Well, what else would you do with a bike on Cycling Road?

(cue catchy bicycle theme)

 I was listening to a podcast where the hosts were discussing the possibility of pink dinosaurs, and I got to thinking about how a dinosaur could be pink. Modern dinosaurs (birds) that are predominantly pink, such as flamingoes and roseate spoonbills, get their coloration from ingesting foods rich in carotenoids, usually arthropods in aquatic environments. That made me think of Deinocheirus, which is from a swampy, tropical environment and looks adapted for a bit of aquatic feeding. So naturally I put two and two together and concluded it would be great if Deinocheirus was pink. It's already such a bizarre dinosaur that you might as well make it pink on top of everything else it's got going on.

I specifically based this guy's coloration on the roseate spoonbill, one of my favorite birds because of how so very weird it is. <3

 Mean old authority figures not letting people do whatever they want for their own safety.

I had a lot of fun drawing that Grumpy Meowth sign.

 After that Viking comic, my thoughts turned to the "Face on Mars" and what could really have been responsible for it. :)

 I love this one because it's so fun drawing people freaking out. (FYI, this is a different Lass from Zombie Lass.)

They say they got stuck at the gates, but they don't explain why. Could be a thirsty guard. Could be that gates are just really scary. I mean, they temporarily make the screen blank out, for crying out loud! For all you know they could be dimensional portals to the netherworld!

#overthinkingeverythingagain

 I'm not quite sure how these things happen. One day I'm just sitting around thinking about Tiktaalik and how cute it is, and the next thing I know, this pops into my head and I have to draw it.

Well, I think the Internet needs more sarcopterygian fan art.

 More costume design for Ravenscrag. Tam wears her clothes from Earth throughout her journey to unseal the Erdunn, but at the end of the story, she spends some time at Castle Ravenscrag and Melly (the resident giant spider seamstress) makes her lots of new clothes. Melly crafted mostly elegant gowns for bookish and intellectual Carrie who spends much of her time studying magic with Saturos, reading, and playing the harpsichord, but I imagine the more athletic and tomboyish Tam would need attire better suited to romping around the woods and using Smaragdus to fuse crystal armor onto herself.

 I feel like the two things everyone remembers most about the Viking missions are a) the controversial results of the life-detection experiments and b) the "face on Mars" incident caused by Viking 1 just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for probably the most infamous case of pareidolia ever. Chris Lintott already made a joke about the first one, but the second one was still up for grabs!

 Costume design for Ravenscrag, which I just can't stop doodling things for. Not sure when I'll ever publish it, but I sure had fun writing it.

This is Carrie's outfit when she and Saturos go to a northerly locale for Important Sorcerer Business. (Castle Ravenscrag is located in the mid-latitudes of its planet's southern hemisphere, FYI.) I based that setting off the island of Svalbard, which is an incredible, beautiful place that I'd probably only ever visit if I made sure I got a really, really warm hotel room. But the landscapes are stunning.

 Well, gambling can be life-threatening (and life-destroying). Honestly I'm glad they got rid of the whole Game Corner thing after a few generations.

Pokémon is okay though!

 After that last comic, I of course had to draw the follow-up--the spectacular landing of the Huygens craft on Titan! This was such an incredible achievement as the first landing in the outer Solar System. I'm just kinda bummed out that I missed it when it was happening because I was in high school at the time, and too busy with terrible friendships and pretending like video games solved everything to pay adequate attention to really awesome stuff like this.

But at least I can re-live the excitement vicariously through my buddy Chris Lintott, who was at ESA headquarters reporting on the landing for The Sky at Night and adorably lost all composure when the signal started coming through. Journalism at its finest.

 I always thought it was kind of weird that Blue was hanging around Pokémon Tower trying to find a Marowak (which don't even appear in Pokémon Tower), when he should have been focusing on leveling up his Cubone. But maybe Blue didn't read the Nintendo Power Player's Guide obsessively like I did.

