New Valentine Design!

Well, Cupid is getting ready to step up to the plate, so best to start thinking about how you're going to tell twelve people - or any other multiple of twelve - how much they mean to you. To that end I've drawn a valentine with a dinosaur on it, based on a great little one-liner thought up by my life partner, spouse, and BFF, Jennie.



but what about that odd multiples of twelve bit up above? Well, you can actually purchase this card with three other designs - by Randall Munroe, Zach Weinersmith, and Rosemary Mosco no less - in a set of twelve. So whether the objects of your affection fancy planetary physics, entomology, parasitology, or palaeontology, you are covered. Pick 'em up from the XKCD store!

A redesign for 2015

With a new year comes a new design for LITC, keeping up with our roughly two year schedule for such things. I decided to go in a pop art direction this time around, after playing with different treatments, all centered around the new logo design. That logo, as revealed a few weeks back, is a sort of "back-to-basics" approach which places a big-headed chasmosaurine in a heart. When working on the header, I liked the idea of using multi-colored, comics-inspired panels and it worked nicely with a cropped detail of our new chasmosaur mascot. If you're reading this on a feed reader, hop on over to the blog site itself to see the design in its bright and shiny glory.


As announced last month, I've finally made some blog-specific merchandise featuring the new logo, available in pink and black or in all white. Both versions are available on a wide variety of products, from garments to mugs to device skins and cases. All proceeds from these items will go to support our activities: purchasing books, visiting museums, and possible future web-hosting related costs.

A beautiful LITC mug! I swear, that's what it is, even though the handle isn't visible.

A snazzy LITC shirt!

Thanks for all of the support you've given us over the first five years of LITC, and here's looking forward to many more!

The March of the Dinosprites

Last week I shared some pixel art dinosaurs I was working on and said I'd been continuing them as a series. It's a fun little project to kick off 2015, with a new one shared every Friday, and added to my Redbubble shop as well. I've decided to call the series Dinosprites, because it seems like a pretty catchy name.



I'll mainly be sharing this at Facebook and Twitter, but I'll probably post the full series here in a few months when this series is complete.

Dragon Tongues

I recently had the pleasure of being commissioned to create a new logo for the Dragon Tongues podcast, and since I'll take any opportunity to share relevant work from my livelihood at LITC, here it is.



Dragon Tongues is the creation of Sean Willett, and it's highly recommended if you haven't had the chance to hear it. As luck would have it, Sean and I were both fans of each other's work, and the process was a lot of fun from start to finish. We met via a video chat (the future is truly here, isn't it?) and hashed out some basic ideas. Besides the need for the work to stand out on the iTunes podcast browser, I knew that it needed to have an aaspect of intimacy to it. Sean does an incredible job recording and producing his podcast, with the result feeling like you're an audience of one, listening to an expert storyteller.

That sense of intimacy and a respect for scientific and natural history were guiding lights as I developed a few different ideas. All involved Megalosaurus in some way, to honor its important role in early dinosaur paleontology. Of theses ideas, Sean was smitten with the design you see here, featuring a juvenile and parent megalosaur in front of a mountain range that bears a strong resemblance to a certain iconic fossil.

Anyhow, go listen to the show! Visit the official website, find it on iTunes, follow Sean and the show on Twitter, and pick up a tee shirt at Redbubble.

Oddly enough, I have another commission for a soon-to-be-announced paleontology podcast I'm really excited to hear, and to share here. Stay tuned!

The Unfeathered Bird in the Time of Jersey Boys

Another shamelessly indulgent post which I nevertheless hope is made up for in sheer geekery. On the last day of his visit to London, Chris DiPiazza of Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs met up with Marc and I once again at the Grant Museum of Zoology, where we were also joined by none other than Katrina van Grouw, the brilliant artist and author of The Unfeathered Bird, a book which has not only been mentioned by us many times, but which every reader of this blog should be in possession of by now (and if not, I recommend rectifying the situation post-haste!).

From left: Katrina, Marc, Chris, and me

But that wasn't all. Chris, Marc and I were wearing t-shirts designed by our very own Chasmosaurs blog master, David Orr, featuring dinosaur family crests representative of our saurian portraits.

Love in the Time of Jersey Boys

So, get yourselves Katrina's book! Get David's t-shirts! Support us artists! "Come buy our orchard fruits". You'll forgive my shocking commercial-mindedness, I hope. Blame recent personal circumstances...

Photograph by Marlies Fischer

As a bonus (such as it is), here is a picture of Chris' first day in London, where we also had the pleasure of Dr. Adam Stuart Smith's company (among that of other dear friends) -- marine reptile expert and our lord and master in another capacity over on the Dinosaur Toy Blog and forum. Chris here sports yet another gem from the Orr Store, from the Dinosaur Hearts series.

Love in the time of Chasmosaurs, uniting the Mesozoic blogosphere. Again, do please forgive the indulgence on my part.

The Society of Palaeontology Fanciers

I have this compulsion that occasionally rises up, demands attention, prompts feverish work, and subsides until it sees fit to return. I am compelled to design the kinds of paleontology-inspired apparel, stickers, and whatnot that I'd like to wear. I'm kind of picky when it comes to graphic shirts, you see, and when I visit a big museum I'm always hoping that they'll have designs than hit me in my sweet spot. Let's call it graphic simplicity. If you've been hanging around here, you may remember me sharing such designs here in the past - I Left My Heart in a Prehistoric Age, Dinosaur Hearts, and of course the set of minimalist family crests that I came to call Cladistic Heraldry.

If this kind of stuff hits your sweet spot too, well, I've got some damn splendid news. I recently created a set of designs and I think they're pretty nice. I call the set The Society of Palaeontology Fanciers, and like the other projects I mentioned above, it gives to the chance to proclaim your allegiances to extinct taxa to the whole world.



These are all seven of the first batch. The impetus for the set came when I was doodling, and started playing with minimalistic renderings of stem-birds. I have to say that as I worked on the design above, of a vaguely deinonychosaurish animal, it was freeing to not to have its damned arms sticking out. When it comes to artistic renderings of animals closely related to modern birds, I find I am less and less satisfied with artists staying close to skeletal contours. In my doodling, I came to challenge myself to find a way to an iconic rendering of just such an animal. I didn't want it to be easily confused with a modern bird; or if it was on first glance, I want it to inspire a double take. Once I felt that I'd achieved it, I was in full-throttle design mode and I played with various non-avian dinosaur forms. Each took on a life of its own. One of the fun challenges of these sets I like to do is to resolve drastically differently scaled animals into a cohesive series. Once my dinosaurs were done, I was compelled to do a trilobite, specifically the Cambrian Oryctocephalus.

I'm flattered by the fact that when I do projects like this I get a lot of "do such and such!" or "what about whatchamataxon?" comments. I certainly want to do more. Before I do any more for extinct critters, however, I'm working on a set in hopes of doing a tiny bit to help extant raptors from going extinct. These I hope to realize as genuine embroidered patches which will be sold in the Indiana Raptor Center's new gift shop, and maybe down the line I could even have the capital to make patches of my paleontology designs, as well.

Anyhow, if you're moved to pick up a shirt or two, these are available in the base colors above, as white designs on dark colored shirts, or as black designs on light colored shirts, so no matter your preferred style and color, there should be something to your liking.