Mesozoic Miscellany 76

The Big News

Fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda was honored for her years of work with the description of Wendiceratops pinhornensis. While it's always fun to see a new ceratopsian with some new configuration of headgear published, this is especially interesting because it's the earliest known centrosaurine ceratopsid. Read more: Integrative Paleontologists, Laelaps, Royal Ontario Museum.

The publication of a new Cretaceous snake, Tetrapodophis, was met with a mix of delight, surprise, and facepalms. While snakes experimented with a variety of limb configurations during the cretaceous, Tetrapodophis was the first found that reveals four limbs. They're small, and probably more useful for grasping than locomotion, but they're there. Unfortunately, the provenance and legality of the fossil is questionable. I'm going to go ahead and just suggest reading Dr. Shaena Montanari's article for Forbes Science, which explains both the potential significance of the find as well as a good dissection of the ethical and legal concerns.

Around the Dinoblogosphere

At Pseudoplocephalus, Victoria Arbour shares pics from her visit to Dinosaurs Unearthed.

Not Mesozoic and I don't care! Gareth Monger's cute Hallucigenia.

Check out Rebecca Groom's life-size Velociraptor plushie!

Speaking of plushies of the prehistoric orientation, check out the Kickstarter campaign by Jungle Plush. The company says they strive "to make our plushies in a way so that any young dino enthusiast can easily identify and learn about their favorite dinosaur, all while having fun at the same time." And it looks like the campaign has funded! There are a few more days to chip in, however.

What can be said about the spinal cords of extinct animals? Liz Martin's got some ideas.

Fernanda Castano has a post specially crafted for all you lovers of paleontology's history: Owen, Dickens, and the Invention of Dinosaurs.

At The Integrative Paleontologists, Andy Farke interviews Mike Keesey about his terrific website, Phylopic.

Dave Hone is publishing a book about tyrannosaurs!

Speaking of the tyrants, Mark Witton cops to a bit of a bias towards them in his art of late...

At Method Quarterly, Laura Bliss writes a nice triptych of interviews, providing an introduction to paleoart for the uninitiated. Read what Doug Henderson, Mark Witton, and Emily Willoughby have to say.

Paleoart Pick

I love paleoart that tells a story. Certainly, restorations that Marc refers to as "spotter's guide" style (isolated against a white background) have their place, and I often love them. But a well-thought out paleoart story captures the atmosphere of a lost world, has the feeling of a dream made real. Emily Willoughby is a master of this, as shown in her recent take on Zhenyuanlong suni, a new dromaeosaur from China. Read more about the story she is telling over at her DeviantArt page.

Zhenyuanlong suni, © Emily Willoughby. Shared with the artist's permission.

Filthy Lucre Corner

Blame Mammoth is Mopey for the lag in round-ups. It's pretty well been a full-time job since March. Once the campaign was funded, production and fulfillment ate up most of my and Jennie's time. But this week, with the completion and release of the expanded ebook, things are easing up quite a bit. Now my main task is to complete the custom illustration perks, which are proving to be quite a bit of fun. I've been spending time with a studious dromaeosaur, a notorious Triassic weirdo, some charismatic canids. I'll be sure to share them here when they're done!

Vintageish Dinosaur Art: The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Dinosaurs

Did you know that if you placed every dinosaur book written by Michael Benton end-to-end, they would stretch three times around the equator? Along with good ol' Dougal 'Dixie' Dixon, Benton is surely one of the most prolific authors of popular books on extinct saurians. Similarly to Dixon, the sheer number of Benton-authored books means that the quality of the illustrations contained within them varies greatly. While not dreadful, the art in The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Dinosaurs isn't particularly memorable; it's the sort of serviceable, highly Sibbick-inspired artwork you'd expect to see in a randomly selected dino book from the mid-'90s. That said, it's still interesting to spot all those beloved '90s tropes, some of which still refuse to die. (Oh, and I have cheated a bit - this book's from 1996, so isn't quite old enough to qualify for VDA. Then again...rules, who needs 'em?)

By far the best aspect of this book is the large number of maps on offer, each displaying the lie of the land and the distribution of different animal groups in a given time period. As one might expect given the title, these maps are the book's real emphasis, and do indeed provide a wonderful sense of the shifting continents through geological time. Arguably, the illustrations (produced by Ralph Orme, Steve Roberts and Peter Smith) are of secondary importance to the maps, but occasionally the artwork is brought to the fore, with entire pages dedicated to a single animal - as is the case with Plateosaurus, below.

