The Bronto Book...

 

...or how I discovered dinosaurs

This blog set out to examine the ways in which we come to know (and occasionally to love) the icons of popular culture in its many manifestations, drawing on my own experiences growing up. Dinosaurs are not strictly a part of popular culture (unless you count the Jurassic Park film franchise), but it was through the mass media that I first became aware of these prehistoric entities, whose existence I had previously not suspected; and in this blog, I’m looking back at how it all got started...

Today, most children are probably familiar with ancient reptiles from a very early age, maybe three or four years. I’m not sure that I knew much about dinosaurs before the age of seven, although I’d almost certainly seen them depicted in cartoons on television without realising that these had once been living, breathing animals.

Our primary school classrooms all had a small library corner, and during one memorable year, one of the most popular items to be found therein was Brenda H. Zielinska’s The Bronto Book (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1960). I haven’t set eyes on a copy for years, but I can dimly recall it as a humorous tale of anthropomorphic dinosaurs, illustrated with black and white line drawings. This would have been around 1968, and it’s conceivable that this comical adventure was my introduction to the world of prehistoric animals.

I began to learn about dinosaurs in more serious detail with the publication, later that same year, of the educational magazine Tell Me Why. Similar in content to the better remembered Look and Learn, this large format glossy weekly launched at the end of August 1968, styling itself as ‘Your World of Adventure – In Living Colour’. Colour was certainly a selling point – there were no monochrome pages in the entire magazine, and no room was set aside for advertising matter. This kind of high quality content didn’t come cheap, and Tell Me Why retailed at an eye-watering one shilling and sixpence (by comparison TV21 was only 9d).

Its contents were a blend of contemporary science, art history, natural history and stories from the classics. It was here that I first encountered H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, in an abridgement accompanied by some of the best depictions of the Martian war machines that I’ve ever seen. And it was here also that I discovered dinosaurs.

I didn’t get Tell Me Why from week one, but I saw copies of it being passed around at school and was immediately drawn to the exceptional artwork depicting these creatures of a bygone age. I can even point to the exact picture that started it all off (below).

Today, when children are accustomed to seeing dinosaurs realistically brought to life as CGI or AI animations, and even real world prosthetics, a mere painting just wouldn’t have the same impact. Back in the 1960s, art was the only means of visualising ancient reptiles, and several painters became famous for their depictions of ancient life: none more so than the legendary Rudolph F. Zallinger (1919-1995), whose works included the ‘Age of Reptiles’ mural at Yale University.

Rudolph Zallinger, 'The Age of Reptiles' (detail)

I don’t know if it was Zallinger’s work that graced the pages of Tell Me Why, but it certainly looked the same: he had a particular way of suggesting the scaly skins of the ancient lizards, and always placed them in excitingly believable settings, clothing his landscapes in intriguing varieties of extinct vegetation. His skies were always atmospheric, often augmented by puffs of smoke from distant volcanoes, and frequently suggesting the light of an early evening. I think it was this sense of atmosphere as much as the monsters themselves that drew me in.

Tell Me Why told the story of Earth’s prehistoric past over successive weeks, and sadly, by the time I was bought my first copy, we’d already reached the late cretaceous period. Back then, scientists had yet to agree on the cause of the dinosaurs’ sudden disappearance from the Earth, and the asteroid impact theory, now largely accepted, wasn’t mentioned. That week’s edition ended with a series of question marks. Had the climate changed? Did the dinosaurs’ food supplies run out? Next week’s edition moved on to the era of prehistoric mammals which, though intriguing in their own right, have never, with the possible exception of the woolly mammoth, elicited quite the same level of childlike awe and fascination as their reptilian antecedents.

That Christmas, amongst my presents was a book that I still own to this day. Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles was illustrated by the mighty Zallinger and I still consider his versions of monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus as definitive, although any modern palaentologist would disagree. Science has moved on, and change was afoot even as I was having my first encounters with prehistoric life.

The late 60s saw a movement in palaentology that has been dubbed the ‘dinosaur renaissance’, a new view of ancient reptiles that sought to overturn accepted wisdom which depicted dinosaurs as slow-moving reptiles. The new thinking argued that dinosaurs had in fact been warm-blooded animals, closer to modern mammals and birds. Scientists began to consider the possibility, now generally accepted, that dinosaurs had evolved into birds. Some species, it was believed, even had primitive feathers.

