The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: 1980s dino books!

With this post, I'm now into the second year of this feature, and we've already run the gamut of size, shape, dates and styles, from the patchisaurs to generic Godzilla to outdated spinosaurs to the Walmart zombie/ cyborg T. rex. This time, I'm truly breaking new ground with a dinosaur book. It's something I might sooner have started a new feature for, but this is one thing that definitely belonged here. It's no less than a compilation of possibly the most notorious pop culture paleontology books of all time. They were criticized back then, they've been ridiculed ever since, but are they really "that bad"? Well, this time, you can judge the book pretty well by its covers. 

This, for the uninitiated, is a compilation of a series known as the Rourke Dinosaur Library, a series of picture books that flooded libraries in the middling to late 1980s. Like the Crestwood House monster movie books, everybody seems to have read them, except enough people must have kept them that they're still quite cheap. Now, you might notice at the start that the title is Dinosaurs of the Land, Sea And Air, where most flying and swimming Mesozoic creatures were not dinosaurs. In fact, these books do pretty well cover what is or is not a dinosaur, as well as the different eras in which the dinosaurs lived. It can also be fairly deduced that the science was a bit dated even for the 1980s, though not as much as the nearly submerged sauropods might suggest. At any rate, I personally read armloads of these when I was a kid, enough that on at least one occasion the librarians said I couldn't have any more, and even I was satisfied with their credentials. Here's a preview of the opening of the first "chapter".

Moving onto the details, this book is a collection of 10 of about 40 books created for the series. The publisher's information says Modern Publishing, and gives a parent company Unisystems, Inc, which sounds more like an '80s computer company. The copyrights for the individual books show 1981, 1984 and 1986. The contents of the collection are Allosaurus, Archeopteryx, Brontosaurus, Chasmosaurus, Dimorphodon, Hypsilophodon, Ichthyosaurus,  Iguanodon, Mamenchisaurus and Triceratops. At one point, I had two of the books and at least one more in uncollected form for my very own, but I long since traded them all. In hindsight, the only reason I regret the decision is that the binding on the present volume has long since given out. An odd feature is that the compilation still includes the inside flaps of the original books, which advertised other books in the series and apparently a few that were never written. Here's another of these mocking teasers.

Something that will be apparent just from the teasers is that there was a lot of variation in quality. The Allosaurus story opens the volume with a showcase of the lesser talent, an author named Ron Wilson and an illustrator Doreen Edwards. The story follows an old, slow allosaur struggling to catch her next meal. From actual scientific evidence, the species was reasonably social, and may have shared food with sick or injured individuals. Here, however, the starving elder carnosaur is chased away from the few meals that present themselves and finally killed and eaten by two other members of her own species. And they don't even say she was a mean old dino who stomped baby protopossums on purpose! Here's the "highlights" of the artwork.

The team of Wilson and Edwards are also credited with the Hypsilophodon and Ichthyosaurus stories. The latter is pretty good, but I still have to find something to make fun of.

"Go home, Mr. Spielberg is done taking auditions!"

 Meanwhile, the backbone of the volume is the team of  author Rupert Oliver and illustrator Bernard Long. Their contributions include Archaeopteryx, Chasmosaurus (source of the opening pic) and Iguanadon. Oliver is also the author of Dimorphodon and Memenchisaurus. Here's pics of their handiwork. I might have done more from the Iguanadon book, but I already have more pics than usual and I found a very good overview at Love In The Time of Chasmosaurus.

We don't need to show no stinking resonating chamber!

Wait, we just want to share the Gospel of John Hammond!

And what's this?... A Troodon! But is he trendy???

And here's a couple pics from the other books by Oliver. Here's one from Dimorphodon, about as cool as the others, though with an uncharacteristic anachronism. At least it's possible some Jurassic creature evolved to look like a synapsid from before the dinosaurs.

Then there's this. I made fun of the outdated brachiosaur above, but I simply have no words here.

Still, the centerpiece for me is the Brontosaurus book/ chapter, the source of the opening pic and one of the ones I know I had as a "single". It's written by Angela Sheehan, also credited for Triceratops, with illustrations by one Colin Newman. Both are dated 1981, making them the earliest in the collection. To me, this book represents what was good about the series. The dinos look stylized and a little old-school even for the 1980s, but the landscapes they are in are rich and beautiful. Here's another pic; I'm really holding myself back here.

Naturally, the books always had a "facts" segment at the end. Oddly, these were included in the compilation but lumped together at the end, along with a glossary listing the various minor creatures. Here's an example of the horror.

Returning to the series as a whole, this was one of two compilations released around 1988, the other being titled Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures. A volume titled The Rourke's Dinosaur Dictionary was also released in 1988. The bulk of the collected storybooks appear to date from 1984 to 1986. The series reportedly continued through at least 1989, with a vast drop in quality if available dates are anywhere near accurate. The rain of coprolite corresponds 100% with the arrival of a Pam Mara as illustrator, who was "credited" with a mind-boggling 12 books. Somehow, one or more masochists compiled the full run of the series at Dinopedia, and Mara's work appears first and often thereafter. These are quite possibly the worst dino-related media I have ever encountered. Mercifully, I don't really remember these, possibly because I was already aging out of the series a little. Yet, there's also this... how does a work of this caliber get ahead of the Jurassic Park franchise???

And in case you haven't had enough pics, here's some kid-friendly graphic violence!

What are you gonna do? It's dino town.

"I'm just standing right here, totally not my fault."

"Forget sexual display, we did nothing to encourage this."

Now, it's well past time to wrap this up. What I can say looking through this is that I absolutely find these books better than their reputation. If nothing else, they introduced a lot of kids to dinosaurs and paleontology, including the smaller dinos and creatures that had long been pushed to the edges by the iconic giants. On a more fundamental level, they demonstrate that there's more to "good" paleo art than the latest science. It's neither good science nor good storytelling to look at any creature without also considering the world it lived in. That is exactly where these books not only did things right but excelled, placing their titular dinosaurs in well-executed, fully fleshed-out environments. Best of all, they could take the "background" creatures, the small carnosaurs, the insectivores and the protobirds (I think Archaeopteryx appears as often in other stories as its own book), and make them as interesting and memorable as the big guys. Like many things, it wasn't meant to be "great", but it was a step in the right direction. Even now, it should be a lesson to those who think that a bigger, flashier monster is all they need to be interesting. And with that, here's one more pic as a tribute to the series and era.

That's all for now, more to come!