What was the first life restoration of a sauropod?
February 2, 2026
Way back in 2010, when I was young and stupid, I wrote as follows in my History Of Sauropod Studies book-chapter (Taylor 2010:368–370):
Ballou (1897) included, as one of his six figures, the first published life restoration of a sauropod, executed by Knight under the direction of Cope (Fig. 5a). This illustration, subsequently republished by Osborn & Mook (1921, fig. 127), depicted four Amphicoelias individuals in a lake, two of them entirely submerged and two with only their heads above the water. The skins were shown with a bold mottled pattern like that of some lizards, which would not be seen again in a sauropod restoration for the best part of a century
And here is that illustration:
Taylor 2010:Fig. 5. Snorkelling sauropods. Left: the first-ever life restoration of a sauropod, Knight’s drawing of Amphicoelias, published by Ballou (1897), modified from Osborn & Mook (1921, fig. 127). Right: a similar scene with ‘Helopus’ (now Euhelopus), modified from Wiman (1929, fig. 5).
I blithely repeated this assertion on the in-progress Barosaurus-mount manuscript. When I mentioned this manuscript in a Dinosaur Mailing Group thread, Tyler Greenfield helpfully pointed out that I’d missed something!
Two publications in 1892 included life restorations of sauropods.
One is Henry Neville Hutchinson’s book Extinct monsters: A popular account of some of the larger forms of ancient animal life, first published in September 1892. His Plate IV (between pages 68 and 69) shows a Brontosaurus:
My initial thought that this may be by Joseph Smit, since the book’s title page says “With illustrations by J. Smit and others”, but that the poorly preserved signature at bottom left doesn’t look like it spells his name. However, Mary Kirkaldy sent me a helpful comparison of this poorly reproduced signature with several others which are definitely Smit’s, and it checks out:
The other 1892 publication with a sauropod life-restoration is James Erwin Culver’s seven-page article “Some Extinct Giants” from issue 1(5) of The Californian Illustrated Magazine. This must have been published before Hutchinson’s book, because the date-range for Volume 1 of this magazine is October 1891 to May 1892.
I’ll quote from page 505 because it’s just so cute:
If men lived in those days, they were cave dwellers living in the rocks,, garbed in skins, defending themselves,, if necessary, with stone clubs and hammers. But what could their weapons, avail against the giant Amphicoelias that crawled slowly and heavily out of the water in the direction of their homes, a mountain of flesh, weighing possibly twenty tons, four or five feet taller than the tallest elephant, and dragging along sixty or seventy feet of flesh?
And on page 506 we see this — note the cavemen on the ledge to the right!
(Tyler says this artwork is by Carl Dahlgren, but I’ve not been able to find the attribution. Can anyone point me to it? He also notes that this piece was clearly an inspiration for Knight’s rendition, especially the patterning.)
But both of these 1892 works were predated by Camille Flammarion’s 1886 book Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme (The World before the Creation of Man). On page 561, as figure 297, Flammarion included this restoration by Jules Blanadet:
Translation: Shape and probable size of the atlantosaur, the biggest animal that ever existed (length: 35 meters).
As things stand, this is the oldest life restoration of a sauropod that I know of. But I’ve been wrong about this before, and very possibly there are yet older ones that I don’t yet know about. Can anyone point us to something older than 1886?
References
- Culver, James Erwin (1892, April). Some Extinct Giants. The Californian Illustrated Magazine 1(5):501–507.
- Flammarion, Camille. (1886). Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme. Origines de la Terre. Origines de la Vie. Origines de l’Humanité. C. Marpon et E. Flammarion (eds.). 847 pages.
- Hutchinson, Rev. Henry Neville (1892). Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life. Chapman & Hall, London. [This links to the more widely-circulated 3rd edition from 1893.]
- Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343. doi: 10.1144/SP343.22
Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws
December 3, 2025
Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing. There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, and busy, and not everyone has to be interested in every possible thing. Just don’t mistake “I can’t draw” for a good reason not to try.)
Drawing forces me to be a better observer. If I have to trace every line and contour of a fossil, I have to push my pen along those paths, and that compels me to notice them in the first place, and wonder about them. Why this shape, and not some other? Is this an omnipresent feature, or a variable one? Where have I seen this before? Have I seen this before? Has anyone ever noticed this at all? (Answer: surprisingly often, no.) I think anyone who wants to be a better morphologist could improve their observational skills and anatomical understand through drawing; indeed, I can hardly imagine how it could be otherwise.
A slide from my introduction to anatomy lecture, from the section on how to study.
