Book review: Luis V. Rey's Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2: The Projects

Cover art for Luis Rey's 2019 book Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2: The Projects, featuring the latest incarnation of Luis' Deinonychus. Notice the presence of lips. Image borrowed from the Luis V. Rey Updates Blog. 

Unbelievably, the sun is already setting on 2019 and the holiday season is fast approaching. In keeping with the season, over the next two posts, I want to draw attention to two palaeoart-heavy products that I think are worthy of a place under your Christmas tree. 

First up is a book by renowned Spanish-Mexican palaeoartist Luis V. Rey: Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2: The Projects. I bought Luis’ book earlier this year at TetZooCon and felt it worthy of writing up, not the least because, as a self-published volume, any and all advertising and promotion is helpful. Extreme Dinosaurs 2 is available in both hardback and paperback editions (my review is based on the paperback) from Amazon and eBay for £25 and £20, respectively, which I think is a very fair price for these well-produced, high-quality books. These are not print-on-demand self-published books that roll the dice with aspects like printing and trimming: they’re pre-printed and Luis-approved products that you’re buying directly from the Rey household. 

Cover of the first Extreme Dinosaurs, borrowed from Amazon.com, featuring the earliest version of Luis' Deinonychus. Such extensive feathering was pretty radical for Deinonychus in 2000, and there's an even more 'extreme' version inside.  

Extreme Dinosaurs 2 is billed as a sequel to Luis’ 2000 book Extreme Dinosaurs, though they are quite different in format and organisation. Extreme Dinosaurs is a fairly conventional popular dinosaur book at heart, overviewing dinosaurs from around the world in several themed sections. Fulfilling the promise of ‘extreme’ dinosaurs is Luis’ compositionally and anatomically radical dinosaur art which, in a palaeoart era dominated by Sibbicks, Pauls and Halletts, was unlike anything seen before. Luis’ enthusiasm for the then newly discovered Chinese feathered dinosaur fossils gave his work an additional revolutionary edge. Today, Extreme Dinosaurs is available only through second-hand markets but it is worth tracking down for the classic Luis Rey art it contains, as well as to own a time capsule from a major transitional period in dinosaur palaeoart.

Extreme Dinosaurs 2, in contrast, has a slightly narrower focus. It documents four major palaeoart projects and exhibitions executed by Luis in the last decade and feels like a more specialised volume as a result. While the opening section of the book, devoted to the evolution of feathers and skin, serves as a general overview of dinosaur palaeobiology and appearance (featuring art from Luis’ Dinosaur rEvolution exhibition), the rest of the book is more eclectic, with sections on Archaeopteryx and maniraptorans (from the exhibition: Feathers Fly; The Art of Archaeopteryx), dinosaur parenting behaviour (Hatching The Past), and Mexican dinosaurs (Dinosaurios Hechos En Mexico). It holds together as a book and contains many 'firsts' as goes restorations of newly discovered Mexican taxa but, as a collection of personal projects, it doesn’t work as well as the first as an introduction to contemporary dinosaur palaeontology. This isn't a problem of course, but it's worth noting - if thinking about this as a gift, say - that readers who aren't already fairly nerdy about dinosaur palaeontology might struggle with some of the content. As with Extreme Dinosaurs, I suspect its main appeal will be the vast quantity of Rey artworks it contains. At over 130 pages it’s more than twice the size of its forebear, and the number of illustrations is extraordinarily high. It really is a bonanza of Reyian dinosaurs, where animals lurch at you or at each other with every page turn. Luis’ artistic flourishes make this a tour through the Mesozoic like no other - a Reyozoic, if you will - and if you’re a Luis fan, it’s a must-have for this reason alone. 

A lot of Rey artwork features predation, but it's not all animals leaping from the page towards your face. Here, the giant Mexican hadrosaur Magnapaulia is pursued by albertosaurines. I particularly like the purple and yellow hues in this scene, and the size of the Magnapaulia is conveyed well. The inclusion of many obscure, rarely illustrated Mexican species is definitely a plus point for Extreme Dinosaurs 2. Image from Luis' blog, © Luis V. Rey.

