Finally: a modern book devoted to everyone's favourite mid-20th Century Czech palaeoartist, Zdeněk Burian. It's big, it's expensive, and it's amazing. For palaeoart fans, it's an essential purchase. As much as I’m a fan of 19th century palaeoart, the 20th Century is where our efforts to reconstruct fossil organisms really take off and stretch their wings. In its early decades, Charles R. Knight…
A juvenile Edmontosaurus disappears into the enormous, lipped and gummy mouth of Tyrannosaurus . Those of us in the palaeoart community are used to seeing lips on dinosaurs now, but neither the lipped or lipless hypothesis has been given a thorough seeing-to in peer-reviewed literature yet. Until, that is, today. This is the PR art for our new paper, Cullen et al. 2023, that dives into the…
The hero of the hour, Triceratops horridus . But how often were those long horns stuck into predatory dinosaurs in defensive action? I feel a long discussion coming on... A persistent idea around dinosaur biology is that the ceratopsids, or horned dinosaurs, were among the most formidable prey for predatory theropods. Though lacking armour, the large cranial horns and frills of these dinosaurs…
Mighty Tarbosaurus bataar carries its Therizinosaurus cheloniformis prey through a Masstrichtian forest in the rain. Colour-wise, I've decided that a ruddy-orange dorsum, light venter, disruptive black stripes, rings and large eye masks are meant to hide this 10 m long animal during predatory acts. But without direct palaeocolour data for Tarbosaurus , could we ever evaluate how sensible this…
It's Christmas time, which means it's time for a festive book review! This year's subject: John Conway's A History of Painting (with Dinosaurs) . It was ten years ago that palaeoartist John Conway , along with his colleagues Memo Koseman and Darren Naish, published one of the seminal works on palaeoart for the modern age: All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other…
The very first image posted at this blog, way, way back in November 2012. It shows a coloured version of a piece I created for the Pterosaur.Net blog earlier in the same year. How time — like so many quad-launching , cowboy-riding azhdarchids — has flown. I don’t normally worry about blog anniversaries, but today marks a full ten years since I started writing this blog and a decade of writing and…
Tabletop gaming and (scientifically credible) dinosaurs: together at last! The draft cover of Nathan Barling's Dr Dhronlin's Dictionary of Dinosaurs , a book illustrated with my palaeoart and now being crowdfunded over at Kickstarter . Time to announce a new project that, I must admit, I never saw coming. For the last few months, I've been working with insect palaeontologist and taphonomy expert…
Well, this doesn't need a caption. Predicting what will become a palaeoart meme is a dark, mysterious art. Sometimes news drops that should, given everything we know about the folks who create and like palaeoart, go absolutely viral. It should be illustrated again and again, find its way into books, magazines and maybe even documentaries, and inspire so much online content that old, miserable…
"Hi, I'm the 1/35 unpainted Beasts of the Mesozoic Tyrannosaurus . You may remember me from this Kickstarter campaign and the Creative Beast Studio website. But now I'm being reviewed at this blog to evaluate my box claim of being an 'ideal 3D reference for palaeoart'. How do I fare? Read on!" Now here’s something I never thought I’d have cause to write: a review of a commercially available…
Giganotosaurus carolinii carries the remains of a juvenile rebacchisaurid while sporting a bunch of crazy tissues on its face. Big scales, horns, and is that some kind of thick pad over its snout? Is all this artistic speculation or something inferred from fossils? Read on... Up until now, my palaeoart career has not crossed paths with carcharodontosaurids, the gigantic, charismatic and famous…
Yes, against my better judgement, we're going there. (Publicity image for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This image is too populous online to find its original source, so let's just assume it's the PR department at Universal/Legendary Pictures.) So, that’s that. With the release of Jurassic World: Dominion the so-called “Jurassic Era” — which is what certain posters now want us to call the six…
By now many readers will have seen the excellent, excellent BBC/Apple TV+ documentary Prehistoric Planet , a show being widely celebrated as the most significant televisual portrayal of dinosaurs since 1999’s seminal Walking with Dinosaurs . There’s a huge amount to say about the reaction to Prehistoric Planet as well as how it was put together. I’m proud to say I was involved as a concept artist…
Behold, the cover of The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs , available for preorder now, and on general sale next month! Next month sees the publication of what might be one of the more important projects I’ve ever been involved with: a new book, The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs , co-authored with Ellinor Michel and published by Crowood Press . This is a large,…
