#dinomania

[jpnostalgia]

Vintage Dinosaur Books 40s-90s

[vermilllionsands]

Winsor Mccay - Dinomania

[gamechestgames]

Just Finished: Dino Crisis 3

Imagine Jurassic Park, with a Stargate plot and setting, and a bunch of Die Hard punchlines... Cheesy as f*ck right? No, it' worse because the gameplay camera transitions are terrible a great to provide us a Game Over screen! Oh but the visuals are stunning, that's on the spot!

[man-creates-dinosaurs]

Finished two books today that I started back at the beginning of January, one fiction and one non-fiction.

The first was A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS: A MEMOIR BY LADY TRENT (2013, Tor Books) by Marie Brennan. I’ve been curious about this series for a while as I’m always on the lookout for a dragon story which isn’t anchored in a Tolkein-style fantasy setting - because I’m not a fan of Tolkein-style fantasy settings. The MEMOIRS OF LADY TRENT series is set in an alternate version of the 19th-Century in which dragons are real biological animals, but ones which are poorly understood. The protagonist, Lady Trent or as she’s known in this novel Isabella Camherst, is an aspiring dragon naturalist who disreguard’s society’s expectations for a 19-year-old upper-middle class Scirland girl and heads off for the mountains of Vystrana to lean about the lives of rock-wyrms. Like Hiromu Arakawa’s FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST or Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER, this book is also set in a world which is clearly our world but going under a variety of pseudonyms; so Scirland = England, Vystrana = Romania and so on. Also Judaism appears to be the dominate religion instead of Christianity. Overall I really enjoyed this novel, with the only downside being that the middle becomes a bit of a Scooby-Doo episode for a minute which seemed rather contrived and silly. I look forward, at some point in the near future, to reading the other books in this series.

The second book was DINOMANIA: WHY WE LOVE, FEAR AND ARE UTTERLY ENCHANTED BY DINOSAURS (2018, Reaktion Books) by Boria Sax. Sax is a lecturer at Mercy College who specializes in human-animal relations. This, his latest book, is very much a continuation of the project started by scholar W.J.T. Mitchell back in 1998 when he published THE LAST DINOSAUR BOOK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A CULTURAL ICON (U of Chicago Press) which endeavored to ask why we’re so fascinated with dinosaurs. I’ve done a lot of reading on this topic and taught a class centered around it so honestly the first 150-pages or so of this book felt like a review. It was after that however that things got interesting. This is where Sax begins directly responding to Mitchell’s theories and poking some pretty substantial holes in them. Substantial enough that I’m going to go back and re-read Mitchell for the umpteenth time. Sax also delves into some issues I haven’t seen addressed before, one particularly interesting one was the idea that the term “dinosaur” is really part of a folk-taxonomy more so then a useful piece of scientific nomenclature. He also discusses dinomania in relation to cryptozoology and young-earth creationism which are two points I feel are often overlooked. Also while Sax doesn’t directly address the recent “awesomebro” controversy surrounding dinosaurs he does say some things about dinosaurs and paleontology that I think are important for that conversation. Ultimately, Sax describes our love of dinosaurs as the greatest one-sided relationship in the history of life on earth. Not only will dinosaurs never reciprocate our love for them, they disappeared never even knowing we would exist! I strongly recommend Sax’s book for anyone interested in this topic and imagine that if this is your first dive into the subject of dinosaur sociology you’ll probably find the whole thing fascinating from start to finish.

[podunkesaurus]

Mark Dion Exhibition by Peter Eimon Via Flickr: Toys ’R’ U.S. (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) Mark Dion 1994

[iknowdino]

This Week in Dinosaur #News: A new #Amargasaurus relative and an #amber-preserved #dinosaur foot The new dinosaur Bajadasaurus, with some amazing spines on its neckfrom doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37943-3 Here's what came out this week in dinosaur news:

[androgynosaurus]

a few weeks back we went to Bristol Zoo and I spent more time with the animatronic dinosaurs than the actual live animals

[kino-rogers]

Definitely the highlight of today! Bradley was even sweet enough to hold still for a picture, he’s a right cutie!!