Dakota the Edmontosaurus dinomummy returns to public view in a new exhibition by the North Dakota Geological Survey’s Paleontology division, which opened just over a week ago on October 16th at the North Dakota Heritage Centre. Specifically, Dakota’s exquisitely preserved right hand and tail are currently on display. I’m sincerely honoured (and more than a little struck by Imposter Syndrome) to have been commissioned for an illustration for the exhibit; my first in a museum.…
We all knew that a great many dinosaurs were airheads, but were we presuming too much about what was going on in and around their gorgeous skulls? In their paper The Frontoparietal Fossa and Dorsotemporal Fenestra of Archosaurs and Their Significance for Interpretations of Vascular and Muscular Anatomy in Dinosaurs, published in The Anatomical Record, Holliday et al. look at the anatomy of existing archosaurs and apply their findings to an aspect of dinosaur cranial anatomy that we’d always taken…
What began with an examination of 1994’s Eyewitness Dinosaur video has lead me to this – purchasing a children’s activity pack from eBay. Ah, but not any children’s activity pack, for this one includes warm 1990s nostalgia alongside a pop-out card model, board game and (gasp!) “five facsimile documents”. Yes, it’s the DK ACTION PACK that, in true Eyewitness style, is simply entitled Dinosaur – even if it isn’t branded up with the monochromatic all-seeing eye. My copy may have…
So, what’s noted palaeoartist Brian Engh been up to lately? Well, last Thursday (February 7) JAMA Oncology published Triassic Cancer – Osteosarcoma in a 240-Million-Year-Old Stem Turtle (link) by Haridy, Witzmann, Asbach et al. The paper documents the presence of a malignant tumour present on the femur of a Triassic stem-turtle, Pappochelys rosinae. Although the specimen resides in the collections of the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde in Stuttgart, it underwent analysis at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, where lead author…
Why don’t we see any four-winged feathered dinosaurs, these days? Time was, not so many hundreds of millions of years ago, that various theropods sported quite well-developed vaned feathers not just on their forelimbs, but on their hind limbs as well. The most famous, and perhaps most flamboyant of these animals (that we know of) was Microraptor, a small four-winged dromaeosaur known from fossils that, even given their tiny size by dinosaur standards, are among the most spectacular ever found.…
Some palaeoart books – many palaeoart books – are monumental hardback affairs, printed on the very sheeniest of glossy paper, sufficiently large that casually reading them on the train to work is quite impossible without drawing attention to yourself. (Not that I speak from personal experience, or anything.) Their pages burst with colour, as awe-inspiringly rendered, hyper-realistic vanished beasts of the past threaten to burst forth from their papery confines. They are, in short, Worthy. They are Art Books dealing…
After a few months of sketching, designing, and communicating with manufacturers, I’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new set of enamel pins! I’ve been wanting to create some pins for a while, and decided to take the plunge with some flaming dinosaur skull designs I’ve been working on. The initial set consists of dinosaurs of Cretaceous North America: Deinonychus, Torosaurus, Parasaurolophus, and Gorgosaurus. I chose these because I wanted some distinctly dinosaurian forms and I wanted them to…
Any dinosaur-loving child in the UK in the early 1990s simply had to have a Dinosaurs! magazine collection. I’ve looked at the series on a number of occasions previously, mostly because it’s a treasure trove of 1990s palaeoart (of widely varying quality), but also because it’s hugely nostalgic for me personally, easily as much as Jurassic Park. My parents placed a subscription with our (now long-defunct) local newsagent, so I had every copy delivered to my door. Mostly thanks to…
More Camptosaurus coming at you! As in literally, a lot of these look like they’re coming directly at you! I have to say, I’m just tickled by this whole thing. To think that Brian tweeted out this hashtag and then people all over the place spent the next few days drawing Camptosaurus in front-view… it’s a beautiful thing. Even when folks strayed from the “rules,” there were very few lateral views shared on the hashtag, and a lot of stylistic…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.