John Muir Laws is all about the practice of observing nature through drawing and writing notes, but the principles he teaches have much broader applications. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes of his:
“The first pancakes off the griddle are always funky, but you need to make them to get to the good pancakes. So too with drawing or journaling. Do not judge yourself by your first lines on paper on any given day.”
– from “Sacrificial Pancakes”
When I first read that, I wrote to Mike, “Holy cow, did I need to read these lines, not just about drawing or writing but about LIFE.”
Mike responded, “Whether X is blog-posts, specimen drawings, novels, narrative songs or landscape paintings, the best _and quickest_ way to produce a good X is to produce a lot of bad Xs. Also: “sacrificial pancake” is a good term for the sequence of Bad Xs.”
The thing is, it’s not about the bad Xs, or even the good Xs. It’s about the willingness to keep making Xs at all. To wit:
“Drawing with the goal of the drawing itself makes a fetish of the product. […] Each drawing is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle to help you focus your attention.”
– from “Quantity, not Quality”
The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is about doing that — learning to focus your attention by drawing and taking notes. I particularly like Laws’s 3-part structure to taking notes on something, be it a landscape, an organism, or a phenomenon. His guiding prompts are:
- “I notice…” What do you notice about the thing? Draw those things, write them down, annotate them — capture them somehow. The more you capture, the more you will likely notice.
- “I wonder…” Ask questions. They can be dumb questions, or unanswerable ones. The goal in the moment is not to filter, not to judge, just to let the ideas flow. As with pancakes, you may have to off-gas some dumb ideas into your notebook to get to the good ones.
- “It reminds me of…” Make connections. Again, without judgement. They can be far-fetched or goofy. You’ll have the rest of your life to sort the good from the bad — but only if you cast a broad enough net to catch the good ideas in the first place. Which is just another way of saying, lower your inner defenses to looking or feeling stupid. A lot of great ideas looked dumb at first blush.
That second quote resonates with me for another reason. I have the odd privilege of being friends with some of the world’s most accomplished paleoartists. If I started comparing my drawings to theirs, I’d never pick up a pen or pencil again. I’m like a goldfish watching a team of brain surgeons. But I’m not drawing for the same reasons they are. I basically only need to be able to do two things: take notes for my own personal use, and — occasionally — hand-draw something for publication. My first draft of the previous sentence included the formulation, “draw well enough to learn something”, but I realized that’s a nonsensical arrangement of words. I think that anyone at any level of skill or experience can draw well enough to learn something; indeed, a beginner may learn more from their first 10 drawings than a master will learn from their next 50.
And to circle back to the opening of the post, I don’t think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can draw better. I think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can see better. As Laws wrote, drawing is a vehicle for focusing attention. But the process of drawing has the handy corollary that it gives off archivable notes as waste.
A still from one of Laws’s videos on sketching.
Laws’s chosen field is natural history, but you could apply his ideas on noticing things, asking questions, making connections, and creating iteratively to all kinds of things: baking techniques, physical exercises, lawn mower engines, you name it. So a book with a seemingly specific remit, observing nature, actually is about becoming a better observer, and a better learner, in general. UPDATE: I should have thought to include this the first time around — Laws has just tons of great resources on his website, including a lot of freely-downloadable inserts and templates in the store to help with observation and drawing. One of them, the ruler sticker, is where I got the idea for affixing IKEA paper tapes to the cover of my research notebook.
Of all the books I’ve covered in this book week, if there’s one I could inflict on aspiring scientists — or active ones — and beg them to read and engage with, it would be this one. Not from any position of superiority! I am climbing the mountain myself, always, one day and one step at a time. This book is one of my hiking poles. I think you will find it useful as well.
Book Week 2025, Day 3: Dungeon delvers delight in Dr Dhrohlin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs
November 29, 2025
This book is squarely at the intersection of being an objectively great thing to have in the world, and a subjectively great thing to have on my gaming shelf. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, and running Dungeons & Dragons for over a decade, including an elaborate “Dinosaur Island” campaign for my son when he was younger. Just this year my current party has had to deal with an Octyrannopus — one of my homebrew monsters:
— as well as a gigantic, very aquatic, possibly-somewhat-undead Spinosaurus. In game, that horror was summoned on the shore of the Sunless Sea by a gnoll necromancer. But I summoned it from the pages of Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs, which is packed with so much good stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First off, as it says on the tin, the book has a bunch of dinosaurs, which go waaay beyond the standard half-dozen or so from the official D&D Monster Manual. It’s nice to see some love for some of the more recently-described, not-yet-famous taxa like the titanosaur Mnyamawamtuka.