This is not just an art book, however. To the contrary, there's a surprising amount of text and it's clear that Luis did not want this to just be a book of pretty pictures. Rather, we obtain a detailed insight into the science behind his artwork, as well as the themes his images are constructed around. Luis' passion for pushing dinosaur restorations is obvious, and I found his text both enjoyable and interesting to read. This is not only because of the insight it gives into the creation of his distinctive art, but also because Luis played a major role in shaping the modern look of dinosaurs, and experienced a lot of pushback from the 'birds are not dinosaurs' crowd and folks who felt his artwork was too outrageous. This gives his commentary a depth, historic perspective and unique voice unavailable to younger palaeoartists. Moreover, while Luis has a genuine reason to feel vindicated by some of his 'extreme' takes on dinosaurs being confirmed by fossil data, there's not a whiff of aggression, arrogance or ego to his commentary. He is open about the difficulties of restoring certain animals and admits that new discoveries will require him to revise and update his work in future, as he has already done for many images in this book. I feel this is a sensible attitude to have in the palaeoart game.

One of the aspects I admire most about Luis' artwork is his consideration of integument. Although guided by phylogenetic bracketing, he plays with skin variation within clades and across individual animals, creating unique - but not implausible - takes on species such as Deinonychus and Nothronychus. From Luis' blog, © Luis V. Rey.

Of course, most people will be buying Extreme Dinosaurs 2 for the art. To paraphrase Alan Partridge, Luis' style has evolved since the first book, but not revolved: his use of media has changed, his hues are slightly more grounded, but his images are still classically Reyian with fantastic colours and dynamic compositions. I think that time has been kind to Luis' portfolio, thanks to palaeoart culture normalising towards ideas he was applying years ago. I recall first encountering Luis’ artwork in the early 2000s and, having mostly grown up on a palaeoart diet of John Sibbick, it would have been easy to dismiss his renditions as a madman’s view of prehistory. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that I first saw his work at the University of Portsmouth - and thus in a wholly scientific and educational context - I might have done so. But though unusual, Luis' work was always produced within the confines of available data. His reconstructions were different because he was pushing ideas and information further, as well as exploring the uncertainties and unknowables of fossil animal form. This philosophy was far ahead of its time in the 1990s and early 2000s and, juxtaposed with his unusual animal arrangements, behaviours and compositions, we have to view Luis as an early practitioner of what we’d eventually label the All Yesterdays movement. While time has altered what we consider anatomically ‘extreme’ in palaeoart (many reconstructions in the first Extreme Dinosaurs would be considered par for the course today), this reflects our changing attitudes and fossil data shifting the bar in Luis' direction. 

Luis remains entirely unafraid of creating extreme takes on fossil animal behaviour and form, and that takes... whatever this Allosaurus used to have where those spikes are now. This image is based on a real Allosaurus specimen with a pathological pubic boot, as outlined at Luis' blog. Image © Luis V. Rey.

While it’s difficult for Extreme Dinosaurs 2 to recreate the anatomical wow factor of the original book, the boldness of Luis’ work remains as strong as ever. Luis’ palaeoart has a reputation for polarising opinion but, whether you’re a fan or not, it’s hard to argue that his art is not thought-provoking, ambitious, and an important reminder to never get too comfortable with convention. Indeed, there’s a fearless quality to Luis’ work. It confidently challenges expectation about what ancient animals looked like, while never advertently straying from the confines of fossil data. Look beyond the saturated colours and elaborately fuzzy animals and you'll notice that Luis is often highly attentive to details of specimens and palaeoecological scenarios, creating whole scenes around pathological specimens and overhauling older works to bring them up to date with modern science. Several such examples are seen in Extreme Dinosaurs 2, such as new art showing Triceratops being decapitated by Tyrannosaurus (as suggested by fossil data) and older paintings being updated to better match current interpretations of feather distribution or soft-tissue arrangements. The addition of lips to most of the dinosaurs in Extreme Dinosaurs 2 feels like a major departure from older Luis works, the lipless jaws of his foreshortened animals being, in retrospect, an obvious characteristic of many of his paintings.

