     Okay, somebody must have a serious obsession with Disney, here. This exact image appears in no less than two places in the forgotten recesses of the Walt Disney Company (four, depending on how you look at it). First we have the Rite of Spring segment from Fantasia (1940). The overall segment represents a superb portrayal of dinosaurs as they were imagined at the time, but the limited scope of our interest at this point concerns the 4:53 mark in this clip. In the space of about 20 seconds we see two separate pairs of sauropods attempt to steal food from each other's mouths. Disney revisited this particular meme again in the dinosaur segment of "Ford's Magic Skyway", one of the four pavilions produced by Disney for the 1964 World's Fair. The animatronics used in this attraction were later re-used in the Primeval World show building on the Disneyland Railroad, and were reproduced for the Universe of Energy pavilion at Epcot. Ahem. So....... yeah. This artist totally copied Disney, is what I'm saying.

I think I may have read to much into this. Maybe I'M the one with the Disney obsession...

     Anyway, returning to more common dino-memes, here we have that old classic of the 70's and 80's, the Chunk-o-saurus Dilophosaurus! Dilophosaurus is best remembered as the spitter from Jurassic Park, and though there's no evidence of a fleshy neck frill, it was otherwise reasonably accurate, from a physical point of view. Now compare that svelte creature with these tubby lards, and you see the issue here. Nobody quite knows why this was such a common practice in older paleoart, but it probably represents the lazy attitude taken by many artists of the mid-twentieth century. And yes, they are eating plants, despite the fact that they are known to have been carnivores. This image intends to demonstrate how carnivorous animals were all originally peaceful herbivores in the Garden of Eden.

Don't even get me started on the one on the left...

     For our final dinosaur image from this book, we have that perennial favorite, Triceratops! It is here depicted using its horns to lift up a log to provide better foraging, rather than using them to gore the nearest Tyrannosaurus. A Rhinoceros Beetle, which uses its horn for similar purposes, helpfully stands nearby to further drive the point home (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!?). I heartily approve of this portrayal. All apologizes to the Awesome-Bro fanboys out there, the natural world, present or past, does not consist of constant cage-fights to the death between evenly matched opponents. Even when carnivores go a-hunting, they tend to steer clear of well-armed opponents and pick on small, weak individuals that have little means of fighting back. Consequently, one finds that "defensive weapons" in the natural world usually serve multiple purposes other than simply fighting off enemies. Use as display structures in courtship represents one of the most common alternate uses, but foraging tools represent a perfectly reasonable utility for these features as well.

A Triceratops, depicted in the act of *GASP!* peacefully enjoying itself!!!

     Well, that all for now. The book had a few more images in it, but as they did not contain any prehistoric beasts, I felt they did not fall within the scope of our little examination here. Thanks for reading along, and for putting up with my ridiculous nit-picking!

Vintage Creationist Dinosaur Art: The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (Part 1)

     Here we go again, with more old creationist dinosaur artwork! As I said in my previous blog post, this series aims to focus primarily on the accuracy of the creatures portrayed within the pages of these tomes, with maybe a bit of art criticism thrown in as well, to whatever extent I'm qualified to speak on the latter subject. I do NOT wish to delve into discussions of the merits of the overall worldviews of creation and evolution, though I likely won't be able to help commenting on the strength/accuracy of individual arguments. Let it also be known that I directly lifted the basic idea of "Vintage Dinosaur Art" from the wonderful paleoblog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.
     This week, we have The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible, released in 1987 (accompanied by a straight to VHS feature), a full decade after our last literary adventure. The sights have definitely improved, though there's still not much indication that the Dinosaur Renaissance was in full swing by this time. Case in point, this lovely illustration on the inside cover, featuring a swamp-bound, presumably tail-dragging sauropod that is almost certainly meant to be (the-by-then-long-defunct) Brontosaurus himself. Superb artwork, sloppy science.

I don't think it would look to out of place next to a classic Charles Knight piece, or maybe a Burian.

