At the last Fossil Friday of 2025 a few weeks ago, we had a great presentation on dinosaurs of Canada, and Ashley and MaggieJo were talking about Albertavenator, a troodontid from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation that's only known from fragmentary fossils. They showed a very nice piece of paleoart that reconstructed it colored like a blue jay, which made me picture Albertavenator perching on a head like grey jays (sometimes called Canada jays here in the US) are notorious for doing. When I told them that, they said they wanted to see it. I wanted to see it too, so here we are.

This Albertavenator is perching on Edmontosaurus regalis, one of the largest animals at Horseshoe Canyon. Hadrosaurs probably made good perches, in all honesty.

 That's kind of weird if you think about it. Except that this is the Pokémon universe and aquatic Pokémon float in the air with no in-universe explanation, just so it's more convenient for battles and general storytelling. Oh, suspension of disbelief.

I'm really proud of that porthole, though.

 The chef NPC's dialogue here is supposed to tip you off to check the trash bins because there are some items hidden there.

But in the Pokémon universe, you have to exercise caution when dealing with Poké Ball-shaped things. They're not always Poké Balls. As the Power Plant makes abundantly clear later in the game. (Which makes me wonder if Voltorb and Electrode were created specifically so they could be used as traps in the Power Plant.)

On an almost completely unrelated note, I'm still playing through Legends: Z-A and still have mixed feelings about it. Unless the climax pulls off something completely amazing in terms of story, expect an unnecessarily long writeup featuring my thoughts on the game's story presentation and character development. I know, I know. Some game reviews put a lot of emphasis on stuff like technical specs or the multiplayer experience. When a writer plays an RPG, this is what happens. The gameplay is still great though. Also I caught a shiny Magikarp yesterday, so that was pretty amazing.

 I just keep getting ideas for these. Props to ISRO (the Indian space agency) for being the first ever national space agency to successfully reach Mars on its first attempt using its own technology! (ESA was technically the first agency to reach Mars on its first attempt, but it got Mars Express there using a Russian rocket.)

I love the idea of Indian food, but both spicy food and onions don't agree with me, which makes Indian cuisine a bit of a challenge. I usually end up just cooking my own at home. I figured out a delicious recipe for shortcut chicken tikka masala that is not at all spicy, and uses storebought rotisserie chicken because I hate working with raw meat.

But that has nothing at all to do with space.

 No offense, Youngster, but if that's your only basis for wanting to be friends with me, that's a pretty superficial friendship. 

I pretty much gave Youngster the characterization of every elementary-school-age boy I knew back when Pokémon first came out. Including my cousin

On the other hand, now that I've got an awesome niece who plays Pokémon, I just give away my rare Pokémon to her like I'm passing out candy on Halloween. But that's a privilege reserved for nieces.

 I can't stop drawing these--the ideas just keep coming! Not that I'm mad. I've loved space for as long as I've loved paleontology (so like forever), but I've just never really had the predilection for the usual sort of space art. Now I kind of feel like I've found my niche and I'm enjoying it.

Hopefully nobody minds the attempts at quirky hand-lettering through this series. I wanted to add the mission name to the cartoons so people will be able to identify the craft (for example, not sure anybody who's not a total space nerd knows what the Venera landers looked like), but I didn't just want to scrawl the name--I thought it would be more fun to come up with a little logo for each one.

Again, huge thanks to Chris Lintott for encouraging me with these. Always nice to spend my time creating things people enjoy.

 It must be tough being a silent video game player character.

 MaggieJo Widdicombe wanted to see a Pachyrhinosaurus with porcupine quills, because she and Ashley Hall were talking about how bristles have been found preserved with ceratopsians like Psittacosaurus, so clearly this was the next logical step.

Ceratopsians with quills is a terrifying thought. Business in the front, business in the back. I'd rather run into a T. rex, frankly.

In all honesty, I've met a porcupine and they're actually quite friendly creatures. You can hand-feed them and it's really adorable to watch their little noses wiggle in excitement as they nibble on cucumber sticks. Just don't make them feel threatened (just like any other animal).

Also, this pachy is P. canadensis, and at this point I've now drawn each of the three species of Pachycephalosaurus. Do I get a medal or something for that?

 What, you thought he meant challenged to a Pokemon battle?

... Nah, clearly they want a Yu-Gi-Oh! duel.

I tried so hard to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! when it first came out in the US. But the card game was overcomplicated, the anime was boring, and the only other person I had to talk to about it was the 13-year-old boy down the street. I'll just stick with Pokémon and Digimon.