I like the fact that Luis works within, but is not a slave to, phylogenetic bracketing, and his work implies that the appearance of fossil species may have varied significantly within clades. His large dromaeosaurs, for example, aren’t just larger versions of the ‘ground eagles’ indicated by small-bodied fossil specimens, but instead have ostrich-like naked legs and shaggy, messy feathers which could reflect flightless habits. He is unafraid of applying large tufts, long fibres and fleshy skin to his restorations in ways which can seem odd, but only because Bornean bearded pigs, porcupines and turkeys are not our go-to reference taxa for most dinosaurs. Luis’ lack of concern for making animals look peculiar or downright daft is a rare asset, and one of the things I admire most about his palaeoart.  

Many aspects of Luis' work - from his posing to his muscular, athletic animals - remind me of Bob Bakker's palaeoart - it's unsurprising that Rey-Bakker collaborations have been plentiful over the years. Here, Tarbosaurus runs down Gallimimus. Image from Luis' blog, © Luis V. Rey.

Luis lists Bakker and Paul among his greatest palaeoartistic influences in Extreme Dinosaurs 2, but I feel the Paulian link is largely philosophical: the demand that our reconstructions adhere to fossil data. Artistically, Luis’ art is more Bakkerian, recalling the energetic, contorted posing and tight framing of Bakker’s work from the 70s and 80s (e.g. images in The Dinosaur Heresies (1984), and Dinosaurs Past and Present (1987)). Bakker's palaeoart is, in itself, very striking, but Luis takes these compositions even further, adding amazing colours, clashing textures and extremes of perspective to Bakker’s foundation. The result is among the most audacious portfolio of palaeoart ever produced, and it makes mechanisms sometimes employed to make palaeoart seem shocking or arresting - such as extremes of gore or melodrama - seem clichéd, tame and pedestrian. Although other illustrators have copied Luis' once signature style of hyper-foreshortened dinosaurs, these imitators lack the flair and boldness of true Reyian foreshortening. Any artist can give you a faceful of gaping theropod, but only Luis will combine this with inflated air sacs, saturated colour schemes and some sort of crazy-complex integument. Luis fans will be happy to know that Extreme Dinosaurs 2 delivers plenty of what you're expecting from a Rey portfolio, despite the use of photo manipulation (see below) adding real-world textures and colours to his arrangements.

Extreme Dinosaurs 2 showcases Luis’ work from the last decade or so, which means it more or less exclusively features digital photo composites over traditional paintings. Many of the featured artworks are murals, and we are treated to glimpses of early sketches showing how these came together. Luis’ use of photo composition has not been universally welcomed, with some preferring his older work executed in traditional media. This might be a deciding factor for some potential customers of this book but… read on a little further before you make up your mind. I’m going to be honest and confess that I’ve not always been a fan of Luis’ digital works, but that Extreme Dinosaurs 2 has given me cause to change that view. For one, the images simply look better in this well-produced book than they do as low-res online versions, being both appreciably sharper and more detailed. I don't think they're always successful but, hey, show me anyone who can flawlessly execute 130 pages of photo-real images. In many cases, the lighting and texturing of the animals is genuinely very good, giving a great sense of three dimensions to a medium which often looks flat.

Double page spread from Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2, showing a mural with battling Tarbosaurus and Talarurus. The arrangement of this photo composite is classic Luis Rey, despite the challenges of this medium. Image borrowed from Luis' blog, © Luis V. Rey.

Secondly, in terms of ambition, Luis’ photo composites are leading the field. It’s not terribly difficult to photoshop a lizard snout onto a bird head to make a dromaeosaur, but that just wouldn’t be a Luis Rey artwork. He continues to make thoroughly distorting and extreme Reyian creations with a medium that typically inspires artistic conservatism. Extreme Dinosaurs 2 features snorting Deinocheirus with bright red inflating facial sacs, a towering Tarbosaurus kicking out of the canvas, and maniraptorans flinging themselves, ninja-style, through the air. While some artists are grounded by photo manipulation, Luis is creating some of his most adventurous and startling compositions in the same medium.