     On to the title page, whose artwork doubles as the cover illustration (I had to split it in two to fit the book in my tiny scanner). The artist (Todd Tennant) behind this illustration has a somewhat unique style I'm not otherwise familiar with, which pops up several times through this book. It's with Tennant's images that we also find the only hints of the Dinosaur Renaissance in this book, represented in this picture by that refreshingly well-rendered (if somewhat skeletal) Parasaurolophus, as well as the small theropod next to it. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, though based on it's size, I'd guess some sort of ornithomimid. Speaking of size, if all the creatures in this image are meant to be full-grown, then that is a seriously MASSIVE elephant in the background. Just look at it! It's SUPPOSED to be about equal in height to the Parasaur, and only come up to about the shoulder on Mr. Smarmy Brachiosaurus there. Also the Brachiosaur's neck is attached to its shoulders strangely.

The ibis and marhor are quite excellent, however.

That Parasaur has a vague similarity to William Stout's style.

     In this image we have a proud Stegosaurus parent with its three rather featureless babies. It's a cute scene, and a rather unique one I'm just now realizing. In fact, Stegosaurus seems to have an oddly lone-wolfish character ascribed to it in all the portrayals I can think of. One hardly ever sees it with other members of its own species, much less engaging in any parental activities. Perhaps this trend is a holdover from those classic days when it was considered almost too stupid to function, and such social activities imply a greater amount of intelligence than most artists are willing to afford our poor spiky friend. In any case, kudos to Tennant for breaking the mold, even if he still insists on portraying Steggy as a lumbering tail-dragger.

"LOL, whut? Parenting? You must have me confused for Maiasaura."

     The next couple pages contain photographs of actual fossils, something I think children's books could use more of. (I'll skip it here since we're just evaluating the artwork.) It's nice to have them as a resource to get an idea of dinosaurs' true proportions, especially since artists can't always be trusted to do the most bang-up job on their own (whether with skeletal or flesh reconstructions), as we see on the very next page. I don't feel qualified to comment too much on the postcranial skeleton, other than to point out that there seems to be some sort of mystery structure blocking our view of the inside of the ribcage. I bring this up only to contrast it with the baffling abscess in the skull. The view presented to us has the viewer looking into the eye socket and clear through the rear end of the skull. Goodness knows where its brain was housed. Or what happened to the actual fenestrae. Or why it seems to have a duck-bill. Come on, Tennant, I was rooting for you! Also, the author attempts to recount the classic "wrong-headed Brontosaurus" story, but tells us the Brontosaurus was really a Diplodocus that scientists saddled with an Apatosaurus skull. Um, no? Come on dude, the last book got it right, and it was a decade older than this one!

Drawing skeletons is, like, hard you guys.

     Oh well. On to better stuff! I've always liked this page. It uses a handy visual example with a dog and a peacock to illustrate the difficulty an artist faces in fleshing out dried bones. In fact, when I first read All Yesterdays, I immediately thought back to this page. Author/artist John Conway manages to get an entire book out of this idea, representing alternate or extrapolated views of prehistoric creatures that run counter to traditional artistic takes on the subject, yet nevertheless remain clearly within the bounds of what we know about paleontology and modern zoology. (It's an awesome book, by the way! Go buy it.) Unfortunately, this book doesn't run with that idea in quite the same exciting way. This page's main function is to cast a reasonable doubt on the competency of mainstream paleontologists and their interpretations of the fossil record.

Still, the reality check is welcome anyway.

     Here we have a creative (ahem) illustration of the concept of creation, showing all life springing forth from the Hand of God. We're here for dinosaurs, though, and I have no idea what's going on with that guy there. On the one hand, this represents our only other significant acknowledgement of the Dinosaur Renaissance, what with that high, balancing tail and all. On the other hand, I can't tell whether it's meant to represent a really skinny Corythosaurus or a burly, beakless Oviraptor, though I'd probably choose the latter if I was forced to. It doesn't really look like much of anything at all.

"He's got the whooooole, world..."

