Subscription Center
September 25, 2012
| 
1
Kalliopi Monoyios is the illustrator of several best-selling science books including Neil Shubin's The Universe Within, Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. Her illustration portfolio can be found at kalliopimonoyios.com.
Follow her solo on Twitter at @eyeforscience. For tweets from the whole Symbiartic crew,
Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
Pteranodons and Plesiosaurs from Asteroid Impact © Douglas Henderson
When it comes to dinosaur art, it takes a lot to rise to prominence. The field is saturated with everyone and their brother who never lost their obsession with the terrible lizards they fantasized about as kids. So it is with no small amount of gravitas that Steve White makes this proclamation in the subtitle of his new coffee table book, Dinosaur Art: The World’s Best Paleoart. Sure enough, the pages are full of spectacular pieces from ten legendary dinosaur illustrators: Julius Csotonyi, Gregory S. Paul, Mauricio Antón, Douglas Henderson, Todd Marshall, John Sibbick, Luis Rey, John Conway, Robert Nicholls, and Raúl Martín.
I was delighted to see my personal favorite, Doug Henderson, amidst the glossy pages. I adore his black and white illustrations – masterful studies of light and shadow that make you feel like you’re crouching in the cover of the underbrush on the most epic National Geographic photo shoot EVAH. But Henderson’s pastels are the focus of the chapter dedicated to him in Dinosaur Art, no doubt because people respond more to color than to black and white. From this stems my only critique of the book – perhaps it should have been titled Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoartists since in my humble opinion, some of Henderson’s graphite illustrations are as strong, if not stronger, than many of the pastels White chose to highlight. Also, surely there are one-hit-wonders by less accomplished or consistent paleoartists that deserve to be in a book about the world’s best paleoart, if not the world’s best paleoartists.
Regardless, Dinosaur Art is a spectacular art book and I thank Titan Books for sending me a copy. It’s early to recommend presents for the holiday season (did I even just suggest that?! Somewhere, some marketer just cackled maniacally) but I can’t recommend this book enough for anyone interested in paleoart. Beautiful book. Check it if you can:
Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart
Edited by Steve White
Titan Books, 2012
About the Author: Kalliopi Monoyios is the illustrator of several best-selling science books including Neil Shubin's The Universe Within, Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. Her illustration portfolio can be found at kalliopimonoyios.com.
Follow her solo on Twitter at @eyeforscience. For tweets from the whole Symbiartic crew,
Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
Rights & Permissions
1 Comment
Add a Comment
You must sign in or register as a ScientificAmerican.com member to submit a comment.
Click one of the buttons below to register using an existing Social Account.
The Cognitive Science of Star Trek
Protist-y art continued: the protist zodiac
To sleep perchance to learn
What is chemical intuition?
A New Way Has Been Found to Make Truck Emissions Testing More Accurate and Less Costly
Khalil's Picks (24 May 2013)
See what we're tweeting about
BoraZ Introducing ScienceOnline Climate - YouTube http://t.co/aKek2b0U3C #sciox #scioClimate
sciam Is Global Warming Cooler than Expected? http://t.co/CspkLM9Eny sciam Prehistoric Climate Change May Have Encouraged Human Innovation http://t.co/aI4buhRUvn
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
Share
Email
Print
I’ll second that Doug has some of the best Paleo art in existence. You can buy his works on eBay, just look up his store Member id “earthhistory2ktz”
Link to this