Third, after immersing myself in page after page of modern Reyian colours and composition, I started to suspect that Luis is not, as is mostly the case with photo-composited palaeoart, going for strict photo-realism. Luis has, after all, a background in surrealist and abstract art, and you can see the influence of these genres even in his traditional work. There is something pseudo-surreal and semi-abstract about some of Luis’ busy, highly active scenes of arching bodies, extremes of body size and perspective, and colliding colours and texture. Combining landscape photographs, original paintings, bits of toys and models, cropped and recoloured animal skin, cloned elements and texturing effects into classic Reyian scenarios is a terrifically bonkers way to reconstruct extinct creatures, and seems almost reflective of how we mentally conceptualise these animals from different references: a little of this living animal, some of that painting, a pose from that museum mount... and so on. This collaging effect sometimes avoids looking real, but Luis' images never fail to look alive. I have a lot of respect for Luis for pushing photo composition in his own way and think some of the results are genuinely striking. The images can still read as straight reconstructions of extinct subjects (and I think this is how most people are appreciating and judging them), but there’s an artistic quality to them which we should also admire, especially as the palaeoart community calls for more interesting styles and experimentation among its practitioners.

Scenes such as this Therizinosaurus rookery/life cycle image are so packed with action, colours, textures and characters that, for me, they transcend conventional natural history art and dip their toes into a surreal, larger than life version of prehistory. Luis has made a name for himself creating scenes like these, and his distinctive style is, I think, a terrific addition to the more conventional palaeoart that folks like myself produce. Image from Luis' blog, © Luis V. Rey.

While I generally have good things to say about Extreme Dinosaurs 2, it's only right that, in interests of providing a fair review, I mention a few things I'm less keen on. Most of these are editing and formatting errors that do little harm to the book, but were sometimes jarring to encounter. There are a few passages that would have benefitted from tighter copyediting (both for typos and phrasing), and fonts can also sometimes change from page to page, or even line to line, in a manner I'm pretty sure was unintentional. More significantly, a small number double-page spreads include important images (either whole illustrations or parts thereof) in the seam, making them all but unseeable unless you're the sort of monster who snaps the spines of their books. These issues are more tantamount to an occasional lack of polish than book-crippling problems, but picky readers might find them distracting or frustrating.

But... whatever. Extreme Dinosaurs Part 2: The Projects is an enjoyable book and a firm reminder of Luis' importance to palaeoart. It works as a fun and interesting read or simply as a vessel to own Luis' most recent illustrations, and the production quality and amount of content represent excellent value for money. In being almost 140 pages of entirely unfiltered, undistilled Reyian palaeoart this is definitely a book for Luis fans and palaeoart collectors, although there's no compromising here to convert anyone with a strong dislike of Luis' style. But, as one of palaeoart's most iconoclastic practitioners, I'm pretty sure Luis wouldn't have it any other way.

(One final word on Extreme Dinosaurs 2: if you've already got a copy, and have enjoyed it, please help Luis out by spreading the word on social media or leaving a review at the web store you used to buy it. I know from experience that word of mouth is critical to the success of self-published books and, if we want to see Extreme Dinosaurs Part 3: This Time It's Extremely Personal, we need to help this book reach its audience.)

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Dinosaurs in the Wild: a review

Dinosaurs in the Wild's Quetzalcoatlus. OK, it's not a dinosaur, but it is in the wild.

If you travel to London's Greenwich Peninsula before the end of July 2018 you might find Dinosaurs in the Wild, a unique dinosaur experience that's been touring the UK since 2017. Created by the same team that brought us the original Walking with Dinosaurs, it continues the apparent mission statement of director Tim Haines to bring realistic, lifelike dinosaurs from cinema screens into everyday life. Walking with Dinosaurs allowed us to see realistic, movie-grade dinosaurs in our own living rooms, and DITW takes us one step further: what if we - the general public - could be among extinct dinosaurs ourselves?

