Duckbilled monsters

Just means the ancestors of the Lank split into two groups: One converged on giraffes, and one took to the sea.

Interesting! Could it be that this is just one of the best ways of depicting something as unambiguously having a duckbill-like head?

Well, I'd simply say that's what a crestless hadrosaur head looks like in dorsal view. That the lank's head looks exactly hadrosaurian is probably intentional.

Looks like a cross between Hadrosaurs and Sauropods or a mutant plesiosaur vs. a "Terror Bird."

Just an intermediate stage on the way to the giant boneless aquatic pterosaur.

Looks like a case of convergent (speculative) evolution to me. I'm with Darren. The link seems to 'out there' to be an imitation.

"Weird, no? Did the artist responsible for the lank (Steve Holden) copy the head of 'that creature'? This would seem like such a bizarre thing to do that I find it hard to believe."

I don't find it hard to believe at all, or bizarre. As drawer of stranger creatures myself, I can tell you that inspiration can come from odd places. I myself have been inspired artistically by these old, strange, outdated paleo-illustrations, so like I said, I don't find it odd that another artist may have done the same.

Further to Cory's comment...
...And even asking Steve Holden might not answer the question! It's more believable when the person claiming it HASN'T just been outed for plagiarism, but unconscious copying is apparently not uncommon. A well-known American philosopher (died within the past decade or so) is widely credited with an idea I suspect he got from a paper by the Polish philosopher Kotarbinsky which was translated into English in the mid 1950s: the details of the argument are too similar to be coincidental, but if he had remembered the source when he wrote his own paper in the late 1960s he would have cited it. And a novelist I corresponded with also said she was familiar with the phenomenon. So maybe Steve Holden saw the weirdie with the Brontornis and the image stuck deep in his memory, even though consciously he did not remember having seen it and sincerely believed it was an original inspiration when he reproduced it. Such things DO happen!

Not to make any assertions I can't back up, but I remember reading something about a controversy over Dixon's "Man After Man" book in which another artist (Wayne Douglas Barlowe) claimed Dixon stole some of his designs.

The Wikipedia entry on Man after Man says this:

It has been implied that Dixon plagiarized at least some of the designs for the future humans from another illustrator, Wayne Douglas Barlowe. In Barlowe's book The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe, Barlowe includes a section with sketches that are nearly identical to some of the creatures in Dixon's book. Barlowe asserts that they are from a project that was plagiarized by another author.

I actually own both these books mentioned and the drawings really are similar.

I am not convinced that Holden copied "that creature." The heads of "that creature" and the Lank are both clearly based on some kind of edmontosaurinin, but beyond that, I don't think it's fair to speculate.

For what it's worth, I've tried to figure out what that caption says. I can't make most of it out, but it looks as though they're calling "that creature" Hadrosaurus. That would make sense, based on an image of Hadrosaurus on the copyright expired site that looks like it's from the same artist, and essentially reproduces the same animal (albeit with a shorter neck) [here].

I wouldn't ding the Brontornis image for accuracy (anatomical or temporal), it's hardly the worst of them. Check out this Triceratops.

Speaking of plagiarism, that "Triceratops" vaguely resembles Charles R. Knight's Agathaumas...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Agathaumas.jpg

Pete Buchholz:

For what it's worth, I've tried to figure out what that caption says. I can't make most of it out, but it looks as though they're calling "that creature" Hadrosaurus.

I also have trouble reading the caption but you're right, it seems to say that it's a 'Hadrosaurus'. Which makes that picture wrong in so many different ways...

As I mentioned in the comments to the earlier post with that picture, I have seen something much like this before, and think the creature was clearly labeled as a hadrosaur in that version.
I think the caption is in German, and reads: "[first line:]Brontornis Burmeisteri [second line:] im Kampfe mit einem Hadrosaurus (Kreidezeit). Die noch heute lebenden Brontornis [?] sind einfache Reptilvertilger." Which means: Brontornis Burmeisteri in fight with a Hadrosaurus (Cretaceous). The Brontornis still living today are simple reptile eaters."
Still living today? I can't make out whether the text really says Brontornis here, but if so, I guess whoever wrote this was thinking abot seriemas.

Just found a version with a better resolution here. It's ebenfalls (also), not einfache (simple), but otherwise my reading was correct.

The neck of the "Hadrosaurus" actually makes sense -- hadrosaur necks are insanely long, they just can't be straightened anywhere near that much and had a lot of flesh dorsally and ventrally.

I wonder if both artists could have copied the heads from a third source. Is there a really old dorsal reconstruction of a hadrosaur somewhere?

And Ethan, I've heard that Barlowe/Dixon claim before, and I'd love to see the pictures in question. Do you have any scans of the relevant page?

Grant, I don't have my copy of "Man After Man" handy, but I did have my "The Alien Life of W.D.Barlowe".

Here are some hastily snapped photos of my copy of that book with the heading "Future Man" and about a paragraph of text claiming another artist plagiarized this work in 1984 so it will not be used. He does not name names.

Here are Barlowe's drawings

Does anyone else have scans of the aquatic man at the beginning of Man After Man, the sand hopping creature later on or the tundra dwellers? That's what it would appear to be.

Odd though it is, your conclusion seems to be right about the illustrator for Dixon's book using the old painting of the Brontornis and (presumed) hadrosaur. Why he would do so is as big a mystery as why the original artist of this schlocky painting would put two animals together that never met in reality (and, even back then, I would think they knew a little better than that!)

Wow, thanks Ethan! I've seen "Man After Man", and I can definitely see the resemblance.

and, even back then, I would think they knew a little better than that!

No, because Ameghino assigned far too old dates to the South American fossil record, putting the Oligocene into the Cretaceous...

I've found Ernst Krause's "Werden ud Vergehen" at archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/stream/werdenundvergeh01kraugoog
(search for Brontornis)
The picture I remembered seeing doesn't show, but the caption and the main text seem to fit. The picture is said to be by Al. Clement, and first appeared in "La nature". The text speculates that phorusracids might have extermined the dinosaurs(!), and the wording is much the same as in the caption of the card ("Reptilvertilger"). So the card is not the original source, and if Holden indeed copied the head, he might well have gotten the picture from somewhere else.

At that point I should mention that vertilgen doesn't simply mean "eat". It has connotations of "cleanse off the face of the Earth"...