One of the great things about dinosaurs is that they can be both an object of serious scientitfic study, and a source of fun. For me, aged eight or nine, they were both. I drew realistic pictures of them in my ‘Topic Book’ at school, but also acted out daft adventures with a series of rubber dinosaurs that I still own to this day. They all had silly voices (of course) and comical personalities. The Ankylosaurus, in reality an armoured beast covered in scales and lethal spikes, somehow reminded me of a cat, so of course in my silly dinosaur adventures, it mewed like a pussycat. It also did a little song and dance routine...

These were not the only dinosaur toys I possessed, and while there was nothing like the range of realistic models that one sees today in any museum gift shop, you could always make your own with the selection of plastic construction kits sold under the ‘Pyro’ brand name. The first such example I had bought for me was the Dimetrodon, a sail-backed creature of the early Permian period. Of course, any palaentologist will quickly remind you that Dimetrodon wasn’t a dinosaur at all and had become extinct some 40 million years before the advent of the dinosaurs. In fact, it had more in common with certain mammals… but to me, aged eight, it was a dinosaur.

Pyro kits came in two box types, above.

This kit was soon joined by others, with varying degrees of realism. Dimetrodon was interestingly textured, whereas the kits of Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex and others were of smooth plastic. I even used them as ‘life models’ for my own dinosaur artworks. The era of the dinosaur kits lasted from early 1969 into maybe 1970 or 71, when they were supplanted by Aurora’s range of horror movie monster kits. By this time, my brother and myself had been bought several further books of dinosaurs, and on a visit to London in 1969 had been taken to see the fossils on display in the science museum, along with the famous (and mostly unrealistic) creations in Crystal Palace Park. As of 2020, these life-sized exhibits, dating to the mid 19th century, were added to Historic England’s ‘at risk’ register.

No, these aren't the Crystal Palace exhibits but two of the Pyro plastic kits pictured in Jurassic Park (okay, the back garden).

Back in the 1960s, it was rare to see dinosaurs on television or film: the work involved in successfully animating the creatures put them beyond the budget of most productions. I well remember seeing the movie The Valley of Gwangi promoted in the press at the time of its release, but had to wait for it to turn up on television. On the small screen, most producers knew better than to try and depict dinosaurs. When Dr. Who tried it in 1974, the results were like the kind of thing you usually saw on The Goodies. But by this time, aged 13, I had outgrown my childhood fascination with all things prehistoric (apart from The Flintstones).

In a way, it seems a shame that my early spurt of interest in a serious scientific subject didn’t lead me to consider a career in that area. But dinosaurs were, to me, a passing fad, and engaged my attention in the manner of any other ephemeral cultural phenomenon. Similarly, around this same time, I took an interest in astronomy, to the extent of having a small telescope bought for me, but could never get beyond the purely aesthetic appreciation of the universe. There’s just too much maths and physics involved...

I never quite lost interest in dinosaurs, though, and when technology finally allowed for the creation of lifelike CGI monsters on film, I was intrigued to see the results. I even went so far as to borrow a contemporary, and properly scientific book on prehistoric life from the local library, so as to read up on the latest theories that were under discussion.

I’ve only once been called upon to create images of dinosaurs, for an entrepreneur who wanted to produce a series of interactive postcards for children, and my drawings, simplified and rather cartoonish, were based on contemporary ideas of dinosaurs as highly colourful, dynamically active creatures. In spite of this, my mind’s eye view still defaults to those old Rudolph Zallinger images, which are today considered as extinct as the animals they depict. In this respect, palaentology operates rather like science fiction, in that its iconography will always reflect the era in which it is created. The Crystal Palace dinosaurs looked cranky and old fashioned to a child brought up on Zallinger’s art, which in turn looks cranky and old fashioned to any modern student of the subject.

That’s the thing with dinosaurs: however many new fossils we unearth, science can never know with absolute certainty what the reality of these long extinct creatures might have been. Today’s palaentologists insist that dinosaurs like Allosaurus and T Rex walked along with their tails erect, to balance their huge heads and muscular bodies, a logical enough idea – yet it can never be proven, and in future may be overturned by some new discovery. It might even turn out that Zallinger’s old-school ‘tail dragging’ dinosaurs were closer to the truth, but short of having a time machine, we’ll never know… unless (and I’ve heard it rumoured as a possibility) there’s a potential Dickie Attenborough out there ready and waiting to clone some dinosaurs from ancient DNA samples…

As I said earlier, dinosaurs can be fun, and maybe that’s a good place to end. Below is a humorous comic strip created in a photo-montage style, using some of the old rubber monsters I was bought way back in 1969 or 70… (click on the image to see it full size)