But it’s not just dinosaurs sensu stricto — the book also has a healthy leavening of pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and non-dinosaurian critters to round out your random encounter tables and fictional ecosystems.
And speaking of ecosystems, the book covers four in some depth: the Yixian, Bahariya, and Crato Formations, and Hateg Island, including flora, landscape, climate, and so on, so dungeon masters can give their players some you-are-there verisimilitude, or use the covered ecosystems as guides for fleshing out their own homebrew worlds. I believe that every single organism in the book — dinosaur, pterosaur, fish, or plant — comes with optional magical rules, so dungeon masters can dial in the high-to-low magic level of their game worlds. There’s just so much in here, to use as written or mine for inspiration.
Note that each critter gets at least one two-page spread (a few prominent taxa get two or more spreads), and, crucially, all the game-relevant info is usually available on a single spread. Why is this important? I’ve heard it may be largely fixed for the new 2024 Monster Manual, which I’ve not yet acquired, but all three of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, and most of the official campaign books that followed, are UI disasters when it comes to consistently putting the info that people will need at the table (i.e., at speed) where it will be immediately accessible — which is the One Job that an RPG book really needs to do well. RPG books are sort of like a combo of emergency manual and cookbook in requiring good, reader-focused structure and graphic design for usability on the fly. If you can’t find what you need quickly, and ideally get all the info for a given thing without turning the page, the book has failed as a game reference, no matter how great the ideas and writing are. Why Wizards of the Coast can’t figure this out for most of the official D&D books is quite beyond me (possibly because they keep firing the whole D&D creative crew and then replacing them with newcomers, so neither institutional memory nor game-creation expertise accumulate as they should). But like a lot of 3rd-party products, Dr Dhrolin’s gets it right, and runs circles around WOTC books in terms of usability at the table.
When a critter gets more than one spread, it’s either for a splash page of art, or more options, or both. There are a handful of custom dinos chosen as high-level pledge rewards by backers when the book was crowdfunded. For example, You-Know-Who here, which struck me as a neat linkage between Mark Witton’s scientific thoughts on what a max-size tyrannosaur would have been like, as explored in his new book, King Tyrant, and a truly awesome challenge to throw at a D&D party. The big, weird spinosaur my party recently faced is another of these special purpose, beyond-the-ordinary, truly monstrous foes. As a dungeon master, it’s nice to have a selection of boss dinos locked and loaded.
For people new to dinosaurs and paleontology, there’s a really lovely, concise introduction that would not be out of place in almost any popular science book about dinosaurs. The book is built in two versions, for D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2E, but there’s such a wealth of good ideas and great art inside that I think it would be worth picking up for anyone interested, no matter what system they run (it’s an article of faith with me that dungeon masters should freely adapt or homebrew stats as needed).
I’m especially impressed by Dr Dhrolin’s as a sort of global and all-encompassing guide to bringing paleontology into tabletop games. It includes ideas on how this might happen at all — lost worlds, time travel, necromancy, and more — NPCs to hook parties into paleo-themed adventures, and new subclasses and other options, for newly-generated characters or pre-existing ones encountering dinosaurian realms for the first time.
Want to ride a dinosaur? The book has you covered, with taming and domestication rules.
Want to play a dinosaur, or a pterosaur? You can do that, too, with six new playable species, complete with notes on their societies.
Just like great paleoart? The visuals alone are worth the price of admission, with Mark Witton providing art for the critters and Jules Kiely on plants, items, and some of the new playable species and character options. The book is a shade over 300 pages long, illustrated in full color throughout, and with pretty pictures on almost every spread. It’s a staggering amount of art.
Finally, a word on professionalism. Considered broadly, RPG products tend to be very hit-and-miss. It’s a genre where new authors can sometimes bring new ideas to the table pretty quickly, and without having all the interesting bits sanded off by corporate focus groups, but also one where a certain level of amateurish production is almost endemic. Even the official WOTC books, pretty as they are, rarely seem to have been designed and assembled by anyone who actually plays D&D regularly, or understands how books get used mid-game. Dr Dhrolin’s is one of the most professionally — and considerately — produced products ever put out for 5E. The creative team — Drs. Nathan Barling and Michael O’Sullivan on writing, Mark Witton and Jules Kiely on art, and a host of others (nicely detailed and credited on page 8) — had the ambition to make it wide-ranging, the closest thing that’s ever existed to one-stop-shopping for dinosaurs in RPGs, while also understanding the brief to make it useable at speed at the gaming table, and while also delivering an attractive, high quality, solidly-constructed book that feels good in the hand and is a joy to just flip through. If you like dinosaurs and paleontology, it’s great — every critter even gets a small section of references! If you like D&D, it’s jam-packed with ideas, well-organized, and actually useful in prep and in play. If, like me, you’re into both things, it’s basically aersolized, weaponized crack, and you probably already own a copy.