The illustration's rather uninspiring - a gaggle of grey dinosaurs standing about in a largely barren landscape, their skins wrinkly in a highly '80s Sibbickian, Michelin Man sort of way. They're very droopy-tailed, and sport rather shapeless limbs - again, no doubt inspired by Sibbick's Normanpedia era work, as so much '90s dinosaur art was. On the other hand, it's worth noting that the plateosaurs remain firmly bipedal, unlike Sibbick's own. The German palaeontologist Friedrich von Huene concluded that Plateosaurus was a biped decades earlier, and while others have since argued in favour of an habitual quadrupedal posture, further work by the likes of Heinrich 'Caudofemoralis' Mallison has borne this out. So...hey, it's actually aged quite well! If you ignore everything else about the animals' postures.

The book moves on in chronological order, and in a mere few tens of millions of years the sauropodomorphs have graduated to their familiar, enormous, long-necked and inevitably grey forms - the Proper Sauropods (or 'Properpods'). Nothing to see here, folks - grey, elephant-skinned, Gurche/Sibbick/Jurassic Park-inspired business as usual. What's more unusual about this piece is the extensive use of airbrushing*, which is seldom seen in palaeoart and at least helps give this illustration a memorable feel - it seems somewhat hazy, as if one were standing in a fern-filled crater in the tropical heat, gazing up at the far-away heads of absurdly large reptiles. Given the way the weather's turned this summer where I live, it's not an unpleasant thing for me to imagine.

Come the Early Cretaceous, we're treated to a classic Wealden scene in which a very obviously Sibbick-inspired Iguanodon (now with forward-curving thumbs for greater stabbing efficiency!) steals centre stage, while brachiosaurs and (presumably) Hypsilophodon look on. It's always pleasing to see dinosaurs in a rainstorm (if nothing else, it helps to distract from the lack of vegetation), but the most curious thing about this illustration is the creature lurking in the middle-right. What exactly is this long-necked, small-headed, sharp-thumbed beast? I'm tempted to assume it's Baryonyx, in which case this is one of the strangest illustations of said dinosaur out there. Could the head be partially submerged? Maybe, but it doesn't look it. Weird.

Speaking of spinosaurs...here's a gloriously '90s Spinosaurus complete with neat, semicircular sail and generic 'carnosaur' head. Note also the short arms, which made perfect sense under the assumption that this was some sort of weirdo allosauroid. It's not the artist's fault that Science Marches On, of course, but it's always amusing to look back.

Equally outdated - but less obviously so, at least to most people - is this Quetzalcoatlus, which, once again, is heavily inspired by Sibbick's work - especially the head. Even the colour scheme on the noggin is a near-direct copy of Sibbick's. Mark Witton discussed the genesis and legacy of Sibbick's Quetz at Tetzoocon last year, but suffice it to say that the much-copied head nubbin is a mistake, and the jaws are also likely too short.

I'm quite sure that the book's Saurolophus (above) has also been copied from somewhere, although I can't quite place it - the original may have appeared in Dinosaurs! magazine. At least it's nice and colourful, as is the handsomely dappled hadrosaur in the background which, based on the accompanying caption, is presumed to be...Tsintaosaurus?! Could it be that (in spite of the text) this is another rare example of a flat-nosed Tsintaosaurus? Admittedly, it's just as probable that the foreground animal is intended to represent Tsintaosaurus (in spite of better matching Saurolophus), while the beast in the back is the 'lower crested' Saurolophus. But it would be cool to find another depiction of that seldom illustrated idea. Either way, this is one of the best illustrations in the book, featuring as it does imaginatively coloured animals and considered background detail (fallen branches! Footprints! A forest!).

As Dino Doomsday draws closer, the book wheels out the saurian big guns - namely, ceratopsian noble knight Sir Triceratopalot, and his dastardly foe of gnashing teeth and atrophied forelimbs, Sexy Rexy. The highly Sibbickian Triceratops in this scene aren't terrible, although there are a few perspective fudges afoot, particularly when it comes to the animals' faces and limbs. Rexy's unexpected lippiness is quite pleasing, but he does also possess a disconcerting '90s-style knobbly fizzog, which reminds me of nothing so much as a collectible model made by American toy manufacturer Safari back in the day. His head's also a little out of proportion with his body, which is unfortunate. Everyone likes to be reminded of how big Tyrannosaurus' head was - that's why it's always being thrust at you from book covers, typically with blood and/or slobber spraying everywhere.