DITW defies easy categorisation, taking inspiration from education centres, theatre, film and theme park rides. At the core of this blend of media is a simple idea: DITW visitors are transported 67 million years back in time to Maastrichtian North America, the final stage of the Cretaceous and the home of some very famous dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Ankylosaurus. Once there, visitors are guided through the labs of 'TimeBase 67', a research base dedicated to the study of Late Cretaceous life. Note that isn't a sit-down VR experience but a tour through a real physical environment with actual rooms, simulated vehicle rides, lab stations, 3D video displays acting as windows, animatronics and trained humans creating a convincing illusion of DITW's setting and narrative.

Vehicle rides are part of the DITW experience, as are traffic jams caused by dinosaurs with little in the way of road awareness.

The tour we took included people of many different ages and, so far as I could tell, everyone was having a lot of fun. Children in particular seemed completely sold by the setting and only the most jaded adults won't be pulled into the experience somehow. Even if older visitors aren't completely able to suspend disbelief for the 70 minute run time, there's huge amounts of detail to appreciate in the lab environments, the back story to the TimeBase to unravel, some terrific sequences with the animals, and a lot of genuine science to find behind the 'edutainment' exterior. Tour guides are on hand to answer questions along the way and keep guests moving on time. There is a narrative to the journey through TimeBase 67, which I won't spoil here, but parents with young kids be warned that Tyrannosaurus is an appropriately big, scary motherhubbard in DITW, and some bonus parenting* might be required at times.

*I don't have kids. I assume this is the right terminology.

Alamosaurus, Dakotaraptor and a collection of tourists approach TimeBase 67. Note that the necks of Alamosaurus are not hugely oversized, but augmented with a long skin flap along the underside.

While many will see DITW as a great activity for kids, I have no doubt that the people who'll get most out of it are genuine palaeontology enthusiasts, especially those who pay close attention to the TimeBase 67 interior, know a little about dinosaur palaeobiology, and have some experience in real labs and wildlife hides. There are Easter eggs galore for the experienced palaeo or wildlife nerd, and it's clear that great attention has been paid to the interior design to evoke the feeling of real-world research labs and wildlife observation posts. Though guides present information in each room, eyes are encouraged to wander to video footage of nesting dinosaurs, instructional posters on animal handling, open notebooks, specimens awaiting cataloguing, tissue samples being processed and - most sciencey of all - weird things in jars. The observation dome - an obvious highlight of the tour - bears animal spotting guides much like those you'll find in nature reserve hides, and they cleverly include a number of animals that (I think) are not featured in the show, tricking us into looking at the animations as we would a real landscape. I can't have been the only one looking for small mammals, birds and lizards among the more obvious dinosaurs. The impression from such details is of a rich, detailed world, and it's convincing enough that you might have to occasionally remind yourself that you're in 21st century east London and not, actually, in Cretaceous Montana looking at freshly caught extinct insects.

Visitors are given time to wander around rooms to take in these details, but not much. The clear intention is to deliberately overwhelm us in the same way that comparable real world settings might - if you've ever taken a tour through an unfamiliar lab or museum, you'll know the frustrations of barely glimpsed curiosities and quickly glimpsed specimens. It's a risky strategy: pull people through DITW too quick and they'll feel rushed and unsatisfied, but let visitors linger and they might get bored, or notice the proverbial wiring under the board. For the most part, I think DITW gets the timing right. I felt I had sufficient time to satisfy myself with the main details of each setting, but left knowing that a future visit would reveal more. This said, I'm aware that palaeo enthusiasts might be able to experience rooms a little quicker than the average visitor. If, say, you're familiar with sclerotic rings and Tyrannosaurus brains you'll immediately recognise these objects when you see them, experience a quick nerdy thrill, and then move on. Other visitors might need a little more time to read labels and work out unfamiliar objects, and I wonder if the tight schedule could be a little more frustrating for those not so familiar with dinosaur theory.

