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| Note the flashy title font. One guess which film franchise set the gold standard for adventure stories around this time. |
We get some good stuff right off the bat with the cover. The artist presents us with a scene from the eponymous lost world, with a man (presumably Noah?) surveying a small river flanked by a Brachiosaurus, an ornithomimid, a lion, a wooly mammoth, and a giant ground sloth. The art is heavily stylized, so there's not too much to nitpick about the accuracy of the animals' appearances in this one, other than the blatantly tail-dragging Brachiosaurus. (I think it also has a blowhole on top of its head.) That ornithomimid is pretty great, though! A nice, dynamic, modern posture lets us know that yes, the Dinosaur Renaissance was in fact taking place outside the creationist bubble. It of course has no feathers, but nobody was drawing feathers on them back then, so we'll give them a pass there. No complaints about the mammals in this picture: they're honestly kind of hard to screw up. That ground sloth reminds me of something though: I'm pretty sure I was first made aware of several less-charismatic (read: not wooly mammoths or saber-tooth tigers) Cenezoic mammals via this book. Always nice to see some lesser known prehistoric creatures get a little love once in a while, so kudos to the artist!
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| Shades of Charles Knight |
Here we have a seemingly idyllic landscape featuring a family of Trachodon and a Saber-Tooth Cat in the foreground, with some farmland and a walled city in the distance. The Saber-Tooth really looks like a proper Smilodon. Though we can't see if the artist gave it the correct bobbed tail or not, at least it's a more tawny color than anything resembling something explicitly tiger-ish. That's not to say that one can't paint a Smilodon with stripes, as long as one gives it an overall more bobcat-ish look than an explicitly tigerish one.
The Trachodons are another matter. Tail dragging clunkers, they look like they popped straight off the canvas of something from the 1950's. Actually, wait a sec, let's take a closer look at the one on the left... Holy goodness, it's a blatant copy-paste of Charles Knight!
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| Noah's Ark Illustration on the left, Trachodon by Charles R. Knight on the right |
One more point of interest before moving on. In the pasture in the distance, one can see a trio of shepherds chasing a flock of non-descript small bipedal dinosaurs away from their flock of sheep. The dinosaurs themselves are too far off to even tell whether they are carnivores or herbivores, to say nothing of what species they represent, though at least they are using their tails for balance, rather than scooting along in a tripod pose! And that my friends, is all you're going to get of the Dinosaur Renaissance in this book! Actually, even that is being rather generous, since smaller dinosaurs often escaped the tripod pose even in the pre-Renaissance era.
Our next piece portrays a sort of "before and after" of the Garden of Eden. On the left what assume is the Forbidden Tree we see Adam in a lush, peaceful, pre-Fall setting. On the right we see the post-Fall world, somewhat more barren, with evidence of carnivory plain to see, with bleached bones in the foreground and vultures at a carcass in the back. As for the dinosaurs, the pleased-looking Brachiosaurus poking his head in on the left doesn't provide us much to evaluate, though its head seems good enough. The eyes are in about in the right position, and while the nostrils are rather close to the jawline, they are at least position on the snout, rather than the dome of its head. Similarly, the Pteranodon and the sauropods on the right are a little too far off in the distance to say anything in particular about, though I note that the sauropods are dragging their tails.
However, off to the right, we have a more interesting pair of classic dino-tropes. My scanner ended up cutting off part of the Tyrannosaurus on the right, and even the original image only gives us a small portion of the front of its body. What we can see of the body strongly suggests a downward-sloping tail-dragging pre-Renaissance monster, possibly even inspired by the pot-bellied T-rex of Zallinger's Age of Reptiles mural. I wish there was more to see, but that's what we're left with for now. In contrast, we get a very nice view of Rexy's opponent, an adorably retro turtle-tank Ankylosaurus. Like most representations of this dinosaur throughout history, it has much shorter legs than the real thing, and very generic armor representative of no species in particular. I'm not sure where exactly this particular portrayal comes from, though it found widespread exposure with the Sinclair Dinoland exhibition at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
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| Aboard Noah's Ark |
Next up we have a scene of daily life aboard Noah's Ark. One of Noah's daughters-in-law guards the feed from a pair of peckish pen-mates, while Noah shoes a horse. In the back, a sauropod of some sort (presumably a Diplodocus or Apatosaurus) snakes its neck into frame after the food, once again obscuring its body from our view. It has a decent skull for a diplodocid, with its nostrils in the correct place, but the teeth extend way too far back into the jaw. This species should only have them in the front of its mouth, as per the leaf-raking feeding strategy employed by its general family. It's a bit small, but the text theorizes that Noah would have only taken juvenile dinosaurs on the ark to save space, so the artist has a reason behind this portrayal.
Also reaching for the food, we have our diplodocid's partner-in-crime, a Wooly Mammoth. From what little we can see, its appearance seems generally correct, though its hair seems somewhat sparser than normally predicted. It could instead represent one of the less wooly varieties of mammoths, but considering it also seems somewhat under-sized, we can probably assume the artist means to represent a juvenile here as well.
Darting about the young woman's feet, conspicuously placed opposite a pair of chickens, is Mr. Chicken-Sized Dinosaur himself, Compsagnathus! In a very quintessentially pre-Renaissance pose, our Compy careens about with arms flailing in the air, attempting to compensate for the fact that although his tail remains lifted off the ground, he has thrown out his back in attempt to conform to a more retro appearance like a good little dinosaur from the awkward transition years of the 1980's.
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| A monster-clawed Brachiosaurus |
We only get a single prehistoric critter in this next image: a glorious Brachiosaurus proudly surveying the countryside! Actually, he could use a little work. He's got a pretty gnarly head, with all sort of pockmarks that I assume the artist intended to represent the various fenestrae of the dinosaur's skull. The feet deserve particular attention as well. If you know any Latin, you know that "sauropod" means "lizard-foot", an odd name for a family of dinosaurs known primarily for their long necks. Nomenclatural peculiarities aside, this sauropod at least lives up to the family name, with very lizardy, practically dragon-like hands and claws. However, by this point in history, scientists had known for some time that sauropods had columnar, elephant-like hands, with the individual fingers completely invisible within the flesh. This makes the sauropod family name, and this particular image, all the more odd.
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| Groovy, man! |
We end with a bang today on our final image, a rather psychedelic painting depicting animals boarding the ark past as ziggurat. The stylization is so heavy here that I'm not going to try to be at all comprehensive with this one. Blah blah, we already know the dinosaurs are inaccurately depicted as tail-draggers, etc. The only one I can't forgive is that ornithomimid on the right, behind the tarsier. The same artist depicted it with tail raised on the cover; the least we can ask for is a little consistency. Anyway, the more interesting points of this picture are moseying on the far left. Here we see a pair of trunked, giraffe-like Macrauchenia and a pair of rhino-like Arsinotherium, frustratingly unidentified anywhere in the text. I remember being blown away by the weirdness of the Macrauchenia, and getting really upset when I had no idea how to find out what the heck they were. Again, not too much to say on their accuracy, given the stylization. The horns on the Arsinotherium seem a little too small and cow-like, and the Macrauchenia look perhaps a little too much like ALF, but otherwise they seem decent enough compared to the other creatures in the painting.
Well, that all for this time. As I mentioned before, this book goes on much longer than I've detailed here, but the rest of it consists largely of photos documented real-life expeditions to find out whether Noah's Ark still rests on Mount Ararat. As I'm mainly concerned with the accuracy of the paleoart in these books, I nixed the Ark Expedition stuff in the interest of time. I hope you enjoyed the images, and I hope to review yet another book sometime soon!
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