Incidentally, this illustration is another example of the '90s trope involving ceratopsian parents encircling their young in order to protect them from predators, seemingly inspired by what people would do with covered wagons in the Old West [EDIT: And also some large herbivorous mammals, as pointed out by commenters. Not sure why westerns came to mind for me - I think they mentioned it in Dinosaurs! once. Or I just had one of Those Moments. It's been a long day]. It's a peculiar meme to appear so often, and I'd be interested to know the origin of it.

And finally...it's the end of the Cretaceous, which means flowering plants, modern-looking birds (is that a swallow?), and mammals...mammals everywhere. Scampering along the ground, peering over tree branches, and generally making a furry, smelly nuisance of themselves. Of course, we're also treated to the return of Triceratops and Rexy, who has turned a delightfully stripy green for this piece. It's difficult for illustrators to make a pleasing composition out of an image that is required to cram in as many different taxa as possible, but this artist has had a pretty decent stab at it. While Rexy is distractingly weird-looking, with his unduly long arms and bulbous derpy head that was seemingly made in a separate mould, the other creatures aren't so bad. I guess.

That's the thing about this book - the illustrations are altogether just so forgettable, for all the artists' best efforts. That's where you come in! Because I have a copy of Ladybird's Prehistoric Animals and Fossils going spare, it's surely Competition Time. I want you to draw me a group of Triceratops adults encircling their young, while tyrannosaur bandits circle around the perimeter. Please feel free to draw clothes and silly facial expressions on your saurians. Link to your entry in the comments, and this fairly mediocre prize could be yours!

*Thanks are due again to Niroot for pointing this out.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The Lost World (Ladybird)

Ladybird books are a firm favourite of mine, since (like many other Brits) I have very fond memories of learning to read with them as a child - not just those bought for me at the time, but also hand-me-downs, which were all the more special. Their factual dinosaur book remains a favourite - laughably outdated these days, but still beautifully illustrated by LITC stalwart Bernard Robinson. Ladybird also published simplified versions of classic tales; as a child, I had their version of Robinson Crusoe. Until last week, I had no idea that these included The Lost World, and happily it's just as lavishly illustrated (by Martin Aitchison, this time) and entertaining as ever.

Regular readers will have noticed that, in the above image, I've actually bothered to stitch images of the front and back covers together for once; this is because they're worth viewing together as one piece. There's an awful lot going on, and plenty of palaeoart tropes to be had. The front cover's dominated by a very mid-20th century kangalizard Iguanodon, all tiny hands, prominent teeth and natty pebbliness (although sadly missing the dewlap). Meanwhile, Stegosaurus rules the back, looking stunning in classic Roofed Lizard Green with red trim; its pose appears to be based on an old Robinson piece. Pterosaurs swoop overhead, 'natives' lurk in the undergrowth, and an 'ape man' swings in from above. Best of all, though, there appears to be a fight between a Crystal Palace ichthyosaur and plesiosaur going on in the background. Beautiful stuff.

As with so many Ladybird books, the story's human characters are superbly illustrated, their faces vividly conveying their emotions and personalities. Here, the crew are aghast as a terrifyingly bug-eyed pterosaur nabs their dinner, like some sort of giant, leathery-winged seagull git. Well, most of them are; Professor Challenger, of course, is happy to have proven Professor Sumerlee (shown here collapsing to the ground in shock) wrong. "Ha ha, look! A Stoutian nightmare wraith with a voracious carnivorous appetite! Take that, Summerlee!" Professor Challenger is, of course, ably portrayed by Brian Blessed. And quite mad.

Speaking of which..."Iguanodon's ALIVE!" The crew enjoy a lovely moment of wonder (without Philomena), observing a herd of Belgians lost in the jungles of South America. These are your father's Iguanodon, described as looking like "monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet long, with scaly skins like black crocodiles". I can't decide what's most enjoyable about this image; the detail of one of the lizardy lummoxes accidentally stepping on the tail of a smaller dinosaur, or Summerlee's delighted expression.