If you need more convincing, professional dungeon master and RPG creator Ginny Di has a great video review.
Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs has been out for a year now, so this is yet again something I could have and should have covered a lot sooner. But this entry is still timely. Right now, and for about 59 hours after I hit the “publish” button (= until sometime on Dec. 1), PalaeoGames has big discounts on Dr Dhrolin’s and lots of other associated goodies, including tokens, battle maps, a fillable character sheet, and 3D-printable digital models (delivered as STLs), through their current crowdfunding campaign, Dr Dhrolin’s Festive Party 2025. You can also pre-order the follow-up volume, Professor Primula’s Portfolio of Palaeontology, which is being developed as I type. This is a hoard of good stuff, just in time for holiday shopping. Go do the right thing.
Book Week 2025, Day 1: Speed Thief Vol 1, by Sean Hennessy
November 27, 2025
I would like this book just for being funny.
I would like this book just for being well-illustrated.
I would like this book just for covering lots of different dinosaurs and other Mesozoic critters, some familiar and many others only recently described, from more dinosaur-bearing formations than I was previously familiar with.
The fact that Sean Hennessy manages all of this at once is pretty astounding. I can laugh at the animals’ sometimes very modern, sometimes Mesozoic-specific, and sometimes universal predicaments, while learning about new-to-me critters, while enjoying pretty darned great paleoart. Each comic is accompanied by a title, a list of featured genera, and the geologic unit, time, and country or continent. There’s even a taxonomic index in the back of the book!
This post is doing multiple duties. Having followed his comics online, and loved them, I promised Sean that I’d buy his book and blog about it…back in 2024. Finally acquired my copy at DinoCon 2025, and got it personalized by the very personable author. So here’s your long overdue shout-out, Sean, and a visible reminder, to myself and to the world, that I still have more DinoCon stuff to blog.
Sean Hennessy’s contribution to the noble theme of sauropods stomping theropods.
New Speed Thief comics are going up regularly on Instagram, and you can get them early as a Patreon backer. You can get the book, prints of comics, t-shirts, pins, stickers, and more from Sean’s Etsy store. Go have fun! And stay tuned for the rest of Book Week 2025, in which I will continue belatedly singing the praises of books that aren’t necessarily new, but are fully awesome.
Finally, happy Thanksgiving! Go eat a dinosaur.
Midnight in the Museum
September 27, 2025
Midnight in the museum
In the yawning resonance
Of empty space
The great xylophone skeletons
Play the lonely strains of Time
Like cathedral organs
Heralding the ends of ages.
Time rushes on
The final predator
Implacable
Like Dinichthys
Cruising the crinoid beds
Sounding one note:
Everything dies.
Change hammers all
On the anvil of eons
Carnivores and civilizations
Long of tooth
Weak of spirit
Wracked by rot and riot
Collapse.
Their carcasses play host
To new generations
That strip the drying flesh
And flaunt their youth
Beneath the philistine stars
That warmed the nebulae
Before the phoenix-fusion birth
Of brash young Sol.
I feel a distant call
The silent whistle screaming
Of my genes
Seeking always
To jump this fragile ship of life
And flee down the generations
Until I am lost
Expended
Forgotten.
The tyrant kings smile knowingly:
“You too shall pass”
And continue their stately voyage
Into eternity.
The circle closes
The revolution complete
And morning spreads her wings
To the far horizon.
I do not fear the dawn
Or the age to come
For I have basked
On desert sands
Drinking life like heat
And felt the mighty Tethys
Washing over my feet.
Notes
In 1998-2001 I was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, with night-owl tendencies and all-hours keycard access to the old museum collections, a defunct WWII-era gymnasium where dinosaur skeletons were prepared and test-assembled, and the new building — now the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History — where they were being installed, ancient bones going up on skeletons of new steel. I wrote this in 1998 or 1999; perhaps fittingly, its precise origin is now lost in time. I’d no doubt say it all rather differently now, but 50-year-old me will yield the floor to the 20-something who penned this, not least because he wrote me into existence as well. Oh, and if I didn’t swipe the expression “xylophone skeletons” directly from Ray Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, it was at least heavily inspired by Bradbury.
Photos, top to bottom:
Diplodocus, Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal, UT
Pteranodon, Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, Woodland Park, CO
Something toothy, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY
Clouds over Mygatt-Moore Quarry, Rabbit Valley, CO
Ripple rock, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, CO
Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops and friends
September 12, 2025
Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk.