     I've always liked this "Behemoth" illustration, even if the creature is represented as a hopelessly outdated old Brontosaurus. One can't ignore the artistic quality however, and the nearby elephant and hippo (just out of frame) really help to emphasize its massive bulk.

     In this illustration, apparently depicting a scene in the Garden of Eden, we have Mr. Manly-Chin Adam interacting with what appears to be a young Tsintaosaurus. The original specimen had only a fragmentary remnant of its crest, and so popular artistic convention restored it with the unicorn-like spike depicted here. Recent evidence has revealed that it had a much more traditionally respectable crest like its relatives in life. Fun fact: many artists gave Tsintaosaurus a pair of inflatable air sacs just below its horn (to compensate for the supposed lack of a chambered crest), with hilariously Freudian results.

Is it just me, or does Adam really look like 1930's Tarzan here?

     I must commend the illustrator for the quality of this Triceratops skeleton, especially after that earlier skeletal nonsense. A small lizard gazes forlornly just off screen at its deceased cousin, haven apparently fallen victim to the great extinction event that killed off the rest of the dinosaurs.

I want to say it's T. horridus rather than T. prorsus, but I don't know enough to be sure.

     Exinction Event!!! A generic sauropod and a somewhat Renaissance-y Iguanodon gasp in terror at the sight of their impending doom. Noah's Flood barrels down upon them in the form of an enormous tidal (which also sweeps up their human neighbors), while a volcano Rudolph Zallinger would consider excessive explodes in the background with the force of a gun.

    Just in case it wasn't clear, we have come to the "What happened to the dinosaurs?" section that every dinosaur book is required by unspoken law to feature. The answer in this book, of course, lies in Noah's Flood. In this image, a dinosaur left outside the ark drowns in the roiling waves. It's a very non-descript theropod, and rather derpy looking no matter what species you try to assign it to. I'm assuming it's meant to represent a T-rex, in which case the most obvious things I can point out are its too-pointed snout and its too-wide bottom jaw.

"Eh, good enough."

     This illustration of animals entering the ark illustrates the idea that Noah would have taken at least some dinosaurs on the ark (since God commanded him to take two of every living creature), but to save space, he most likely only brought juveniles. The sauropods in the picture look fine, although their tails seem a bit draggy, and while I meant to critique those pterodactyls, the artist represents them abstractly enough that it seems unfair to do so.

     So if Noah took dinosaurs on the ark, where happened to them? Why the Ice Age, of course! Or rather, dramatic climate shifts including but not limited to the Ice Age. In this image, a mammoth lies dead from unknown causes. It's not a bad illustration, except for the fact that its tusks should point towards rather than away from each other.

     The film accompanying this book told a story about some Native Americans who saw a pterosaur struck by lightning, then later coming across the skeleton. This supposedly represents the origin of the Thunderbird myth, though I'm not sure where they got this story from. The film used this image to illustrate the final part of that tale, showing a Pteranodon skeleton apparently freshly picked clean by vultures. It's actually a reasonably good-looking skeleton. As best as I can tell from the semi-disarticuated features, the wing anatomy all appears present in their proper arrangement. I think even see a pteroid bone in there!  The skull also appears pretty accurate, with the fenestrae in their proper positions. The torso is a little too jumbled to really say much about it one way or the other.

You should also buy Mark Witton's Pterosaurs. I used it to reference for the Pteranodon skeleton.

     This only gets us halfway through the book, but I think I'm going to stop here for now. I'm putting quite a lot of  images up, and don't want to make this page too hard to load. Thanks for reading so far! Keep an eye out soon for Part 2, in which we examine dragon legends and their possible connections to dinosaurs!

