After so many trips back to the '80s and '90s, it's good to return to a book that's properly vintage. Dinosaurs was number 355 in the impressively diverse Little Golden Book series from Golden Press of New York, and was published in 1959...
After so many trips back to the '80s and '90s, it's good to return to a book that's properly vintage. Dinosaurs was number 355 in the impressively diverse Little Golden Book series from Golden Press of New York, and was published in 1959. It was a simpler time, when a kids' dinosaur book could be purchased for a mere 25 cents, and palaeoart consisted of lush forests, erupting volcanoes, and giant lizards...all too literally.For you see, while the illustrator William de J. Rutherfoord was clearly an immensely talented individual - just take a gander at the beautifully painted cover art, with its murky, ashen sky and vibrant, surprisingly dynamic dinosaurs - he was a little prone to quite literally applying lizards' heads to dinosaurs' bodies. The cover provides one such illustration, with the noggin of a slightly perturbed-looking small lizard grafted atop the body of a generic sauropod. It looks bizarre to say the least, especially given that the chasing tyrannosaur appears to have the head of, you know, a tyrannosaur. The anatomical mash-up makes the book an entertaining read, though, as you can never quite be sure when a lizard-headed beastie will pop up next.In the tradition of countless dinosaur books before and since, the reader is taken on a (mostly) chronologically ordered trip through the ages, with illustrations of and snippets of text on the various animals to be found at different points in Earth's history. As such, the crocodylomorph Saltoposuchus makes an appearance early on - slightly ill-proportioned, but with lovely skin textures and patterns. For whatever reason, it's depicted standing next to the much later dinosaur Compsognathus, itself sporting a shrunken head and extra lizardy digits; it may be that the illustrator intended the animal to be Procompsognathus, but it ended up mislabelled. Regardless, these are very conventional depictions for the time, which makes what follows all the more baffling...Now, prior to the Dinosaur Renaissance, artists had a habit of interpreting dinosaurs' anatomy somewhat...loosely. Not only were the dinosaurs' obviously mightily muscular limbs reduced to weedy stilts propping up exaggeratedly blobby frames, but features like skulls were often smoothed over or their shapes changed in order to be closer to living reptiles, and in particular lizards like monitors. In this sense, Rutherfoord's approach can be seen as a particularly extreme example of an artistic convention, but...really? An iguana? For Allosaurus? Really!?! As already noted with the cover, what's strangest of all is the lack of consistency - even in the very same illustration, as the wonderfully knobbly Stegosaurus is entirely normal (even rather good) by contemporary standards. On the other hand, images like this wouldn't be so fantastically bizarre if Rutherfoord wasn't so good at painting, well, lizards - it's the realism evident in the iguana head that makes this image all the more amusing.Continuing with the theme, we see here two suspiciously serpentine sauropods - the Diplodocus in particular looks like a snake that's swallowed a decapitated elephant. That said, the vibrant skin patterns - at a time when sauropods were inevitably depicted as dull in every sense - are a very welcome change from the norm, and really help enliven this otherwise quite static (and somewhat familiar-looking) scene. And speaking of the familiar-looking...It's good ol' snorkelling Brachiosaurus again, here described as having the evasive habits of a cartoon ostrich - again, though, the bright-green-with-yellow-stripes look is just fabulous. Darling. I can't help but feel that an opportunity was missed for a rhyme here...There was Brachiosaurus, biggest of all.Massed fifty tons and was forty feet tall!But he couldn't run. He couldn't fight.Instead he went waltzing, all thro' the night.Or, you know. Something like that.Entering the Cretaceous, we encounter the usual suspects, all of which look rather conventional - there's a none-too