Re: Treasures in the Freebie Pile

[Mark Hallett <marksabercat@yahoo.com>]

Regarding the "little red pterodactyloids", I think it was something that 
Zallinger just liked to do to dramatically show how ginormous sauropods (and 
how tiny the pteros) were. It was one of his trademarks, like Doug Henderson's 
"King Kong logs" in his paleo landscapes and my inability to resist putting 
skulls in mine. That sauropod art style of Mark W's is very nice, and for me 
evoked some of Maurice Wilson's delicate handling. --Mark Hallett  

--- On Tue, 7/28/09, Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> wrote:

> From: Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>
> Subject: Re: Treasures in the Freebie Pile
> To: rtravsky@uwyo.edu
> Cc: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 1:31 AM
> 2009/7/27 Richard W. Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>:
> >
> > Our local public library had a nice surprise in the
> freebie pile: "Dinosaurs
> > and Other Prehistoric Reptiles" a "Giant Golden Book",
> filled with Zallinger
> > illustrations.
> >
> > Nice!
> 
> Very nice!  A while back I made a high-resolution scan
> of the
> double-page Brachiosaurus restoration in this book (pages
> 20-21) --
> you can see it here:
>         
> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tmp/goodies/Zallinger1966-giant-golden-brachiosaurus.jpeg
> It's instructive to compare it to the same artist's much
> better known
> Brontosaurus from the YPM mural, which I conveniently also
> have here:
>         
> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tmp/goodies/Zallinger1947-mural-brontosaurus.jpeg
> The composition is strikingly familiar in both cases: both
> show an
> animal in right anterolateral view in the foreground, up to
> its chest
> in water, and another in the background, in left lateral,
> out of water
> on the far back (although in the YPM mural, I believe the
> background
> individual is supposed to Diplodocus).  And in both, a
> small red
> rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur is flying across the front of
> the elevated
> neck of the foreground individual.  It's in tribute to
> this that we
> asked Mark Witton to place a similar pterosaur in the
> Diplodocus
> reconstruction that he did fo
neck posture,
> which you can
> see here:
>         
> http://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/markwitton-diplodocus-scene.jpeg
> 
> An in-joke for the palaeo-art aware -)
>