Vintage Creationist Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards

     One of the paleontology blogs I follow, Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs, has this semi-regular feature they call "Vintage Dinosaur Art", where they look back through old dinosaur books and critique them on the paleoart found within their pages. I enjoy these posts tremendously; I find it fascinating to see what these books got right, what was good enough for the time, and what was so wildly, hilariously off-base you wonder how how anyone ever got such an idea into their heads. It's also interesting to note the random memes that take hold in the medium for no particular reason and then refuse to die over the course of paleoart history. (Note: because my wife told me it sounds weird to use the word "meme" for something other than funny cat pictures, I should clarify that I am using the word in the broader sense of "an idea, behavior, or stye that spreads from person to person within a culture.")
     And so, I've decided to get in on the game myself, reviewing a set of books I'm sure are rather under-exposed: get ready for Vintage Creationist Dinosaur Art! As a dinosaur nut from a Young Earth Creationist background, I grew up with many books with such provocative titles as "Noah's Ark and the Lost World". They've been gathering dust on my shelves for a while, so when I recently leafed through them a while back, I got the bright idea to give them the Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs treatment. Now, since I hope to appeal to both sides of the aisle with this series, I'm going to avoid any assessment of the larger models of creationism or evolutionary theory; I am endeavoring to strictly evaluate the reconstructions and portrayals of the creatures in these books, and maybe increase awareness of the aforementioned in the process.
     With that in mind, let's move on to the oldest book in my collection. Straight out of 1977, it's Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards!!!

ROAR!

     Now this book is so old that many of the dinosaurs here will appear outdated to even the most casual layperson. Luckily, there's still plenty  of material for us to review together, as a few classic dino-memes pop up here, as well as several homegrown, creationist-specific memes.
     We begin unassumingly enough with a pair of dinosaur skeletons, which appear to represent Tyrannosaurus and Corythosaurus, respectively. It's kinda hard to screw up a skeleton unless you're just making things up on the fly, and happily, the illusatrator (a one Marvin Ross) has rendered these reasonably well for their time. The neural spines on the Corythosaurus' vertebrae should be a little taller, and while Mr. Ross appears to be aware of the existence of gastralia (stomach ribs) on the T-rex, they are far too thick (they should be much thinner than the normal ribs, and connecting to a sort of sternum). The poses are rather outdated of course, but as all the dinosaurs in this book remain ponderous tail draggers, we won't dwell too much on this topic.

     Being written by creationists, the book starts off with brief explanations of the theories of evolution and creation. I won't dwell on them here, but this visual representation of evolution certainly stands out. I like the way the artist made the dinosaurs all blend together in a manner suggesting a common source.

It stands opposite another image with all the dinosaurs standing perfectly separate but not doing anything particularly interesting, so in the interest of space I only included this one.

     The next illustration features a hallmark of early creationist arguments that has since been abandoned by most mainstream creation societies: the Paluxy River dinosaur tracks. These famous trackways are significant for showing what seems to be three theropods (carnivorous dinosaurs) following a small herd of sauropods (long-necks). During the 1930's, the claim began spreading around that human footprints could be seen interspersed with the dinosaur trackways, thus proving human coexistence with dinosaurs. However, since that time, some of the purported human footprints have turned out to be outright forgeries, while others have been proven to be badly eroded dinosaur footprints. It makes for a provocative illustration, though! Speaking of which, the art in this book alternates between not-unpleasant watercolor paintings and what I believe to be green pencil drawings, though I'm not sure about the latter. Art majors, feel free to correct me!

I believe it's meant to represent a Ceratosaurus.

     Every creationist book on dinosaurs has some variation of this next image, because how could you not? Basically, it quotes a passage from the Job 40 that talks about the Behemoth, the mightiest of all land animals. All the creationist books I owned drew explicit comparisons between it and the sauropod family of dinosaurs. If you're coming from a creationist background, it's a very convincing argument. Like the book says, one could argue that it's talking about an elephant, though one would have to explain the verse about a "tail that sways like a cedar". Speaking of which, Mr. Ross includes an elephant here, which is given a shaggy coat of fur with no particular explanation. It bears a greater resemblance to an Asian Elephant than a Wooly Mammoth, though I wonder if this represents an early appearance of the creationist idea of created "kinds"? It would explain this creature's blended appearance, though no such reasoning is given in the text.

