I recently got the book Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs. It’s technically an TTRPG supplement but it has a lot to offer just general Dinosaur fans. It’s written by a group of Paleontologists and has really beautiful write ups of a bunch of Dinosaur species with a huge amount of art. I got it via Kickstarter because I backed an upcoming second volume but you can get the first from their web store in physical or PDF form.
I haven’t heard of this book; I may have to get it.
Donald F. Glut published a Dinosaur Dictionary that was sold at the bookshop at the American Museum of Natural History. Glut is a guy with a truly weird career trajectory. He made monster movies as a kid, wrote the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back, wrote scripts for Saturday morning kid’s shows, claimed to have created He-Man (a disputed claim), wrote numerous horror and SF fiction, edited The Dinosaur Dictionary and The Dinosaur Scrapbook, comics for Gold Key and Marvel, directed exploitation movies, and played in a band. And he was a classmate of George Lucas.
I’ve wanted to write a dinosaur book for years called Dinosaurs for Adults. It’d show the dinosaurs in their proper time periods and in the appropriate ecological settings. I think too many people raised on the old images still think of dinosaurs as living in crowded desert landscapes dominated by volcanoes. But the Jurassic Park movies are changing that. Except for the damned volcanoes.
Time to bring up another source of Dinosaur Fixes – comic books.
Dinosaurs were always a big draw in comics and in science fiction magazine covers. You could always draw in more readers with a brontosaur or a T. Rex on the cover.
DC and Marvel frequenty had dinosaurs on their superhero comic covers, and even without them. DC, in particular, started running the series “The War that Time Forgot” in Star-Spangled War Stories, where modern-day GIs with tanks and modern weaponry took on dinosaurs.
I was delighted when I discovered, in a 1950s era Tarzan comic, stories of the land of Pal-ul-don, which was filled with dinosaurs and Pithecanthropoid humans (with tails!). The Tarzabn comics drew more heavily from the books than the movies ever did. A feature of Pal-ul-Don were the savage Gryfs, which were basically Triceratops with Stegosaurus-like spines. But the Dell comics had all sorts of dinosaurs there. When Gold Key adapted Tarzan the Terrible, though, they only had Gryfs.
Marvel had its own Tarzan imitator, Ka-Zar (stolen, name only, from an earlier magazine Tarzan imitator), who lived in the "Savage land’, full of dinosaurs.
Classics Illustrated had a plesiosaur and Icthyosaur (not dinosaurs, admittedly, but dinosaur-era giant extinct reptiles) on the cover of their adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. They even copies Verne’s erroneous description of the plesiosaur as “a serpent with a turtle’s shell” in its drawings of it (which the plesiosaur definitely was not). That’;s about the only time dinosaurs showed up in the regular issues. You’d think that , knowing their audience, CI would have adapted Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (They adapted A Study in Scarlet and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and they even did an issue of his The White Company, so why not his dinosaur story?)
If you wanted to satisfy your dinosaur cravings with Classics Illustrated, there was always their “World Around Us” series The Illustrated Story of Prehistoric Animals and the Classics Illustrated Special Edition 167A Prehistoric World
There were always adaptations of movies done by Dell and, later by Gold Key. So you could get the Dell edition of Dinosaurus or the 1960 movie of The Lost World or The Land Unknown or The Animal World. Frequently, it is appart to me, the artists and writers tasked with adapting the movies didn’t get to see the movie or even stills from it, and had to use their imaginations – so a lot of the adaptation of The Lost World doesn’t look at all like the movie, Unfortunately, the part that does is the lizards with fins glued on their backs. If you’re free to imagine things, couldn’t you at least imagine a T. rex that looked like a T. Rex/
And there were other comics, unconnected with other franchises or series. One of my favorites was Turok Son of Stone. Turok and Andar are two American Indians (probably pre-Columbian, and possibly Mandan, although the details were left vague) who stumble into a vast “Hidden Valley” filled with prehistoric life of all kinds, including dinosaurs, pterosaurs, icthyosaurs and other sea reptiles, giant mammals, and cavemen. All prehistoric eras were mixed together. The comics ran from intermittent issues in 1954 through 1982, all drawn by Rex Maxon, with stories by a variety of writers. Most issues featured gorgeous painted covers.