The team later come upon a crater containing an entire nesting colony of grotesque pterosaurs, all bony arms and bizarrely ribbed necks. While exaggerated to more closely match their descriptions in the text, the animals appear to be based on contemporary depictions of Pterodactylus, as is particularly evident from the head. An especially superb detail in this illustration - and evidence that Aitchison had seen a few avian nesting colonies - is the huge amount of dried guano on each rocky outpost. It helps make things that little more authentically revolting.

Thankfully, the sinister pterosaurs don't come for our heroes in the night. Instead, they're visited by a large theropod, on its way back from a merry Iguanodon slaughter. The characters speculate that the animal might be a Megalosaurus, and Aitchison's illustration seems to take cues from Peter Snowball's oft-reproduced 1970s painting of the animal, right down to omitting the hallux on both feet. The shorter, wider head is probably deliberate; in the text, the creature is described as having a face like "a giant toad" (only with more teeth).

Thankfully, there's plenty of time for more dino-watching in between bouts of life-threatening peril. In the above illustration, the narrator (Edward Malone) has a close encounter with an old-fashioned Stegosaurus, the likes of which one might find in a 1950s Zallinger painting or Jurassic World. Unusually, the tail is depicted snaking up into the trees, rather than just dragging along the ground, which actually works quite well for the composition.

Of course, it's far too easy to be distracted by everything going on on the left hand side of the piece, where a panoply of retro palaeoart creations are chilling out by (and in) an otherwise quite serene-looking lake. A pair of plesiosaurs are shown sitting in the shallows (for some reason), snatching up passing fish and unwary pterosaurs alike. This may be a work of fiction, but such impossibly periscope-necked marine reptiles featured frequently in palaeoart until surprisingly recently (and now, with the benefit of hindsight, look completely ludicrous). Meanwhile, two '70s model kit Corythosaurus hang around by the shore, looking a bit glum as a squat Protoceratops joins them for a drink. There's also a deer because, hey, why not? In all, it's a marvellous piece of work by Aitchison, who seems to delight in cramming ever more tiny details into this rather surreal scene.

Of course, it's not long before the megalosaur returns, which the narrator describes as having come "snuffling after" him (a pleasant reminder of a time before pop culture dinosaurs were required to sacrifice the element of surprise by roaring at their potential victims in an inexplicable rage). When compared with the previous illustration, this theropod looks rather more awkwardly static and unconvincing, which may be explained by Aitchison's need to change the pose further from Snowball's original. On the other hand, there's a beautiful sense of sudden movement in the depiction of Malone stumbling into a trap set up by the locals (complete with a particularly deadly-looking pencil. Hardness rating: NAILS). I'm also fond of the way that a foreground detail (the carnivorous plant snagging a dragonfly) echoes the main action in the scene.

Having spent some time on the plateau, our ever-ingenious protagonists start improvising contraptions to walk among the unfriendly prehistoric denizens without being eaten (because that's what aristocratic, unflappable Edwardian explorers would have done, damn it). In the above illustration, Lord John Roxton heads off to steal a pterosaur egg, having whipped up a protective cage from bent canes. The dramatic red sky here is quite lovely, and the knowing expression on Roxton's face is just priceless.

Of course, this leads to our heroes presenting a pterosaur to a sceptical audience of scientists in London.  Naturally, this leads to uproar, as indicated above by the shocked-looking audience members and a lady in dire need of her smelling salts. By contrast, the four protagonists appear to be taking great delight in being able to present the living proof behind their tall tales, and none more so than Brian Blessed, unleashing an aggressive carnivorous animal on the audience with a toothy grin and a theatrical hand gesture. The pterosaur itself has adopted an equally dramatic pose, holdings its wings up like Dracula's cloak and giving the audience a steely glare from its giant red eye.

And finally...as everyone reading this blog surely already knows, the pterosaur promptly escapes the Queen's Hall and goes on a brief sightseeing tour of London before making its way down to Devon, perhaps because it had heard something about the 'Jurassic Coast'. This occasions the above illustration, depicting the beastie terrifying one of the fine men in silly hats who help keep our fine democracy's hereditary head-of-state-for-life a good bayonet's length away from the peasants. The way that the pterosaur looks almost as startled as the guardsman is quite brilliant. Bearskin hats off to Aitchison for his fine work on this one, I think!