Behemothus biblicus

The Mysterious Wooly Elephant

     The next picture portrays a general Mesozoic menagerie, though I'm not sure what's up with that duck-billed sauropod in the background. We'll give Mr. Ross the benefit of the doubt and say it's a prescient depiction of the eventual discovery of Nigersaurus. And near the middle, we have the tree-climbing Hypsilophodon meme! At least I assume that's a Hypsilophodon, since it literally could not be any more of a "generic-small-dinosaur". Also, sad Triceratops is sad. I want to give him a hug. Perhaps the other kids made fun of his JP-Dilophosaurus frill.

Also, classic pancake-Ankylosaurus makes several appearances in this book.

      Now it's time for "Don't Mess With Armoured Dinosaurs", the PSA! We are treated to several scenes of well-endowed herbivores giving the mean old sharp-teeth a piece of their minds. Or horns. Whatever.

Queen Elizabeth the Third-Horned watches her loyal subject gore a vicious T-rex to death. He was probably a filthy Spaniard, anyway.

FSHWING!

I would seriously advise against any plan that in any way involves Turtle-Tank Ankylosaurus.

     I thought for sure this next image was more or less copied from some other source, but it seems to be more original than many vintage dinosaur books tend to be, since it doesn't seem to explicitly copy any pre-existing painting I can find, unless maybe it's the middle Trachodon in this piece by Zdeněk Burian. Incidentally, the genus "Trachodon" has since slipped into the territory of "nomen dubium", and the title of "generic duck-billed dinosaur" has since passed on to Anatosaurus and then Edmontosaurus, successively. The "duck-billed" hadrosaurs are no longer thought to have been aquatic either. Other than that, the illustration is pretty good for its time, especially in its depiction of hadrosaurs as being capable of both bipedal and quadrupedal movement.

I do rather like this picture, though.

      This next image is a little odd in its choice of dinosaurs, as they really should have appeared back a few pages ago. Psittacosaurus actually belongs with Triceratops and Styracosaurus (which I forgot to scan), as it hails from Ceratopsia, the family of horned dinosaurs (despite its lack of such ornaments). Pachycephalosaurus is distantly, distantly related to the Ceratopsians, and so would have been better to showcase earlier as well. Hey, at least they managed to get the distant relation between Ankylosaurus and Stegosaurus right! Also, the description of Pachycephalosaurus reeeally reminds you of how repetitive this book can be at times.

This boneheaded bonehead boneheadedly boneheaded his way into the Bonehead Club. He was a real bonehead.

      Now we get to the part all little kids wait for: the Meat-Eating Dinosaurs! The book chooses to focus only on "the two most interesting ones" (I would beg to differ), leading off with a rather triangle-faced Allosaurus contemplating a classically swamp-bound herd of sauropods. A rather common problem plaguing old paleoart is the scourge of the generic-o-pod, where unique, interesting features are obscured by artists simply paving them over in favor of easier-to-draw profiles. Thus, many kids (like me) grew up not realizing Allosaurus actually had admittedly small but still quite distinctive crests that really make it stand out next to the larger, supposedly cooler T-rex. Such is the case here.

"Ah! I am really enjoying this peaceful, introspective moment!"

      But what's this? Could Murder-Death-Kill Allosaurus have suddenly sprouted some lacrimal crests? It's hard to tell even with the book here in front of me, but it definitely looks like it has some little ridges on the sides of its still-misshapen head. YOUR PUNY BRONTOSAURUS IS NO MATCH FOR AWESOME-BRO ALLOSAURUS.

"LOL JK, I KEEL U NOW"

     Another well-known old paleoart curse is that nobody can ever quite seem to get the arms right on Tyrannosaurus rex. Here they seem to be sprouting from his jugular veins. Old Rexy gets no murder-death-kill scene of his own, having presumably used up his allotted screen-time getting stabbed and bashed by armored herbivores several pages ago.

"That looks pretty good. Coming out of the back of his neck there..."