Fully-lipped Tyrannosaurus surveys the TimeBase 67 floodplain. Note the feathers - they shouldn't be over the pelvic region, right? DITW has an obvious solution to this - though you'll have to visit to see what it is.

Of course, most sensible people won't visit DITW to look at notepads and specimen trays: they want dinosaurs, preferably in the wild. These also do not disappoint, with the digital versions being especially well produced. 3D glasses UV-protection goggles need to be worn whenever you're next to a window, allowing us to appreciate a great sense of depth when we look out over the Cretaceous floodplain surrounding TimeBase 67. We get a number of opportunities to see the animals in their full digital glory, and they're refreshingly animalistic instead of Hollywoodised monsters. Half the fun of the experience is not knowing what the animals will do and I won't spoil anything here, but you can get a good sense of DITW ethos from the snippets released by the DITW Twitter feed. I won't pretend I wasn't super-chuffed to see terrestrially-stalking azhdarchids...

These #Quetzalcoatlus are having a truly #MoodyMonday... Hopefully yours isn't as bad! Who's in need of a bit of #MondayMotivation? #DinosaursInTheWild pic.twitter.com/7FMFTWQvgl

— DinosInTheWild (@DinosInTheWild) March 5, 2018

...and this sequence of Alamosaurus irritating a flock of Dakotaraptor is terrific. No Jurassic World-style tag-teaming to dispatch a giant dinosaur here, just lots of irritated feather poofing. Shake harder, boy!

These Dakotaraptor don't look too pleased with this Alamosaurus on their patch! He doesn't seem too bothered though...

Book now to see these living dinosaurs up close: https://t.co/HMjoxajkBe pic.twitter.com/XIFog4AQ9N

— DinosInTheWild (@DinosInTheWild) November 17, 2017

It's not all yawning dinosaurs and preening pterosaurs, though: fans wanting dicier threat displays and hunting behaviours won't be disappointed**. Happily, the quality of the reconstructions matches the depicted behaviours. The animals are thoroughly modern takes on familiar species and seem to have received refreshingly little, if any, embellishment to make them more ferocious or marketable. Extra-oral tissues (lips and expanded rictal plates) are standard, bold but credible decisions have been taken with their integument, and the volume of muscle and other soft-tissues is substantial, but within reason. Their animations are pretty good too, with larger species having an appreciable sense of mass and inertia instead of pirouetting around like creatures half their size. This is especially noticeable when the animals are close to viewing windows, these being large enough to appreciate their real-life size. A lousy sense of mass in the animation would have ruined the illusion, but they move with a weight and heft comparable to large living animals. This might not be something that we appreciate consciously, but is one of narrowest precipices over the uncanny valley and the downfall of many dinosaur animations. Hats off to the animators for taking time to get it right.

**Apparently. I, er, was basically watching the pterosaurs most of the time.

Variation in animal proportions, integument and colouration gives a sense of looking at real populations and not cloned digital models - it's subtle, but makes all the difference. I suspect deliberate efforts were made to avoid the uniform greys and browns that still characterises many popular dinosaur reconstructions with most species sporting elaborate colouration or patterning somewhere. These are not garish carnival monsters though, and look consistent with our knowledge of pigment mechanics and evolution, as well as appropriate for the habitat and lifestyle of the creatures concerned. Ultraviolet colouration and iridescence features too. Further points are awarded for the animals not being dressed up in the colours of living species: there's no cassowary-inspired maniraptorans or other obvious real-world colour schemes to jar the illusion. I'm fairly certain the facial colours of Triceratops (below) owe something to Darth Maul, though...

DITW's Triceratops takes a dip. Sadly, this great image isn't a still from DITW proper, but the attention to detail and nuanced behaviour shown here - including the birds on the Triceratops face - is typical of the show in general.

