A Great Paleolife Artist

[Danvarner@aol.com]

       Darren Naish has been very kind to share with me a website featuring
the art of Maurice Wilson. Wilson certainly is up there in the pantheon with
Knight, Burian, Zallinger, and others in the first rank of painters and
sculptors who crafted images of prehistoric animals not only as
illustrations, but also as investigations into the beauty and aesthetics of
their form and environment.
       Reproduced here are the Brooke Bond teacards from, I believe, the
early 70's. A similar collectable from here in the US would be Paul Calle's
Sinclair Oil dinosaur stamps from the early 60's (which I made my
long-suffering mom drive many miles to get). Wilson's marvelous watercolors
were an inspiration to Darren. In Minnesota, of course, we had no Brooke Bond
tea. In fact, we had no tea whatsoever unless we had take-out chow mein. But
I did know Wilson through books like _The Wonderful World of Prehistoric
Animals_by William Swinton, and I can truthfuly say he was a youthful hero of
mine as well as Darren's. So take a peek at his work. There's a very early
Deinonychus picture, Wilson's tail-off-the-ground and erect postured
dinosaurs, and less we forget, I believe Wilson was the first to depict
australopithecines and other early hominids as fully erect.
       My favorite here is his woolly mammoth. You can hear the drips of the
melting snow.
       The texts are by the late Dr. Alan Charig and I believe everything
here is in Public Domain: http://www.whom.co.uk/squelch/bbprehis.htm
       DV