I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere. A timely example: I didn’t know that Alex Pritchard was out there making museum-quality dinosaur skulls and skeletons until I saw his work on the DinoCon Instagram feed in the run-up to the convention. Then I visited his website, DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk, and then I got very excited.
Here I am at Alex’s booth at DinoCon 2025, with his mounted Aquilops skeleton. If you’d like to see the skeleton without a big dumb mammal crowding the view, see the image at the top of the post, or visit the webpage.
That skeleton rocks on toast. Luggage constraints kept me from bringing a skeleton home, so I settled for one of Alex’s Aquilops skulls, only ‘settle’ isn’t the right verb because this is also extremely awesome.
I spent a *lot* of time reconstructing the skull of Aquilops for our descriptive paper (Farke et al. 2014), so it’s one of the few non-sauropod things I’m qualified to yap about (and have, here, here, and here). Alex’s Aquilops skull is so good it gave me flashbacks; it looked like my drawings had leapt off the page and into faux-fossilized-bone — and very shortly into my hand and then into my luggage.
I made a point to get to Alex’s table early on to scoop up one of his Aquilops skulls, which was a savvy move because he did later sell out — of Aquilops, and of darn near everything else, much of it gone by the end of the first day. I was also quite taken with his Psittacosaurus skull, which I got in two sizes, and an oviraptorosaur egg I picked up for the heck of it. I guess I should have nabbed a Velociraptor skull to complete the early ceratopsian/Djadochta Formation Venn diagram. Maybe next year.
I got to chat a little with Alex. He’s so easygoing and approachable that it would have been all too easy to overlook his passion and dedication, had the evidence of it not been covering a very long table and rearing around us on metal stands. I know how hard it is to execute these things faithfully in two dimensions; the sheer number of specimens that Alex has conjured into being in three dimensions — and not just accurately but convincingly — is pretty staggering.
Alex likes to show some love to the less-famous dinosaurs — on his Instagram feed you can see his reconstructed skeleton of the recently-named dromaeosaur Shri rapax. Aquilops turned out to be kind of a fluke — he’d already made the skull and skeleton before Jurassic World Rebirth‘s Dolores catapulted ‘my’ little weirdo from relative obscurity to global fame. That happy accident worked out pretty darned well for me, and I think for Alex as well — he had a whole raft of Aquilops skulls at the start of DinoCon, and none at all on day two. I assume he’s hard at work on more awesome critters; from now on I’ll be following his output a lot more closely.
So, if you want a faithful representation of the Aquilops holotype as it exists today, you can download and print the 3D model of OMNH 34557 that we published with the paper. But if you want a non-roadkilled Aquilops skull that looks like it might have come straight out of the Cloverly Formation, I can personally vouch for Alex’s — it’s the one I have sitting on my desk right now.
I got the impression that DinoCon 2025 punched a decent crater in Alex’s inventory, but he is accepting orders and I expect him to recover quickly, if he hasn’t already. So get on over to DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk and do the right thing.
Reference
Matt’s DinoCon 2025 adventure
August 27, 2025
Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now.
I love driving across the American West. Give me a thousand miles of interstate and a couple of days to myself and you’ll rarely see me happier or more well-adjusted.
My brain is still buzzing, from DinoCon and from the rest of the trip, but here are some of my personal highlights in no particular order:
1. Venue generally — all the conference areas on the University of Exeter campus were very walkable, and the Great Hall had tons of space and lots of doorways, which made it easy to get in and out of from multiple directions, quietly, even during talks. The vendor space was nice, and having dorms and a pub on site was excellent.
Kieran Satchell fixin’ to hold court. Past Matt did not know that he was about to get his face rocked off.
2. Speakers — great, diverse set, appreciated seeing so many women and early-career folks, and people that have had different pathways into paleontology (researchers, educators, artists, people in entertainment, students, etc.). Hillary Maclean’s talk was the absolutely perfect way to kick off the conference, and set a really wonderful tone for everything that followed (irritatingly, I got no photos). I’ll have more to say on a couple of standout talks in a future post.
I’ve been admiring Dougal Dixon and his work for four decades, so getting to meet this kind, gracious, curious, enthusiastic, wonderful person was a lifetime dream come true.
