The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs (1995)

The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs by David Lambert (1995) from Bloomsbury Books was one of many dinosaur books I had as a kid - however, this one was memorable not only for its many, many dramatic illustrations of species both familiar and obscure, but because it contained a scant few pages about dinosaurs in media. Thought brief, this section was one of the few sources of information I had back then as to the history of dinosaurs in film and literature, and I can't express just how much these few morsels whetted my desire to track down all the works within!

 This page is from a 'Dinosaurs in Art' section. These four pictures are (1) The great Charles R. Knight's 1926 drawing of a Protoceratops from the Field Museum of Natural History (2) a sauropod by the also-legendary Zdenek Burian from Life Before Man (1972), (3) Allosaurus by Maurice Wilson from The Story of Prehistoric Animals (1961) and (4) Torosaurus by Neave Parker from the Illustrated London News (no date given). Incidentally, I was browsing through my copy of The Art of Ray Harryhausen recently and was surprised to realise that not only was Charles R. Knight still alive and working in the 1940s, but that Harryhausen, as a young man, used to phone him up in his New York apartment overlooking Central Park, and chat about dinosaurs. For some reason I had always assumed Knight had been a a master from an earlier age.

Also in this section, we get some then-modern examples of 'dinosaur renaissance' imagery, with a lively, spritely-looking Deinonychus by Robert Bakker from 1969 (sporting a decidedly wrinkly neck) and an ostrich-like Ornithomimus from Greg Paul's (in)famous Predatory Dinosaurs of the World from 1988 (yes, the one that created the Deinonychus/Velociraptor confusion in the Jurassic Park novel).

 They're flocking this way!

This was when the book really started blowing my mind: for some reason, my imagination was absolutely fired by these half-glimpses of olde-worlde dinosaur literature. The alien interior world conjured up by the Stegosaurus skeleton and the giant fungi! I can now tell by the font that this is a reprint of Verne from the Amazing Stories pulp magazine. It was serialised in Vol 1 Nos 2-4, translated by F.A. Malleson, with the names of some characters changed (Professor Lidenbrock becomes Professor Harwigg). The picture is by the great pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul, and I have dropped a better image of it below. Conan Doyle's The Lost World is of course here from its original publication in The Strand magazine in 1912 - it was a real coup when I finally found a copy of this when I was about 13. This comic version of Tarzan the Terrible (just snagged myself a version of the novel in its Ballantine edition!) is from a newspaper strip published between 1931 and 1932 and drawn by Rex Mason. Gotta love that dopey-looking Triceratops.

 These tiny, low-res reproductions entranced me.

 The human figures are a lil bit goofy.

 

The bottom left image here must have been one of my first exposures to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar series. It's an illustration from the 1922 hardcover edition of At The Earth's Core by J. Allen St John, an artist very much associated with Burroughs. Again, the wonderful original image is worth reprinting, see below. The Amazing Stories cover is for a story called Death of the Moon by Alexander Philips from 1929. In this story, lunar aliens invade Earth in prehistoric times but are defeated by a Tyrannosaurus. The cover image, I'm almost certain, is also by Frank Paul, given the trademark lurid yellow sky and the absurdly-proportioned dino (also see below). I would have killed to have access to stuff like this as a kid! Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet from 1978 is one I now own, and in this exact edition too!

I read and reread these pages all the time

 

 

I was probably a bit too old by the time I finally got to read Burroughs, and found him a bit disappointing

Frank R Paul loved him a uniform yellow or red sky

 

And then, the comics: this is one of the first pages from Thun'da, King Of The Congo, from 1952, drawn by the legendary (lot of legends in this post!) artist Frank Frazetta. I did a podcast about this comic once upon a time. In short, it's about a WW2 pilot who crashes into an African lost world full of dinosaurs, where he becomes a kind of Tarzan figure. When Frazetta's editor instructed him to remove the dinosaurs and turn Thund'da into a generic, regular-jungle Tarzan imitation, Frazetta left the comic. I don't know why an editor would make this request - it's not like it was any extra expense to draw dinosaurs as opposed to lions and tigers. And it's not as if dinosaurs weren't a big draw in the 50s!

Dinosaur terror! Yes please.

 

The first issue of Thun'da, at least, is well worth your time checking out on Internet Archive.

The short-lived Tor was a comic from 1953, drawn by Joe Kubert. It's not one I ever came across again later in life anywhere. The Triceratops looks good, but the two dinosaurs in the first panel definitely give me cheap rubber monster vibes. Turok, Son Of Stone, on the other hand, went on to spawn a rich legacy over many decades, with imitation comics published in Mexico, many reboots, and a video game series (all will receive more attention on this blog at some point) following his original run in Four Colour Comics and Gold Key Comics beginning in 1954. Turok is a Native American who has adventures in a lost world called The Lost Land, located in the American southwest and inspired by the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico. Turok was mostly written by Gaylord Du Bois.

 And now we're off to the movies! Things kick off with this odd drawing of a minimalist couple, dressed in rather a 90s style, musing over a poster for the 1953 Ray Harryhausen film Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which is depicted in a completely different style. Then, we learn about the four main ways in which dinosaurs were generally depicted on film, with some truly awful movie examples for each, and weirdly illustrated by - not film clips - but drawings of film clips. And despite this book being published two years after Jurassic Park had revolutionised movie special effects, and dinosaur effects in particular, there's no mention of CGI at all. Below, we see (a) a generic sauropod meant to represent stop motion animation (I don't think a particular film is being referenced here) and (b) Real lizards made to look big, as in the absolutely z-grade 1955 film King Dinosaur.

 

 Behold King Dinosaur in all his, ahem, glory

Here we have method (c): real animals with bits of horns and fins stuck onto them, as in Irwin Allen's campy 1960 version of The Lost World. We also get method (d) the ever-popular man-in-a-suit dinosaur, represented not by ... ooh, I don't know, Godzilla, but by the obscure 1948 cheapie Unknown Island. At least the artist has managed to accurately depict the sheer awkwardness of these scenes as they actually are.

I desperately wanted to see all these movies too

Here's a shockingly young looking Ray Harryhausen messing about with a Ceratosaurus (I'm guessing it's from 1956's The Animal World) as well as an Allosaurus and Ornithomimus from The Valley of Gwangi. This picture inspired me to make my own stop-motion dinosaur models from plasticine, though it was a few more years before I had access to a camera which could actually do the technique.

And to finish things off, a reminder that although these monsters look huge, they are in reality only the size of a children's toy! I don't know what film this is from, or whether it is just a test shot. It's strange to go back and see how such an impression was made on me by so little - just a few pages with black and white low-res copies of book covers and strange drawings of film clips. But it set me on a quest of many years, to track down as many of these properties as I could!