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.
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| 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.
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| The ibis and marhor are quite excellent, however. |
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| 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.
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| "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!
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| 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.
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| Still, the reality check is welcome anyway. |
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| "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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| "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.
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| You should also buy Mark Witton's Pterosaurs. I used it to reference for the Pteranodon skeleton. |
