You nab the first image you see as your reference and immediately get to work. So you take to Wikipedia, one of the few sources available to you (though read on). It’s quite the new thing, that Olorotitan! You’ve never heard of Olorotitan, and being Chinese your access to Google is somewhat limited. One day, someone commissions you to make a model of Olorotitan. Your dinosaurs may not be very scientifically informed, but they are crowd-pleasing enough for you to make a living.

rex, Triceratops and Parasaurolophus models.

You don’t know much about dinosaurs, but you have spent quite some time making hackneyed T. Imagine you’re an engineer at a Chinese robotics firm. But I imagine it must have gone something like this: I wouldn’t know where to begin if I were to try to trace back where this meme originated I don’t understand Mandarin for one thing. Speaking of ripoffs: I have found this image on the websites of Kawah, Gengu and Amodinosaur, all competing Chinese robot firms. Which brings me to my favourite smalltown dinosaur park, where I recently had to do a double take seeing the new addition… The fact that we mostly cover Vintage Dinosaur Art means we mostly see Vintage Dinosaur Memes, but that doesn’t mean new palaeoart memes, unique to the 21st century, aren’t springing up under our noses as we speak.

Infamous cases include the Mohawk Syntarsus, the Freaky Giraffoid Barosaurus and, often spotted in our own archives, the Gangly Dork Parasaurolophus. So when everyone is copying everyone else, you get palaeoart memes. How many books have been reviewed here whose artwork can be traced back to the old greats? How many lesser artists have we seen who’ve copied the work of originals like Charles Knight, Zdeněk Burian, Robert Bakker, Greg Paul or John Sibbick? This is especially true if a nonexpert artist has been commissioned to cook something up on the cheap. As readers of this blog should know all too well, palaeoart is a field where copying other people’s work is commonplace.

Dinosaur imeme