The stories generally featured Turok and Andar trying to escape the valley, or dealing with their caveman neighbors, or some new problem. Occasionally giant humans, or some new prehistoric beast, or even aliens would show up. One issue dealt with drug addiction, predating the infamous Spider Man and Green Lantern/Green Arrow drug issues.
Turok and Andar had two advantages – they knew how to make poison arrows to kill the “honkers” (as they called the dinosaurs), and they knew how to make fire. Cavemen trying to steal these secrets from them frequently drove the plot. Turok was interesting in that it was never condescending about its Indian heroes. In fact, considering that the cavemen appeared to be white, Turok and Andar were technologically
superior to the whites, which was an interestying and weird dynamic in 1950s and 1960s comics. (Although they were supposed to be the same age, Turok was pretty obviously older, with Andar acting like an inexperienced teenager). I never did find out what “son of stone” was supposed to mean.
After the original series ceased, other comic companies took over the name, but “Turok, Dinosaur Hunter” was not at all the same as the original.
Dell had a Turok ripoff called Kona, the Monarch of Monster Isle that featured several dinosaurs, although the most terrifying beast was a giant kitten.
Dell started running Kona after they lost Turok to Gold Key.
Kona was a truly weird comic. I read it from the start. Every time you thought you had it figured out, they’d go and do something even crazier. Kona was the white-haired guy in your image. A sort of really white Cro-Magnon ruler of what at first looked like an island of dinosaurs. A family in a dirigible (the father is the guy behind Kona doing the talking) crashes on the island and needs Kona’s help to survive.
So there are dinosaurs and floods and then – for no good reason – giant cats. Then they get sway from that and open a cave full of weird monsters with things like giant chicken feet. Then giant insects and scorpions. Kona: Monarch of Monster Island ran for 21 very weird issues
I’ve wanted to write a dinosaur book for years called Dinosaurs Old and New. Written in simple language for children, it would illustrate how our understanding of dinosaurs has shifted over the centuries, and how old ideas about them have been revised time and again.
This is going to haunt my dreams.
Does look sorta’ like a Lich, doesn’t it?
David Rand, the original Ka-Zar, debuted Oct. 1936 in a pulp published by Martin Goodman (later to start Timely Comics, which became Marvel). The 3-issue run was later serialized in Marvel/Marvel Mystery Comics 1-5. He was a blond jungle dude aided in his dinosaur-less adventures by a lion named Zar. The blond silver age character was Kevin Plunder and his lion was named Zabu. Minor details like names and backgrounds aside, this arguably makes Ka-Zar the oldest Marvel character.
Along with the noted Gold Key titles, Tragg and the Sky Gods also featured dinosaurs.
Created by the aforementioned Donald Glut, the series blended elements from One Million Years, B.C., Flash Gordon and L. Ron Hubbard. Two alien scientists come to Earth and “experiment” on females who later give birth to Tragg and his hot girlfriend. It seemed like a premise not entirely appropriate for kids.
Lastly, I note the Marvel character of Stegron features in a well-known meme exemplifying unassailable logic and integrity when it comes to his master plan:
The natural history museum where I volunteer has an exhibit, 75,000,000 B.C. and I like to point out it was one of the few times and places where you had dinosaurs roaming around with active volcanoes in the vicinity. It was more alpine than desert, though.
Did somebody really think that was how it went together?
Apparently, it’s just a prehistoric rhino missing it’s rear hips and legs. The horn is from a narwhale. It’s a sad attempt to create a unicorn.
That’s not even the worst of it; “Scrotum Humanum” was so-named because someone thought it was the fossilized testicles of a giant.
ETA: displaying the sort of interpretational logic later applied by alternate-theory enthusiasts on the Internet.