It didn’t matter that they lived tens of millions of years apart – it was post-Crystal Palace tradition, and in the UK, tradition trumps almost everything else. Ever.īack in the day, Iguanodon and Megalosaurus always travelled together. This is the reason no one is allowed to draw Iguanodon with a dewlap ever again. Iguanodon (although at least the animal’s given slightly bigger hands).

It also features a sadly predictable number of outright copies, such as this Parker-style

Sadly, after featuring such a gorgeous spread, the book reverts to the standard ‘animal profiles’ format for the majority of its length. The plants look great, and best of all, the whole thing just appears so believable. For example, the very Neave Parker-like Iguanodon-thing stands out a mile, but I hadn’t even spotted the small group of dinosaurs in the middle of the scene until I started writing this paragraph. It also really rewards closer inspection. It’s excellent at drawing the viewer into the scene through the use of varying topography, foliage, and animals depicted as mere components of a larger ecosystem. We don’t get enough of this sort of thing, these days, although Mark Witton’s got a couple of lovely covers in this vein under his belt.Įqually lovely is this spread depicting The World of the Dinosaurs. Its fat arse and tail do spill over on to the back cover, but I prefer viewing the front cover alone. It’s an excellent choice – an animal that instantly evokes the Age of Dinosaurs, cropped down to form an effective composition, and posed beautifully. I rather like the cover, featuring as it does a very retro – but superbly detailed – illustration of Stegosaurus, wonderfully lit and understated. In this case, Barry Driscoll is on hand to provide the expected Parker-like illustrations, although there’s at least one nice surprise along the way.ĭigging for Dinosaurs was first published in 1962 by The Bodley Head, which is now a cog in the Penguin Random House megapublisher machine. In any case, and as his Wikipedia page notes, Swinton’s ideas on dinosaur palaeobiology were doggedly old-fashioned, and the illustrations in his books inevitably reflected this, regardless of the artist. I reviewed it around seven and a half years ago (yikes), although that review isn’t very good, so perhaps you should just check out my review of his Dinosaurs of Canada instead.

A Scottish palaeontologist who had a berth at the London NHM before moving to Canada, Swinton is probably best known among palaeoart aficionados for writing an official NHM book on dinosaurs, featuring Neave Parker artwork, that was reprinted again and again – long after the science in it had been rendered completely obsolete. Welcome back, at long last, to the wonderful world of vintage dinosaur books authored by Professor William Elgin Swinton, typically credited as simply W.

Dinosaur text art copy paste