 MaggieJo Widdicombe keeps coming up with fantastic paleoart ideas at Virtual Fossil Friday! Last week she said she wanted to see a Yutyrannus in a Christmas sweater, and I just had to draw that.

Hope everybody has a very happy and safe holiday season!

More sketches!

I've always loved the idea of centaurs that are other things besides half-horse.* So here's an epic jaguar-woman warrior.

Miscellaneous character designs; I was looking through a very old sketchbook of mine (from junior high) and decided to redraw a few of my archaic character designs.

That girl on the top totally looks like a Mega Man fan character**, and although back then I was really bad at adding any sort of context to my drawings, I have vague memories of seeing ads for a new Mega Man game and thinking the character designs were interesting and wanting to draw my own.

 Couple of Hyren and Blynn doodles because they're so fun to write. Looking at my oldest sketchbooks, I'd forgotten just how long Blynn and Hyren have been around. I created Blynn and adopted Hyren (the real ones on the website) when I was 14 and drew some (badly rendered and not very funny) comics about them that were way too unpolished to get into the Neopian Times. Back then, Hyren's character was drastically different than how he's portrayed in my Neopian Times stories--he was quiet and shy and bookish, and actually a lot like how Pharazon's personality turned out. Pharazon hadn't been created yet, though; in fact, Meridell hadn't even been discovered yet, and yes I am very old.

Back when I first adopted Hyren from the Pound, I toyed around with various sorts of mysterious and dramatic backstories for him. I think at one point he was a former pirate. I found a comic that shows him undergoing some sort of weird werewolf-like transformation under moonlight into a warrior Grundo very similar to Ghi Pharun. None of these ideas got very far. It wasn't until Worth Fighting For that I solidified Hyren's past and personality.

Blynn, on the other hand, has just always been Blynn. She came that way.

Her doodle is a reference to the on-site description for Flouds, which says to never feed them carrots but doesn't say why. Perhaps the reason is just too unspeakably horrific.

*This may have something to do with the fact that horses kinda scare me. I don't know why, but I get along a lot better with carnivores than herbivores. Not sure what that says about me. I'm gonna go fangirl some theropods.

**This is not to be confused with the terrible Mega Man fan design I referenced in a post a few days ago. That one was totally different but arguably worse, because bad fan art by a junior high student is at least a little more endearing than bad fan art by a pimply, overly-emotional teenager.

... Maybe I'm a little too hard on myself.

 I got the idea for this one from my astro buddy Chris Lintott's excellent recent lecture "From Mars with Love", where he wrote postcards from several Mars missions. Most of them were very enthusiastic, but InSight was quite disgruntled at having been intentionally sent to the most boring place on the planet, and then its heat probe didn't even work. Can't win them all, I'm afraid.

 When this NPC says that about Team Rocket, it just makes me think that if Team Rocket doesn't have an adequate handle on what other people consider popular or useful Pokémon species, they're going to run into some issues.

Fun fact: I modeled the Rocket grunts in this one after my sister and brother-in-law. Little did I know that they would end up giving me a niece who would inspire even more video game comics!

 Another adorable anthropormophized spacecraft! The Venera landers have always been some of my favorite space missions. Let's engineer a machine that can survive long enough on the surface of of Venus to take and transmit pictures, because why not?

... So, when are we going back?

 I decided to do something I haven't really done in a while and just sit and sketch. I used to sketch prodigiously when I was a teenager and in college. Unfortunately, 99% of what I filled my sketchbooks with in high school was absolute rubbish, mostly janky anime-styled lame character designs from before I learned how to draw, and doodles from franchises I was largely into just to try to please a friend who frankly didn't care about me nearly as much. 

For a while I kept those sketchbooks because of the presumed importance of an artist keeping a thorough record of her work, but finally a few years back I decided I couldn't stand to look at them anymore, and I threw them all away. If that makes any of you cringe, you're honestly not missing much. I really doubt a pencil drawing of an awful Mega Man fan design with terrible anatomy is of any relevance to anyone. It makes me sort of sad that I spent day after day in high school churning out that sort of nonsense instead of actually taking the time to learn to draw and have better friends. Oh well, live and learn.

Right, about the sketches--these are some concept doodles for a novel manuscript I've been working on. I wanted the Plainsmen to have facial features reminiscent of the Middle East and southwest Asia. They're loosely based on the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans, but also take inspiration from the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin. Also a portrait of Jawwad because he's great. I really enjoyed writing the Quo Qu--they're intellectual, numbers-obsessed, and slightly unscrupulous, which is an entertaining combination. But Jawwad comes through for Arun's family in the end.

