“They’re not monsters, Lex. They’re just animals.” Dr. Alan Grant I had the opportunity this week to see Jurassic Park (1993) in the theater for the first time since I was in elementary school. The Steven Spielberg blockbuster was presented as part of series of “cult classics.” Considering the original success of the film and…
Author: Luke-Elizabeth
The Last Dinosaur Book
W. J. T. Mitchell begins The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (University of Chicago Press, 1998) by hypothesizing a post-human future, when visitors from another galaxy — imagined as erect bipedal reptiles — arrive on earth and attempt to reconstruct human life from the fossil remains. To these visitors,…
Dinomania
“To make sense of phenomena like dinomania, we need to understand ‘dinosaur’ broadly as a construction in which palaeontologists are not the sole arbiters.” (p. 238) Boria Sax is a professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College and is known for his writing on human-animal relations. In Dinomania: Why We Love, Fear…
Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs
I happened upon a digital version of the The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2nd ed., 2016) in the New School Library collection. The author and illustrator, Gregory S. Paul is a dinosaur illustrator and independent researcher. As a reference book, the bulk of the text is, as the title suggests, field guide-style listing of…
All Yesterdays
All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (Irregular Books, 2012) is a small art book by vertebrate paleontologist Darren Naish and paleoartists John Conway and C. M. Kosemen. When the book was first released in 2012, it got a lot of attention online on the “speculative” illustrations of extant animals….
Articulating Dinosaurs
Brian Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. One area of Noble’s research is the anthropology of science, techniques and expertise. Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (University of Toronto Press, 2016) explores how scientific knowledge and public practices intersect to articulate dinosaur natures. Noble begins by…
Palaeocast
I came across the podcast Palaeocast through Episode 30: Palaeoart which featured an interview with Julius Csotonyi, two-time winner of the Lanzendorf-National Geographic PaleoArt Prize, awarded by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. I listened to that and a few other episodes in a similar vein: Episode 80: Paleocreations, which featured an interview with paleoartist Robert…
Wild Safari: Prehistoric World
Safari Ltd was established in 1982 and describes their products as “Toys that teach.” While Safari Ltd does produce lines of mythological creatures and dragons, the majority of the company’s toys are extant and extinct animals. The toys themselves are relatively simple plastic figures, but are notable in that they are hand-painted and in their…
Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians
Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians Ricardo Delgado Dark Horse, 2016
Age of Reptiles
Age of Reptiles Omnibus Ricardo Delgado Dark Horse, 2011