I think it’s All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. Looked really interesting to me but I was never able to find a paper copy.
I saw a thing about a controversy over colorizing photos. What do you guys think? I don't really have enough information to have an opinion, but it reminded me a bit about some paleoart discussions I've seen...it's almost certain dinosaurs had bright colors and did all sorts of stuff we can't see directly in the fossil record, but we don't know exactly what those things were. You can draw a gray dinosaur just standing there and be fairly sure you aren't providing any inaccurate information...but also be fairly sure you aren't giving people the right idea of what dinosaurs would really have been like. Or you can add in some color and likely behaviors and be sure you have the details wrong...but might be providing a more accurate impression of the overall way the animal would have been.
I see both kinds of art used in different contexts, ranging from simple black outlines in papers to All Yesterdays which might be the best solution.
Is there anything like the paleoart community for historical art?
Also, in this era of violated norms, it's nice to see the administration hewing so tightly to the historical norm of being vague and sketchy about the president's health status
These illustrations are from a book called All Yesterdays where they explain how a lot of paleontological illustrations of the past largely just shrink wrapped skin around the musculature (easier to determine based on bone position) and failed to account for soft tissue (fat, cartilage, etc) and uses the reimagining of familiar animals to demonstrate how lacking that approach can be. They also try to add those features to dinosaurs to change our ideas of what they might have looked like.
When sexually aroused, excited or unable to find available members of their own kind, animals mate with members of other species with surprising regularity. Incidents of this sort are probably more common than generally realised, and there is evidence from the modern world that they occur increasingly during times of environmental stress or as populations become reduced or brought together due to changing conditions. When the species concerned are closely related, hybrid babies can be the result: numerous such cases are known from the modern world. However, matings between distantly-related species also occur in the wild. These seem to serve no function other than to relieve the frustration or boredom of at least one of the participants. As unsettling as they may seem, such acts may even be considered to bepart of the animal's play behavior. In one especially celebrated recent case, an apparently frustrated Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella ) copulated with a King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus ). It is well known that modern elephants are prone to a sort of seasonal sexual madness when they go through a phase of heightened sexual aggression termed musth. While in musth, elephants have been observed trying to forcefully mate with members of different species, such as rhinos.
We combined ideas about interspecies mating events with both the possibility of oversized sexual organs and of a seasonal 'sexual madness'. The result: a bull Stegosaurus trying to mount an innocent Haplocanthosaurus . In order to mate with females bearing a phalanx of dangerous spines and armored plates, we imagined male stegosaurs to have developed some of the largest and most frighteningly dextrous penises of the dinosaur world.
Source: All Yesterdays Book by C.M. Kösemen, Darren Naish, and John Conway
When sexually aroused, excited or unable to find available members of their own kind, animals mate with members of other species with surprising regularity. Incidents of this sort are probably more common than generally realised, and there is evidence from the modern world that they occur increasingly during times of environmental stress or as populations become reduced or brought together due to changing conditions. When the species concerned are closely related, hybrid babies can be the result: numerous such cases are known from the modern world. However, matings between distantly-related species also occur in the wild. These seem to serve no function other than to relieve the frustration or boredom of at least one of the participants. As unsettling as they may seem, such acts may even be considered to bepart of the animal's play behavior. In one especially celebrated recent case, an apparently frustrated Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella ) copulated with a King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus ). It is well known that modern elephants are prone to a sort of seasonal sexual madness when they go through a phase of heightened sexual aggression termed musth. While in musth, elephants have been observed trying to forcefully mate with members of different species, such as rhinos.
We combined ideas about interspecies mating events with both the possibility of oversized sexual organs and of a seasonal 'sexual madness'. The result: a bull Stegosaurus trying to mount an innocent Haplocanthosaurus . In order to mate with females bearing a phalanx of dangerous spines and armored plates, we imagined male stegosaurs to have developed some of the largest and most frighteningly dextrous penises of the dinosaur world.