Several aspects of the reconstructions recall All Yesterdays for their boldness, such as the pterosaur dewlaps, display flaps on the sauropod necks, and some inflatable nasal tissues - this isn't surprising when you realise that an All Yesterdays author - Darren Naish - was DITW's scientific consultant. I'm sure these additions will startle some folks who aren't familiar with modern palaeoart conventions, especially those used to dinosaurs depicted as shrink-wrapped walking musculoskeletal systems, but, simultaneously, none of the animals look 'over speculated': their appearance acknowledges our limits to predict extinct animal anatomy without losing sight of what real animals look like. This isn't to say there aren't some aspects of the reconstructions that won't be quibbled by experts, but we're talking nitpicks here, not glaring problems. In terms of broad-brush strokes, and most of the finer ones, DITW hits home in all critical aspects of its reconstructions and animations. It's rare to see big-budget, mass-audience palaeoart achieve this sort of credibility and is especially surprising given how much animation was needed to create the sense being in a real 3D environment, sometimes with multiple views over the same landscape and animals transitioning between viewing stations. The sensation is believable enough that, upon leaving the event, I felt a strong urge to head off to the countryside for genuine wildlife watching.

Back in the real world, away from the TimeBase, is where some minor criticism of DITW might be found. Having been thoroughly impressed with DITW I was a little disappointed to find that there was no book or other media (behind the scenes DVD? Blu-ray with the animations?) allowing us to preserve the experience at home. There's some great work gone into this show and it's a shame to think that, when DITW eventually ends its run, there'll be no way to truly appreciate the designs and ingenuity that went into it. There are DITW toys, posters and clothes, but they only go part way to capturing the experience itself. A book or 'behind the scenes' film could reinforce the science behind the spectacle, too - a lot of visitors surely enjoy DITW, but do they know how saturated in science the event is? I'm aware that this might change in the future - I hope it does.

Another look at the DITW Tyrannosaurus. There are other, non-tyrannical choices of PR art, but I really like the composition of this piece. Half-obscured dinosaurs have an almost classical vibe, I suspect Zdenek Burian would have approved. The artworks you're seeing in this post are promotional renderings by Damir Martin - check out his site for more cool stuff.

The ticket cost of DITW has drawn some comment on social media, some of which may be unwarranted. Tickets are upwards of £20 each so, yes, DITW is undeniably a more expensive dinosaur experience than, say, visiting a museum or watching the next Jurassic World movie at the cinema. Such cost, however, is comparable to that of gigs, theatre shows and travelling exhibitions - not perfect analogues for DITW, but similar in terms of running expenditure and event duration. I'd argue that the novelty, ambition and execution of DITW trumps most of these experiences too: there really isn't much else out there like it, let alone something of such quality and educational potential. I appreciate this doesn't diminish what will be steep door prices for some, but a little online research revealed a number of family passes, promotional codes and other means of trimming the ticket cost down, sometimes quite considerably. Group rates are available too, if you're looking to attend with a suitably sized clan. If cost is an issue I heartily recommend checking these offers out - dinosaur fans young and old(er) will not want to miss this.

In sum, Dinosaurs in the Wild is a terrific blend of cutting edge science, technology and entertainment that dinosaurophiles - or anyone with a general interest in extinct life - will enjoy immensely. Whether you visit just for the spectacle, to nerd-out over the palaeontological Easter eggs, or to see what next-generation science outreach could be like, you're sure to enjoy it. As far as I know, the next location for DITW has not been announced yet. It leaves London on the 31st of July, so I recommend exploiting London's accessibility to visit as soon you can in case the next venue is less reachable. Hopefully, if DITW does well, we can look forward to sequel experiences set in alternative times or locations: DITW-style experiences in Mesozoic seas, Permian Russia or Pleistocene Europe, anyone?

Exclusive, unused promotional still of the DITW Alamosaurus, AKA Spods Maclean, finished acting for the day and out of character, relaxing in a pub close to the venue. It's funny how performers are often smaller in life than they appear onscreen.

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