3. Vendors — freakin’ amazing. Highlights for me were getting to meet Dougal Dixon, Andy Frazer (Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, etc.), Sean Hennessey (Speed Thief), Alex Pritchard (DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk), and Katrina van Grouw (Unfeathered Bird, Unnatural Selection), in addition to catching up with old friends like Mark Witton, Georgia Witton-Maclean, Bob Nicholls, and Toni Naish. I’d corresponded with Natee Himmapaan and David Krentz but not met them in person, so it was nice to finally close those loops. And Nathan Barling — I’ve been meaning to blog about Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs for ages, and I got to gush at Nathan for a few minutes over how rad that book is. I got books signed by Dixon, Frazer, Hennessey, Naish, and Witton, but I was a lightweight compared to some in that department. The evening art exhibition was fantastic; Mike and I wandered around taking it all in, and it gave us a lot to think and talk about. If you were there and I didn’t meet you — and I know I missed a few folks from busyness, brain fog, general overwhelmedness, etc. — I’m sorry, and I hope we can catch up next year.
Lots of official DinoCon stuff, some of it personalized by me. No-AI pin by Andy Frazer is available in his shop.
4. Brochure — all the swag was great, including the badges and lanyards, but the brochure was a real high point for me, for these specific reasons: I love the A5 size and form factor, so much more convenient than anything larger or smaller; print quality and paper quality were excellent, so it felt good in the hand and like a high-quality artifact; layout with schedule on the middle fold and maps at the back (and on the back) was super convenient, especially for one-handing when carrying an armload of books and art; and finally having room for notes. This is peak conference guidebook design; no need to rethink, just keep making them like this, and other conferences take notice.
Still a few spaces left, but laptop real estate is getting tight. Blue Lias sticker was another DinoCon acquisition, courtesy of Kieran Satchell.
5. Official themed art for the conference — I like that this existed, and I thought that Natalia Jagielska‘s art hit the right note for the type of event this was, so well done all around. I was particularly taken with what I can’t help seeing as her Union Jack azhdarchid; that piece adorns the laptop I’m typing this on, courtesy of the official DinoCon 2025 sticker pack. Speaking of: loved the stickers and pins and so on, I’m a helpless victim for all of that, as Mike can attest.
As the self-nominated Aquilops Ambassador, I left a few Aquilops Funko Pops with various parties in the UK, and put one in the auction.
6. Auction and Quiz — turns out Darren Naish is really good at working a room, and keeping the tone light, even when he was (mock) exasperated by this or that. Both events were enjoyable and hilarious. My plea for the future: don’t find a more professional or even competent auctioneer, just keep making Darren do it. It’s unarguably the right move.
What the kids refer to as a grip of Mark Witton’s art.
Needless to say, I enjoyed myself tremendously. I did have one minor problem that I’d never had the opportunity to experience before: sheer exhaustion from all the dinosaurian awesomeness. At most conferences the dinosaur bits get one day, maybe a day and a half max, and although many of the vendors will be catering to the dinosaurati, it’s not all dinosaurs all the time. DinoCon was just that, and although it was exhilarating, I collapsed into bed each night on the thinnest of fumes (and thinnest of wallets).
Mike and Fiona kindly let me disgorge my DinoCon loot onto their dining room table. I did manage to get it all safely home to SoCal, with only a little necromancy and some slight warping of the spacetime continuum.
But heck, I’ve got in the neighborhood of 50 weeks to recover. By the time DinoCon 2026 rolls around, I’ll be more than ready to do it all again.
The SV-POW!sketeers cracking each other up, as is our wont. This photo was taken just before the one at the top of Mike’s recent post.
One of the major highlights of the trip was just getting to hang out with Mike and Darren. I hadn’t been to the UK since SVPCA 2019, so it was well overdue. I’ve known them both as pen pals for a quarter-century now, and as good friends and colleagues for over 20 years, and looking back I can see the Godzilla-sized footprints their scholarship and companionship have left in my life and my career. That’s a humbling amount of good fortune.
Probably my favorite photo from the trip. Fiona, Mike, me, and Jenny watching the sunset from the trampoline in the Taylors’ back garden.
Also perfectly lovely: getting to stay with Mike and Fiona before and after the conference. Their place is my home away from home. Rivers of English tea flow invisibly beneath the surface of many of my papers, courtesy of the Taylors, and it’s past time I publicly acknowledged that.
I have more to say about the trip — about Mike’s talk, book signings and art acquisitions, not one but two close encounters with Aquilops, and more — but science is calling so those posts will have to wait a bit. Stay tuned.
DinoCon 2025 is next week
August 7, 2025
The DinoCon brochure — really a conference guidebook, with schedule, speaker list, vendor list, maps, etc. — is a free download here. Art by Natalia Jagielska.
DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation. In addition to Mike’s talk on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its various offspring, and mine on the sauropod body plan, Tess Gallagher is giving a talk on sauropod skin. I’ve vaguely noodled on that topic (once, twice), but it is far from my realm of expertise, so I’m looking forward to getting the real story from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. A talk on sauropod skin seems extremely fitting for a conference that straddles the science and art of dinosaurs, with lots of presenters and attendees who are interested in the life appearance of extinct animals.
DinoCon 2025 schedule (with the Saturday evening quiz and art exhibition cut off). Click to embiggen, or see the full version online at this link.
I’m stoked for every single book signing — Witton! Hennessy! Naish! — but most especially for Dougal Dixon’s event on Sunday afternoon. He’ll be signing copies of the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, which I recently reviewed and am looking forward to acquiring. I’ve been idolizing Dixon from afar since I was 10, so it will be deeply satisfying to finally meet him and tell him in person how much his books have meant to me. There’s a non-zero chance that I will also throw myself on the floor, crying and begging like a spoiled child for him to work with Breakdown Press on new English-language editions of Man After Man and Greenworld. (I gather Dixon doesn’t have fond memories of Man After Man or think highly of it, but it’s still one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution and it would be great to have it in print again, not least so I could get a copy without selling any organs.) If you see me there, have your camera ready, just in case.
I don’t have the time or financial fortitude to cover all the vendors right now, but there’s a list in the DinoCon 2025 Brochure (link) and various vendors have been getting love on the DinoCon Instagram account for weeks. I’m horrifixhilarated at the prospect of my impending bankruptcy.
Hope to see you there!
I’m stoked for Aquilops in Jurassic World Rebirth
February 26, 2025
A promo image Brian Engh did for the release of the Aquilops paper back when. Who wouldn’t want one of those?! See lots more great stuff at Brian’s Living Relic Productions.
Aquilops turned 10 years old in December. For all of that time, I’ve been waiting for Aquilops toys. I mean COME ON people, it’s an adorable little cat-ceratops, the only one of its kind so far in North America, how do we have multiple toys of Kaprosuchus and no Aquilops yet?
Well, my good day has come. Apparently Aquilops is going to be in Jurassic World Rebirth, and there are going to be toys!
Screenshot of the leak(?)/announcement from Collect Jurassic this very morning. Better photos here.
There may be plushies too, which is such an obvious move that I am legit flabbergasted no-one has done it sooner. But also, yay!
I am not so cool and reserved that I will not squee hard over all of this. As I texted Jenny this morning:
I’m going to buy 100 of them and give them all unique names and turn the spare bedroom into the Aquilops Paddock and take 2 0r 3 with me wherever I go and aggressively start conversations with strangers about them and generally be unbearable.
You’ve been warned.
UPDATE March 4, 2025:
An addendum in three images.
Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets.
But with the progressing enshittification of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), that post is rendering less and less well, and at some point will probably fail completely. So I am reproducing it in a form not dependent on a doomed third-party API.
Enjoy this blast from ten years ago!
John Conway 🦣 @john
Stupid painting takes too long. I should outsource this.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
.@nyctopterus Here you go: 
That’ll be £8, please.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus Now I regret not having used MS Comic Sans for the lettering.
John Conway 🦣 @john
Salamanders are surprisingly difficult to paint. Too formless or something.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus “Salamanders are surprisingly difficult to paint” <– “Always with you it can not be done.” Here you go:
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus That’ll be £8, please.
Darren Naish
Urge to draw #temnospondyls won’t go away. Stop reading Schoch 1999, #JeholWealden2013 is tomorrow & it’s mostly #dinosaurs. But but – –
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Dude, I already drew you one. (You have to share with @nyctopterus though).
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Brilliant work, thanks, I assume it’s CC BY? #terribledrawings #lame
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Even better, it’s CC0 — public domain! But hey, you accidentally misspelled #awesomedrawings
Darren Naish
There really do need to be lots more good temno drawings. I mean, good Platyhystrix pics: there’s Bakker’s… and that’s it.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣@TetZoo
Here you go.
That’s be £8, please.
Darren Naish
That’s seven #temnospondyls illustrated. Each one takes 20 minutes but can only spend time drawing on rare occasions.. otherwise writing.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Twenty minutes? Har har, that’s rubbish. I can do them in TWO minutes. Look, here’s my newest:
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Oh wow, you’ve come through again with outstanding panache. Verily, Doug Henderson is quaking in his boots. #temnospondyls
Darren Naish
“When CM Kosemen told me of his plans to invite ppl 2 send in their own illustrations… I thought it was a tremendously bad idea” AYY Intro
Charon Henning
@TetZoo So bummed I missed deadline for this. LOVE the book. Supporting your podcast. #AllYOURYesterdays #tetrapodcats
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TheOddAngel @TetZoo I feel your pain. I also wasn’t able to finish my feathered Dipldocus in time to be included.