I was hanging out with my awesome paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe at the Museum of the Rockies's Virtual Fossil Fridays, and MaggieJo, who loves Pachyrhinosaurus, pointed out that P. lakustai has a single horn on its forehead anterior to its frill, and she thought that made it look like a unicorn. She then said she'd love to see an actual P. lakustai unicorn, and I just had to draw that.

Man, I want an entire toy line of dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures. I would have gone crazy for that as a kid. I was a strange child. While other girls my age were playing with dolls or crushing on boy bands, I was reading encyclopedias and building computers. And I turned out just fine(????).

One of my (many) paleo art pet peeves is when people under-muscle dinosaurs. I see this a lot with ceratopsians and hadrosaurs. Some reconstructions just give them these way twiggy limbs, which is ludicrous considering how much bulk those limbs are supposed to be holding up. You can't follow limb bones too closely when putting flesh on an animal--there's a lot of muscle and skin built around those things. If you look at the skeleton of a rhinoceros (a good modern equivalent to a ceratopsian), they actually have rather svelte limb bones--it's just that they're well-covered with thick muscle and tough hide. Let's make our dinosaurs adequately chonky, folks! Soft tissue is a thing!

 With the Pokémon Fan Club, I not-so-subtly commented on fandoms that are really scary and toxic. Like, I thought the whole point of getting together with other fans of a franchise was to enjoy it together, not to argue and bully and make other people feel bad for liking something differently than you do?

On a related note, I'm still playing through Legends: Z-A and Naveen is driving me up the wall. I understand what they were trying to do with his character, but he's so obnoxious with his arrogance, and making it clear he doesn't want anything to do with anyone, and obsession with a celebrity to the point of prioritizing watching her stream over lives in danger, it's not even funny. I just really, really hope he displays some sort of redeeming quality by the end of the game. And by that I mean character development that gives him likeable traits, not some sort of shallow "I showed up to help you save the day and that means we're best friends now" nonsense. I swear if the writers pull that stunt I'm going to have to dock the game points in the story department.

Fun fact: In the original Japanese version, the Pokémon Fan Club is called the Pokémon Daisuki ("We Love Pokémon") Club. In 2004, Nintendo created a real life Pokémon Daisuki Club in Japan whose members have access to exclusive merchandise and media. Its English-language equivalent is Pokémon Trainer Central. It's always fun when franchise creators sort of bring a part of the fictional universe to life like that.

 When this NPC says that, I always get really confused about whether he's referring to someone else's Pikachu, or your hypothetical Pikachu.

So if you don't have a hypothetical Pikachu, it's a very odd thing for him to say to you.

 My friend Chris Lintott and I were commenting on cute cartoon versions of spacecraft, and I mentioned I wanted to retroactively anthropomorphize past space missions, and then the ideas just started coming. Chris had the idea of encounters with the Great Galactic Ghoul, a fictional entity supposed to be responsible for the failures of spacecraft headed to Mars. The Ghoul was created by a journalist in 1969, and subsequently adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and even mentioned lightheartedly in some of its official documents.

Mars Polar Lander was launched in January 1999 and was supposed to have landed in December of that year. Instead, communications dropped just before cruise stage separation, and that was the last we ever heard from MPL. The mission failure was probably caused by a software error that caused the onboard computer to mistake the landing legs deploying for actual touchdown. Whoops.

I'm still a little bit sore about MPL because I'd put my name on it:

That said, the concept of sending a lander to the polar regions of Mars was later resurrected for the Phoenix mission (pun intended by the mission team), which was phenomenally successful. So all's well that ends well.

Also, I'm fairly certain this is the first time in 56 years that someone's drawn fan art of the Great Galactic Ghoul. You're welcome.

 There are fans and then there are fans.

Maybe we can all just stop fighting about what constitutes a "true fan" and acknowledge that everybody likes a thing in their own individual way?

 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.

 I doodled this after a fantastic Fossil Friday where we got to discussing theropod feathering, and it made me want to render a very speculative troodontid*, specifically the undescribed giant species found in Alaska and northern Canada. I just really wanted it to have fluffy snowy owl feet. I also would not be surprised if troodontids had facial discs like owls, because they have asymmetrical ears like owls, so it's reasonable to conclude that they may have employed facial discs to further focus their hearing. Their large eyes also suggest they were probably low-light hunters that likely made good use of sound.

I kinda think this guy turned out like a combination of a snowy owl and a wolf, which is epic.