Tyrannosaurus engages in some closed-mouth vocalising , but which species of Tyrannosaurus is this? It might seem that, up until recently, there would be only one answer, but this is actually an old question dating back to at least the early 1970s. Hey, writing about this sounds like a fun idea for a blog post. Oh look, someone else thought so too - read on... Even aliens living on the far side of…
Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni scavenges a juvenile Torosaurus , recently killed (judging from the decapitation) by a large tyrannosaur. We've been waiting for ages to learn more about this pterosaur following a near-50 year delay in the description of its remains, but we're finally there! So what have we learned about Quetzalcoatlus proportions and anatomy from this glut of new information? Read on...…
The story of how dinosaurs were resurrected for cinema in the early 20th century tends to focus on the visual components of these technical feats: the 2D animation and stop-motion technology that made long-extinct reptiles move again. But alongside making dinosaurs walk and run, cinematic dinosaurs also gave them a voice, imagining their snarls, barks, screeches and roars. Perhaps the first film…
That most obscure theropod taxon Tyrannosaurus chews on bones on the front cover of Emily Willhoughby's new book, Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs: the latest entry into the growing literature dedicated to palaeoartistry. Can we talk about how nice that tyrannosaur knee is? From the Crowood Press website . The last decade or so has seen the arrival of several notable palaeoart books, articles and…
It's a well-verified fact that the best dinosaurs to draw are the sauropods, exemplified here by the mighty Giraffatitan brancai . But the route to this modern realisation was a difficult one. When sauropods were first discovered no one wanted to restore them at all: their fossils were always in the hands of the wrong people, at the wrong time, and our first attempt at restoring their life…
When it comes to imagining aggressive behaviour between large Mesozoic theropod dinosaurs, the main game in town is head-biting : individuals grappling with one another by locking jaws around each other’s faces (Tanke and Currie 1998; Peterson et al. 2009). Such actions are well-evidenced by the sometimes significant trauma found on theropod skull fossils, including tooth marks, gouges, and even…
The giant elasmosaurid Albertonectes vanderveldei forages for invertebrates and small prey deep underwater. From this posterolateral view, the vertical tail fin is unmissable - but should I have drawn it as a horizontal fluke instead? Welcome to yet another challenge for restoring the life appearance of plesiosaurs! It’s fair to assume that, when painting or sculpting plesiosaurs, most…
After a long wait and much online discussion, the Mary Anning-inspired historic drama Ammonite is finally on general release. As goes the popularisation of palaeontology, Ammonite is something of a big deal: it’s the first film treatment of the iconic 19th-century fossil collector Mary Anning, a rare major feature to focus on genuine 19th-century palaeontology, and - in what might be another first…
Dinosaurs and dragons: is there a better fit between fossils and folklore? Common wisdom is that Chinese dinosaur species, perhaps including Yutyrannus huali , became associated with local dragon lore when ancient people used their bones for medicinal purposes, but how well-evidenced is this popular idea? Geomythology is a discipline that most of us are familiar with even if we've not heard of…
Megaloceros giganteus galloping about: a rare scene in palaeoart, but probably a common sight in life. Famed for its size and headgear, we mostly ignore the fact that Megaloceros was among the most cursorial of all deer. What else about this amazing animal is hidden behind those antlers? Megaloceros giganteus , otherwise known as the Irish elk or giant deer, can genuinely be regarded as a…
The American mastodon Mammut americanum is one of the most iconic members of the North American megafauna. A frequent subject of museum displays, books and technical research for over two centuries, we can all immediately conjure mental images of this long-bodied, relatively short-legged elephant-like animal. Nearly all of us will imagine mastodons the same way: that is, covered with a thick layer…
Few of us need an introduction to the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures (here shown during construction in 1854), or their artist, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, but not many of us know much about Hawkins or his work beyond this one installation, thus overlooking a major contributor and pioneer in the early history of palaeoart. Image from the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs blog . Most of us…