The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs need more love! I just really wanted to draw fan art of them. (I know, I need to get better at photographing my art. I'm trying. Lighting is hard.) (I know my lettering also isn't great. An attempt was made. Ironically, my grandmother is a professional calligrapher. I don't know what happened with me.) I definitely need to go see these guys on my (as-yet-hypothetical) grand tour of nerdy places in the UK (which will of course include Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics).

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs get maligned a lot for being inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs, but considering that no complete (or indeed articulated) skeletal remains of dinosaurs were known at the time of their creation, you have to cut Waterhouse Hawkins a lot of slack. Hawkins was an extremely skilled wildlife illustrator who was probably the best person in England for the job of trying to come up with believable animals based on fragmentary remains. I think his designs, while incorrect, are actually much more biomechanically workable than those ghastly waddling-tripod dinos of the late 19th century to late 20th century. (That one is Louis Dollo's fault, and he tried with those Bernissart Iguanodon, I know, but if you have to straight up break a specimen's tail to get it into the posture you want, that is probably not the right posture for it.) 

If you look closely at the Iguanodon sculptures, you'll notice that they even have beaks. There was no cranial material known for Iguanodon at the time, which makes this all the more remarkable on Hawkins's part, because Iguanodon really did have beaks. A genius inference.

Fun fact: Hawkins's Megalosaurus has that big shoulder hump at Richard Owen's request; he was directing Hawkins's sculptures, and was aware of a set of tall-spined vertebrae that he referred to Megalosaurus (which at the time was basically a wastebasket taxon for all large theropods). Because these vertebrae were found on their own, it was anyone's guess where they went on the animal, so it seemed reasonable at the time to give "Megalosaurus" a tall shoulder hump like bison have. Nowadays the specimen is referred to Altispinax, which may have been related to Concavenator, meaning those tall spines formed a weird mini-hump in the middle of the back. Interesting case of a dinosaur being reconstructed inaccurately because too many unrelated animals were lumped into the same genus.

I'm a big fan of the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and that's why I wrote him into my novel Thunder Girl. If you want a really beautiful treatment of his work with sculpting prehistoric animals, I highly recommend the picture book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick.

 This NPC's dialogue is supposed to tip you off to the fact that in earlier Pokémon games, a poisoned Pokémon's health would steadily decrease outside of battle as you walked, until it fainted. But I just imagined a different story involving a negligent Trainer not noticing his own Pokémon getting poisoned. (I feel really bad for that Clefairy, though.)

In later games, this mechanic was amended so that a Pokémon was cured of poison when it reached 1 HP, thus preventing the player character from potentially blacking out and being sent back to the nearest Pokémon Center at an inconvenient time. More recent games have done away with this mechanic altogether, which is kind of nice because that poison sound effect reminding you that your Pokémon's health was depleting was kind of stressful.

 Theoretically, more Pokémon can only be a good thing, right? I guess I just wanted to play around with someone bypassing the usual party limit.

Game Freak has said that at times they've entertained the idea of altering how many Pokémon you can keep in your party at once, but decided that would mess with the formula too much. Six does feel like a pretty solid balance between a strategically diverse selection and a manageable party, so I doubt it will change anytime soon.

Most forms of Pokémon media don't actually explain why you're only allowed six Pokémon in your party at once. I think the Pokémon Adventures manga is the only canon that actually does bother with an explanation--in that universe, the Pokémon League restricts Trainers to six active Pokémon at a time because they felt that was the maximum number a Trainer could properly give care to at once. Kinda weird how in the games and anime, it's never addressed. But I guess the writers have other things to do than satisfy pedantic geeks trying to work out fictional logistics.

 After yesterday's cartoon, I got to thinking about how Americans do not have a monopoly on the English language. But don't worry, there's a dinosaur for every occasion.

Incidentally, alvarezsaurids (the family Mononykus is in) are still giving paleontologists a headache about what they possibly could have used those tiny, short, one-clawed arms for. Some people think they could have used them to break open termite nests, anteater-style, but their arms are so short, the critters would have had to lay on their stomachs to do any digging.

I'm probably right about this one, guys.

 Sometimes the truth hurts, Bug Catcher.

Don't worry; someday, you'll grow up to be a Bug Maniac, and then... actually I'm not sure that's any better.

 The other day I was just thinking way too hard about what tyrannosaurs could possibly have used their dinky forelimbs for, and, uh, this is where my mind went.

And then I had to draw it.

Seeing as it's Christmas and all, perhaps now is a good time for a bit of end-of-year pontificating. There's a lot of negativity and contention going on in the world, and the more people bicker and try to prove they're right and force the solutions they want, the worse things get. In this season when I and many others celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, let's try to be peacemakers and find ways to get along and love one another. Let's laugh at some dinosaur comics and remember all the things there are to like and appreciate about each other. The world has a lot of issues to hammer out, but I think the way forward is to work together to find solutions everybody can agree on, and do so in a spirit of unity and caring for all.

This Christmas, would you consider taking the time to find ways to brighten someone's day? My church's Light the World initiative has lots of great ways you can contribute to your family, your community, and to your brothers and sisters around the world. That's what Christmas is really about--giving back in service of the One whose birth we celebrate.

 So this NPC tells you this as a hint that the developers hid some invisible items on the floor of the underground path.

But of course I had to take things a step further, and now I just imagine the underground as a place where people go to ditch all their unwanted junk.

Like Lass.

(It's semi-implied that this is the same Lass from Mt. Moon. I'm sure her "friends" told her they'd meet her here, too. She's been waiting so long that she turned into some sort of zombie mole-person.)

Lass going unhinged is kind of another of the subplots of this comic, and looking back at my treatment of Lass now, I'm wondering if it might have been a little bit of a subconscious representation of some really terrible friendships I was in at the time. I'm glad now I spend my social life talking to scientists.