Mesozoic Mind

 Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, let's try something new and delve into the work of a particular palaeoartist. Specifically, one who you may not know by name but may know his artstyle.  Joe Tucciarone is not exactly well known as his contemporaries from the tail end of the Dinosaur Renaissance, but if you see his art anywhere, chances are you'll know it. I sure do, as my family used to have a placemat just like the one pictured above. Whether it was on other merchendise, books, or online in edgy tribute AMVs, Joe's dinosaurs were everywhere. Look at them on his (now-archived) website  and see how many you recognise. The man himself Joe himself (at least according to his website) is an Ohio resident born in 1953 (and likely Italian-American) who specialises in space art as much as palaeoart (he loves both), getting his start at the Memphis Museum's (presumably the Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium - is that right Memphians?) planeterium in 1978, and wh...

While humans have been digging up fossils of prehistoric life (not just dinosaurs alone) and interpreting them for literally thousands of years and interpreting them, it's only been relatively recently in the 1800's onwards that human societies have understood them for what they are, and have created works centred on them, known as Palaeo-Media, from art of them, to literature, to film and television, to video games. In the last 20 years it could be argued there have been more of them made then in the last 100 years combined. It is here I propose a list of the periods of palaeo-media has seen so far and how each of them relates to the social values and events of their era. Worth noting is that the stratigraphy presented here isn't understood in the way clearly (more or less) defined layers of rocks or periods of time are, but rather as boxes within one another a la cladistic charts (hence the lack of specific dates), and previous periods can still last decades if not centur...