     Next up we get to the mighty long-necked sauropods! We start off we a majestic portrait of... an oblivious sauropod having his tail bitten off. There's this old idea that dinosaur brains were so small, and their bodies so long, that they wouldn't have been able to process any signals coming from or going to the back half of their body, so they needed a "second brain" in their hips to help share the load. This has long since been disproven, but still pops up today, mostly famously in connection to Stegosaurus, though here we see it being demonstrated on an unsuspecting, tail-dragging Diplodocus (it was also referenced in the recent hit movie Pacific Rim). See this blog post over at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week for further discussion of this idea. At least it's not slogging through a swamp as they were normally depicted!

"Duh, what?"

     We also get a star appearance by the great Brontosaurus! What's that? It's been Apatosaurus nearly a century now? Eh, it's okay. The book pays lip service to that, so they can go right back to calling it Brontosaurus. We also get a reappearance of the Paluxy human-dinosaur meme as a bonus.

That kid looks for all the world like he accidentally wandered in from an old-timey children's book on David and Goliath.

     Old Bronty of course spends all his time wading around in swamps, as do these somewhat Burian-inspired Brachiosaurs (with another nod to the secondary brain meme). The text states that its nostrils were positioned on top of its head, like a submarine we are informed, so that it could hide underwater from predators. Sauropods, Brachiosaurus especially, are now thought to have been so tall that the water pressure would have rendered them unable to expand their lungs should they have actually tried this strategy in real life, suggesting that they did not make a habit of setting up shop in deep water.

"The order ish, engage the shilent drive!"

      Speaking of Burian, this Iguanodon certainly owes a lot to his work, right down to the dewlap hanging below its neck. Most dinosaur books from this time period directly lifted this particular representation of Iguanodon from him, an image that dominated pretty much until the Dinosaur Renaissance finally took hold of pop culture. The text recounts the classic story of Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell's discovery of the original specimen. We also get a brief discussion of its hand spikes, here shown to be giving their typical approving thumbs up.

My scanner cut most of it off, but I love the little Iguana in the corner giving Iguanodon it the most adorable little brother look it can muster.

     Did I mention Generic-o-pods earlier? Sorry, that was somewhat unfair. HERE we see a group truly indistinguishably illustrated dinosaurs, identifiable only by the vaguest of references in the text. I'm guessing the one eating the lizard is Struthiomimus, since the text describes it as doing such, which maybe means the one next to it is Ornithomimus? The two in the middle are likely meant to be Comsognathus and Podokesaurus, though the perspective in the picture is such that their apparent small size may be misleading, and all four previously mentioned dinosaurs may in fact be interchangeable! We can be fairly certain the one on right right is meant to represent Oviraptor, however, caught red-handed in the act of stealing an egg, though we'd have no way of knowing otherwise since it's lacking its distinctive head crest. (This fact, among others, leads me to believe this book may have been an inspiration for much of the artwork here.) Oviraptor originally gained its reputation as an egg thief when it was discovered buried with a nest, apparently buried in the act of robbing the cradle. Later, CT scans revealed that the babies in side the eggs were in fact little Oviraptors themselves, meaning the adult was actually the mother, which, when you think about it, you have to wonder how that was not the initial conclusion in the first place. They text also mentions that though they look a bit like ostriches or chickens, they would have had leathery skin instead of feathers. We now know the opposite to be true. I should add that no matter what your orientation on creation vs evolution, there really is no question about whether certain dinosaurs had feathers. They did; though you don't have to take that as proof that they evolved into birds any more than fish evolved into reptiles because they both have scales. See my other blog post for more on this.

Struthiomimus and Ornithomimus, probably.

Probably Compsognathus and Podokesaurus, definitely Oviraptor.