​
Source: All Yesterdays Book by C.M. Kösemen, Darren Naish, and John Conway
Rex's vision based movement, while ludicrous, was fine for the time, since no one had really looked at a tyrannosaur braincase or done a detailed study of tyrannosaurid eyesight. Is it incredibly stupid in hindsight? Yes, yes it is. But we were still coming out of the dark days of dinosaur research, and the mammalian bias was (and still is, for a lot of people) strong. It makes sense in that context they would give the tyrannosaur such a primitive "reptilian" trait.
Gregory S. Paul, someone who was very influential to Michael Crichton when he was writing the original novel, suggested that Deinonychus was a species of Velociraptor in "Predatory Dinosaurs of The World."
On the dilo: Soft tissues don't preserve, so giving a dilophosaurus a frill is perfectly reasonable, if speculative. Venom does not preserve either (yes, many modern species have grooves on the teeth that show how the venom is injected, but others don't). Again, that's speculative and is fine. It doesn't contradict anything we know. A whole book called "All Yesterdays" has been written by a couple of paleontologists celebrating this speculative angle.
So those things are excusable (Crichton even pokes fun at this idea in the second novel, where the Rex was written off as toying with Grant and the kids).
I most certainly am not acting like JW is making its dinosaurs wield guns. I'm pointing out that JW isn't as accurate to modern paleontology as Jurassic Park was to the paleontology of the '90s. It seems a bit odd, given Treverrow's reverence for the franchise, he wouldn't try to respect that, but again, it's his movie, not mine.
And like I said, that's okay! If this were a movie on climate change or evolution or vaccines, and they were completely out of step with modern science that'd be a big damn problem. Having naked raptors, not that big of a problem.
Source: This illustration is from a book called "All Yesterdays", a book filled with speculative dinosaur designs adding elements we just don't know could have been there or not. It ends with a section that does the reverse and takes modern animals and shows them were they drawn by an paleoartist from the 40s
Here is a podcast/article on it https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-art/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/all-yesterdays-book-and-launch-event/
https://www.amazon.com/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
John Conway's Leaellynasaura art is one of my favorites. Honestly, it's worth checking out the whole book it's from, All Yesterdays, which isn't necessarily full of completely out-there interpretations of dinosaurs, but refreshing ones.
Absolutely, given we don't know enough about most extinct animals.
I forget the actual term [I have, while writing this, realized it is called Shrink Wrapping], but it is heavily discussed in All Yesterdays how paleoart is often incredibly wrapped to the bone, not accounting for fat and such that isn't fossilized. This is why people didn't know about feathers on dinosaurs, partially because they just weren't fossilized and were based on the idea that the bones were 100% accurate to the body.
Imagine if whale bones were treated to that degree— the tiny legs they have would likely be represented in a fully skeletal based recreation, as is commonly done with most dinosaurs.
Images from All Yesterdays showing Shrink Wrapping of modern animals, because I cannot explain it well in words.
As such, it's partially encouraged for paleoartists to get completely creative and speculative with their designs. Their fantasy dinosaur recreation would even have a chance to be more accurate than the shrink wrapped one represented in Hollywood and other media.
Overall really cool subject.
It is 9 years old but I found All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals interesting.
Looks like this book got it right: [All Yesterdays](https://www.amazon.com/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O)
There is a book based exactly on this premise.
All Yesterdays. https://www.amazon.com/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
Check out the book “All Yesterdays”: https://www.amazon.com/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O/ref=nodl_
> All Yesterdays.
amazon /dp/B00A2VS55O
Yeah, that's what I did. At the time the exchange rate murdered me but I really wanted it.
There was a kindle version as I recall? It's only $9: https://www.amazon.com.au/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
Support the book this is from, it's great
https://www.amazon.ca/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaurs-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B00A2VS55O
OP: Have a read of the book "All Yesterdays". A fascinating read on this topic IMO.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NAxmmgG5S94/UMtKcA4OYNI/AAAAAAAACEM/9twpzSOuJp0/s1600/kosemen%2Bstego.jpg
That's from a really cool book about the limitations of paleo-reconstructive art called All Yesterdays.
There's a whole illustrated book about this! It's called All Yesterdays and I'm fairly certain this hippo illustration comes from the end of that book. It also has the same kind of illustration with spider monkeys and geese.