Ezequiel Vera
@MikeTaylor I believe there are many of us who missed the deadline… maybe there is an AYY: Episode Two in the future?
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
.@ezequielvera I hope you’re right, fort sake of my speculative quadrupedal tyrannosaur:
Charon Henning
@MikeTaylor Vaccuming up prey throughout the Cretaceous, the Hooversaurus Rex was a relentless predator ….
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TheOddAngel NOT DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY THE FOSSIL EVIDENCE, that’s our motto!
Ezequiel Vera
@MikeTaylor @TheOddAngel @TetZoo you haven’t seen my gliding ankylosaur :-P
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
Here you go, I’ve saved you the trouble.
Darren Naish
Wow, people really don’t like drawing braincases, do they? Especially crappy line drawings throughout the vertebrate literature, sigh…
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “Wow, people really don’t like drawing braincases, do they?” <– Here you go.
CC By as usual.
@keesey
@MikeTaylor If you went with CC0 you could avoid the shame.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@tmkeesey Shame? I’m not following you.
@keesey
Let’s just say attribution is a double-edged sword. ;P
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Hey, that’s >>>brilliant<<<, thanks again! But it’s an occiput, not a braincase :( Something tells me you don’t do skulls…
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I copied it from the Suuwassea basicranium http://app.pan.pl/archive/published/app49/app49-197.pdf
I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with the head.
Darren Naish
Dear World: just because Burian made Diadectes green & like a fat iguana, doesn’t mean it was so. It could have been NOT GREEN, you know.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “just because Burian made Diadectes green & like a fat iguana, doesn’t mean it was so.” <– Yes. Proof here:
Darren Naish
Thanks LOADS to @mattkeevil @RosemaryMosco @UK_Wildlife @Blackmudpuppy for salamander pics used at #TetZoo :) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2013/10/01/amazing-world-of-salamanders/
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I can’t BELIEVE you didn’t use mine! All that work!
@phylopic
This wonderful article by @tetzoo
on salamanders reminds me that PhyloPic could really use more salamanders. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2013/10/01/amazing-world-of-salamanders/
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@PhyloPic Here you go:
Darren Naish
How long does it take me to draw a gar? I decided to time myself. A: about 15 mins. Results are pretty ropey but good enough.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “How long does it take me to draw a gar? About 15 mins”<– Pathetic! It only took me ONE minute!
Will Petty 🌳🌳
@TetZoo C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la gar.
Darren Naish
When time allows, gonna draw fish. Each takes c 10 mins. Let’s see how many I get done in average work day. Follow #drawingfish. 1 so far.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Come on, slow-coach, I’m beating you already!
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor No you’re not, I’ve done two so far today. Anyway, it’s not a race :) #drawingfish #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I retake the lead: THREE fish in a day!
#drawingfish #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
Mark Witton
You know, I’m thinking that #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt is the true revolution in palaeoart we’ve all been waiting for.
Darren Naish
@MarkWitton Yeah, HE should have done those new Royal Mail #dinosaur stamps. Mike, you should be raising hell.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo @MarkWitton Like this, you mean?
#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt #rockinItOldSchool
Mark Witton
@MikeTaylor Yes. Constructed with the same consideration for scientific accuracy as the actual product, I see.
Darren Naish
#drawingfish I just did a hagfish, lamprey & chimaera which brings final count to 9 fish for the day. @MikeTaylor, did you beat me? :)
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Not yet … but the world has not seen the last of #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt! Bwahaha! Mwahaha!! BwahahaHAHAHA!
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo OK, here you: lamprey and hagfish
#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Aww shucks, much better than mine, but hope you don’t get hurt when I don’t publish yours in a book (unlike mine, which I will).
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Fine! I’ll make my own book! Of #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt!
Charon Henning
@MikeTaylor Cult classic in the making ….
Darren Naish
We learnt at #SVP few yrs ago that Tsintaosaurus doesn’t look as it does in the books: anyone know if this has been published? #dinosaurs
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Yep, it’s right here.
SPECIAL BONUS!
This post came about because of the death of Twitter. These days I am over on Mastodon, and it’s really good: absolutely no adverts, a collegial atmosphere, absence of nazis. Come and join us! I’m @mike if you want to follow me, and if you can’t find a server you like, John Conway’s sauropods.win has been working really well for me.
Here’s some art that I was commissioned to create as a celebration!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 