     I hope nobody has been misinterpreting any jokes I've made as ragging on this book at all; this has actually all been fond memories so far. Unfortunately, we now come to an illustration that I am rather angry about these days.
     It purports to disprove the evolutionary theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds by pointing out that birds are thought to have arisen among the Saurischian ("lizard-hipped") dinosaurs rather than the Ornithschian ("bird-hipped") dinosaurs. However, Deinonychus, the raptor dinosaur that got the whole birds-are-dinosaurs movement going, HAS BIRD-LIKE HIPS, despite otherwise clearly belonging to the Saurischian family. In fact, these bird-like hips are one of the biggest reasons its discoverer suggested the bird connection in the first place.
     I really don't think I can make any excuse for the author here, because if they knew about the Bird-o-saur theory, they should have known about Deinonychus. At best, the benefit of the doubt grants them only inexcusable ignorance about the claims they're making. This Saurischian vs. Ornisthschian line stuck around much longer than it should have as well, as we shall see in a future post.
     I don't want to dwell much more on this. There are decent reasons to dispute the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds, but hips are not among them. Let this be a plea for honesty and fact-checking lest you drive away the very people you're attempting to reach. After all, how do you think I felt when I realized I had made it to 24 years old not realizing the misleading nature of this image?

Sigh. I promise I'm done now.

     But enough of that. Let's turn our attention back to more light-hearted matters. This next image is laughably wrong, but in a much more constructive way. The function of the head crests in many species of duck-billed hadrosaurs often found itself the topic of discussion among paleontologists back in the day. Similar to the periscoping Brachiosaurs from earlier, one early idea stated that perhaps dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus used their crests as snorkels to breathe while hiding from predators underwater. I would hazard a guess that this, combined with their distinctive snouts, is the reason why hadrosaurs were so consistently depicted as swimmers, despite the fact that the absence of air holes in the crests quickly disproved the snorkeling theory. The mystery appeared solved when an experimenter made a cast of the nasal passages in the crest and blew air through them, producing a trumpet-like sound, leading to the now generally accepted theory that hadrosaurs used their crests to amplify their voices. Our delightful little book here has other ideas however. BEHOLD, THE MIGHTY FIRE-BREATHING PARASAUROLOPHUS!!!

FWOOSH!

     I love this image (which ended up becoming a persistent creationist meme, as we'll see in later books), and always found it rather inspiring as a child. I imagine everyone can see the appeal in the idea that dragon legends were inspired by relict populations of dinosaurs. The book spends a weird amount of energy explaining this idea, too. Seriously: it devotes six whole pages to this one idea, two of which are nearly all text! In a children's book! No other concept in this tome receives such detailed treatment. And sadly for Parasaurolophus draconis up there, it has zero anatomical basis. Oh sure, a similar phenomenon exists among the Bombardier Beetles, as the book wastes plenty of time pointing out, but nothing about hadrosaur skeletal anatomy suggests such a feature. The nasal passages are just that: long straight airways from the nose to the back of the throat. No side chambers for the storing or mixing of volatile chemicals. Even if such structures existed as soft-tissue features in the throat, the chemicals or fumes would have to travel through the entire length of the crest in order to be expelled onto the intended target. This would leave precious little time for other things, like, oh, I don't know, breathing. Such a feature would be much more likely on an otherwise much more "generic" or "boring" dinosaur, one which we would likely never suspect based on only dry bones. Still, it's a nice idea.

Plus this Bombardier Beetle cartoon is kinda funny, I guess.

     After that, it's on to the obligatory denouement of all dinosaur books: why did those grand old reptiles ever go extinct? The answer provided by this book is of course the Great Flood, AKA Noah's Flood. While dinosaurs are suggested to have been on Noah's Ark, the book speculates the subsequent Ice Age would have killed them all off. There's a sparse bit of impressionistic landscape artwork that I didn't feel like scanning, although there was a decent looking Chasmosaurus skull in one of them. Oh well. I'm feeling too lazy to do it now. In any case, we close with this final image, comforting us with the idea that perhaps maybe we should be glad that dinosaurs no longer live among us after all.

Um, what?!? I BEG TO DIFFER.

     Anyway, thank you so much for reading! Please comment below if you have any questions about anything, even if it wasn't necessarily in the book. I know you'll all keep a civil tongue. ;)

UPDATE (11/18/2015):
     I have a new blog now titled Stuckasaurus, where I've recently review the 1992 "reboot" of this book titledDinosaurs by Design. Click for Part 1 and Part 2. Give it a look!