Old School Palaeoart

SHARPTOOTH!!!

I thought I was going to be the first to post from Land Before Time but obviously not.


This was an excellent musical number though.

I'm gonna have to hook my scanner back up tonight, I have a ton of old dinosaur books.

I found an old book in the library called 'A natural history of dinosaurs'. It dates from 1977, so the art in it is an interesting mix of old and new theories (for once it refutes the idea of sauropods needing to live in swamps, and so all its sauropods defiantly stroll about on land).


I've noticed that Megalosaurus is always done as this hunched-over predator in older palaeoart. The accompanying text states that it lived from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous periods, an idea spawned from the use of Megalosaurus as a 'wastebasket taxon', i.e. a lot of big theropods were dumped into the genus Megalosaurus.


A lot of depictions of Archaopteryx have something attacking it, likely a reference to Knight's artwork of Onitholestes attacking it. Here, Compsognathus fills the role.


IMMA GONNA KICK YOU IN THE FACE


Believe it or not, this is supposed to be Velociraptor. According to the text, it was only classified as a dromaosaur recently (by 1977 standards of recently, anyway). Hence the lack of killing claws.


Before a certain movie came along in 2001, 'bipedal Dimetrodon' was the popular image of Spinosaurus. The bipedal aspects weren't often illustrated-the book suggests that the 'sturdy front legs' of Spinosaurus indicated that it was a quadruped some of the time.


I can imagine this image going memetic.


I'm sorry, Anatosaurus, I can't hear you over the sound of SYNONYMOUS WITH EDMONTOSAURUS.

In regards to the evolution of dinosaurs in art from monsters to allegedly 'romanticised' images, I think it's much less 'romanticism' and more that we know much more about dinosaurs and their places in the ecosystems of their times. They're less prehistoric monsters and more like the animals that they were.

While a lot of old art (specifically pieces done by Knight, Zallinger, et al.) has its charms, I do prefer contemporary art on the whole, given the focus on accurately reconstructing the world of dinosaurs, instead of whacking them in generic deserts like most of the above images.

The issue is that they have been glamourised, if not necessarily *romanticised*; the modern portrayal of dinosaurs as scrawny, supercharged, oversized hummingbirds is just the old tail dragging swamp-dweller dogma taken in the opposite direction. To me it comes across more as an artistic rebellion against the old status quo that became the status quo through imitation.

Studies on dinosaur anatomy and metabolism and brain structure since the "Dinosaur Renissance" have shown that, while not the sluggish mistakes of nature they were thought of as during the early 20th century, they've often overestimated how active, slim and intelligent dinosaurs likely were (for instance, the study on tail musculature I linked to earlier.) To me, it seems that the truth is probably somewhere inbetween and I'd like to see more paleoart that reflects that.

Something more akin to these beasties you posted earlier, right?

Okay, I know I'm replying here to a post that's a year old, but it's in a currently active thread, and besides it's exactly a year old [EDIT: Well, it's March 9 where I am, no matter what the date on the forum says], which makes it okay to reply to according to an insane quasilogical argument that I don't plan to ever use again.

Anyway, though, it just stunned me that this sentence got by here without anyone challenging it. Jurassic Park may have had style, but for accuracy I'd give it at best a C minus. And that's being generous.

Yes, Jurassic Park popularized the formerly obscure Velociraptor. Sort of. But what it actually popularized was the name "Velociraptor", and got it associated with a made-up dinosaur that bore very little resemblance to what the Velociraptor actually looked like.

I'm not talking about the feathers. The fact that Velociraptors had feathers wasn't known then, so they get a pass on that. What they don't get a pass on is making the Velociraptor way, way too big. How tall were the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park? Maybe about human height? How tall were real Velociraptors? Oh, a little over a foot and a half. Yeah, seriously. They were about six or seven feet long from head to the tip of the tail, but half of that was tail, and it probably had a horizontal posture, so, yeah, the head of a real Velociraptor would be about level with the average adult human's kneecap. Maybe slightly higher, but definitely not above thigh level. Plus, the Jurassic Park Velociraptor's head shape is completely wrong. Actual Velociraptors had kind of a weird, skinnier, bent-upward snout quite different from the generic "Let's just give it a Tyrannosaurus head, but smaller" look of the Jurassic Park creatures. Also their tails were wrong, and their forelimbs, and pretty much their everything.

(Some sort of defense could be offered in that some paleontologists did for a while lump Deinonychus into the Velociraptor genus, and Deinonychus was larger than Velociraptor (and had a head shape closer to the movie's Velociraptors). But even for Deinonychus, the movie's Velociraptors were still way too big, though not by quite so large a margin. And even for Deinonychus, the tail and forelimbs were completely wrong. Besides, while I don't recall if the movie specifically mentions the species of the Velociraptors, the book does, and it's not the species now called Deinonychus.)

There are other major issues, too, but in general, suffice to say... yeah. "Jurassic Park" and "accuracy" don't really go together.

Not to mention that although they had big brains for dinosaurs, they weren't much smarter than a chicken . . .

Revenge of the Raptors

Exactly how smart were 'raptors'? Cause depending on the source, I've heard they were anywhere from being as smart as chickens to as smart as dogs...

Not counting Jurassic park, which made them out to be as smart as monkeys.

Here is a link show off some the art of BW Hawkings
http://forbiddenmusic.wordpress.com/2008/0...rtist/hawkins1/
I also had some of these old dinosuar trading crads
http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/preh...ctoptrumpsindex.
This person has some cool old school dino art
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anatotitan/se...57622752730315/

Can't say that I like the colour scheme (it would be okay if not for the head,) but in terms of build and posing, this restoration, based on recent research about dinosaur mass and anatomy, is a good middle ground between the old school style and the dinosaur renniasance style.

Oh God the skin on his head has been removed

He's a dinosaur version of red skull?

No, no, clearly it's a dino-krenshar.

(By the way, Googling "krenshar" to find an image to link to got some... unexpected results. Huh.)

Hm, it looks a bit odd. The legs seem kinda small compared to the size of of the body. I'm having hard time imagining it being able do walk without falling over.

*Shrugs* Well, the leg porportions are more or less accurate. This is the skeleton the illustration was based on: