Mesozoic Mind

Phew, sorry for the hiatus folks! I had other stuff to work on (to varying degrees of success), but I'm back and mesozoic Mind is going back to the late 2000s with a picture book about what else? The Mesozoic. A Year in the World of Dinosaurs is a book by Elizabeth Havercroft and cobsulted on by Bristol's Michael Benton released around 2008 and '09 as part of the Time Goes By series, those picture books from libraries showing timelapses of certain places kids would like. In this case, Late Jurassic US. We start with a basic introduction. But we can skip it. The book begins proper with with showing the birth of some  diplodocus . Naturally, the coelurosaur Ornitholestes comes to eat them, while Brachiosaurus are nearby. Sounds like a familar setup .... though funnily enough, the open is more akin to what we know sauropods did nest (or at least some, like titanosaurs). Next, as summer starts and the baby diplos are growing up, though the main focus is directed to a  Stegosa...

Happy New Year everyone! 2024 has fully begun, and admittedly i'm just waiting for it to end already. But that's not what we're here to discuss. Rather, we are doing something more fun and upbeat: looking at childhood memories! Last month, my parents were cleaning the basement, and they found stashed in a cat litter box, books we had put there years ago. What caught my attention were several books I had not read in years as I rummaged through it for fun. Surprise surprise, they were the ones about palaentology and dinosaurs, picture books and a magazine, and I immediately took them and reading them, even after the other books got donated to a thrift store. They came from the Paulian and Beebian ages of the 1990s and early 2000s when children-oriented books like them were all the rage and just about every book had something original to it So we're gonna take a look at some of them to start the year off, just as we look back on our lives and choices at the start of year. ...

Happy halloween season, reader! Say, remember these books? It's easier if you were born and/or raised in the 90's or early 2000's, but to those born later then that, allow me to introduce them to you. These are the Looking At... Dinosaurs books . They are all illustrated by Tony Gibbons, and written by a body that included authors Heather Amery, Tamara Green, Frances Freedman, Mike Brown, and Jenny Vaughn. Finally, Cambridge's David Norman was the consultant for the book series, while Gareth Stevens Publishing published the books; they also did other series like it, covering topics like animal victims of the Anthropocene Extinction and arthropods. Each of the books follows a typical formula. There are a few deviations in order from book to book, but they mostly go: The introduction to the genus A size comparison spread A spread with the skeleton of the subject. An illustration of the dinosaur in its time. Two or three freespace pages that vary by subject, often seeming ...

The atlas is one of the many ways dinosaur books have been organised, going from continent to continent and highlighting the genera and fossil find of each of them. To my knowledge, it became common in the 80's and 90's during the height of the Dinosaur Renaissance and into the 21st century, as new discoveries were being made and revaluated in the southern hemisphere and Asia that expanded views in palaeontological beyond just North America and Europe (although funding for research is still confined to those two, because imperialism), and into the 2000's. Today we will look at one such example, 2007's  The Kingfisher First Dinosaur Picture Atlas , written by nature writer David Burnie, who usually writes about extant life, most prominently for the  Eyewitness  series, and published by Kingfisher, a pretty big purveyor of books like these. The book's art meanwhile is by Anthony Lewis , who has done more in a series of similar childrens' atlases for Kingfisher. I ...