*There is sometimes some confusion on how to pronounce "Troodon". When the species was originally described in 1856, it was named Troödon (with the diaresis) and is supposed to be pronounced "troh-oh-don". Twenty years later the name was amended to Troodon because the International Committee for Zoological Nomenclature does not allow diacritics in taxonomic names. But it should still be pronounced as if it contained the diaresis.

 You go through all that trouble to retrieve this guy's Dig TM... and he has a Diglett who learns Dig by leveling up. And doesn't want the TM back.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with these people.

I loved drawing the guy's face in the third and fourth panels, though.

 Just about any problem can be solved with a fake moustache, honestly.

 I guess you can tell how old this comic is because it's still called Twitter* and not X.

Also, I like how Bill's PC is undoubtedly one of those great old beige CRT-monitor models, and yet there's social media. (You young'uns might have a hard time believing that there was an age when social media didn't exist.)

Fun fact: The Pokémon Bill gets transformed into is different across media that depict this event. The original games never specify what Pokémon he is; they just use one of the generic minisprites that were used for the party menu screen back then (which is how I chose to depict him in this comic). Later remakes show him having specifically turned into a Clefairy and then a Nidorino. And in the anime... he's just stuck in a Kabuto costume for some reason. And has green hair and a British** accent.

(The early Pokémon anime was so weird.)

*I hope nobody minds that I essentially never use X anymore and took it off my list of ways to contact me. I barely used it anyway, and lately I've been more into BlueSky, which is a lot like a more sane version of X. Social media is so stressful. I can basically only handle two platforms at a time, maximum.

**Extra fun fact: Across Japanese Pokémon media, Bill is consistently portrayed speaking with a Kansai*** dialect. The Kansai dialect is notoriously difficult for American English localization teams to work with because it carries cultural nuances that don't really match anything in America. Sometimes a Kansai dialect is translated as an American Southern accent because both have the vague connotation of being more rustic and rural. This is what the translators did for Bill in the Pokémon Adventures manga. I just think it's kind of odd that the translators instead gave him a British accent in the anime.

***Bonus extra fun fact: In Gen II, it's revealed that Bill's hometown is Goldenrod City in the Johto region. Regions in the Pokémon games are inspired by and based off the geography of real-world regions. In Johto's case, it's based off an area of Japan west of Tokyo, and Goldenrod City is a stand-in for Kyoto, which is the seat of the Kansai dialect. It's awesome that the developers paid this much attention to detail.

 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

I just thought it was funny that Lass says that first line in the games, but then (like all Lasses) she already has little cutesy Pokémon. This Lass must be wanting a different vibe.

 What if there were PokéVampires in the Pokémon world?

In that case, can I get bitten by a Metagross? Because being part-Metagross would be rad.

This comic also makes me wonder what would happen if a human got hit with a Pokémon move.

It... would probably just hurt really bad. (That seems to be what the Legends series implies, anyway.)

I could go on a whole weird rant about how I don't understand why vampires are so maligned in fiction. It's actually a pretty awesome deal. All you have to do is make a little blood donation, and you're immortal, and have supernatural powers, and can change into a bat and bats are adorable. Nothing wrong with that. As much as I'm not into the Twilight franchise, I feel like that's one thing it actually did right, portraying a mortal falling into the company of vampires as a positive thing. That's a message I also tried to get across in Thunder Girl (and in the sequel I've been planning, which introduces a vampire protagonist)--don't hate on things just because they're different and/or your society has conditioned you to hate them. You could be missing out on something amazing.

 In all fairness, Thunder Wave is actually a pretty useful TM because paralysis is one of the more effective status conditions (doesn't wear off, 50% chance your opponent can't do anything on their turn, major Speed reduction). I just was amused by the idea of finding a lame item in the grass and the game text being all excited about it. 

On that note, I'm planning a full writeup of my thoughts on Pokémon Legends: Z-A after I finish the game (I'm about halfway through, and so far, I'm mostly really liking it with just a few quibbles), and one of the things I think the game did right was the real-time rehaul of the battle system, and how it actually makes non-attack moves way more useful in the main game as opposed to them mostly seeing use in the multiplayer (and battle facility) metagame. I'll go more into detail about that in the writeup, but suffice for now to say that I really want to see more of this style of battling in future games.

 I feel like a criminal organization that tries to recruit preteens is either extremely shady or extremely desperate. Also, that is the worst marketing copy I've ever seen. "Hey kids! Don't you want to come be evil with us?! Don't tell your parents!"

... Although, considering the overall track record of its Grunts, I'm not surprised Team Rocket has a similarly incompetent PR department.