 There's some fantastic NPC dialogue in the Pokémon games. Like this creepy little girl in Lavender Town. Who gave me a great excuse to throw in Zombie Lass again.

 My mom requested this one, and honestly it's such a great anecdote from the Voyager mission that I just had to. Voyager 1 was specifically directed toward Titan (which would put it on a trajectory that would not allow it to continue to Uranus and Neptune) because it was known at the time that Titan had a thick atmosphere, and astronomers were really curious about what the surface looked like.

Well, turns out Titan has a thick, opaque atmosphere, so we got lots of great pictures of a fuzzy, featureless orange ball. Oops. (Thankfully Voyager 2 made it to Uranus and Neptune, and Cassini-Huygens came back later with radar and a cute little lander to give us a proper look at the surface.)

 There's this one Hiker on Route 10 who just laughs when you battle him, and afterward explains he's not laughing--he's sneezy from hay fever.

Or he ingested too much Repel and he's on the fast track to becoming another Professor Oak.

 I was listening to a paleontology podcast where they were discussing Scutellosaurus, and one of the hosts called it "scutey", and this popped into my head and I just had to draw it.

I think we need to celebrate cute little dinosaurs more. They were dinosaurs too! (Scutellosaurus was about the size of a turkey. So cute!)

 Really makes you wonder if Game Freak had this exact NPC in mind when they designed Munna.

 I couldn't draw cartoons about space missions and leave out Voyager! It's amazing that both Voyager probes are still working after nearly 50 years. Their discoveries defined most of what I learned about the outer Solar System as a kid (I'm dating myself here) and they have a special place in my heart.

... So, when are we going back?

 Again, the NPCs seem to think the world is larger than it actually is. Just walk a couple of frames down, Jr. Trainer, and you'll start to see rooftops.

 Time to indulge in wild speculation!

I watched this interesting documentary on dinosaur biomechanics that seemed to show that it was very unlikely that ceratopsians' skulls could withstand the stress of charging at opponents in the manner of rhinoceroses, and it got me to wondering how else ceratopsians might have used their horns. (And no, I don't believe they were purely display structures. Nature makes weapons to be used, and I'm not of the persuasion of writing off every unusual anatomical element as a display structure unless all other options are exhausted.)

The other day, I was watching a video of a bison using its horns to throw a tree (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you stay away from bison), and suddenly it occurred to me--what if ceratopsians used their brow horns to throw things instead of stab (for the most part)? A large animal like Tyrannosaurus getting lifted and thrown is going to hurt quite a lot, and I think large ceratopsians could manage that kind of thing with their massive builds.

I also think ceratopsians might have used their horns (especially their nose horns) more for shoving. I watched a video where a rhino was given a pumpkin, and it very adeptly used the flat of its horn to crush the pumpkin into edible chunks. Maybe ceratopsians did the same thing to fruiting bodies of plants, or used them in social shoving contests.

Just some thoughts.

 In the pint-sized pixel-world of the Game Boy Pokémon games, the NPCs have to really try to sell it to you that Kanto is actually geographically vast, and not, y'know, a place you can walk clear across in less than an hour.

Fun fact: Hyrule in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is roughly based on the geography of Kyoto, Japan, home of Nintendo headquarters. It's also a faithful to-scale reproduction of the Kyoto region in terms of size (as compared to Link). So next time you're making Link jog from one side of the map to the other out of boredom, realize that that's about how long it would take somebody (at least somebody in shape) to jog across Kyoto. Wild.

 Can't leave out the OG space mission!

I've been having a lot of fun with this series; I guess the overarching theme is the history of space exploration seen through the hypothetically sentient eyes of the plucky robots who have taught us so much about the universe. (Except sometimes they're ceiling fans.)

 I think it's really awesome how a lot of Chinese dinosaurs get Chinese taxonomic names, and a lot of them include the word long (dragon). Much more fitting than saurus (lizard); dinosaurs were pretty much as close to dragons as the history of life on Earth has ever gotten. 

I just wanted to play around with depicting a Chinese dino as it might appear in one of those historic bestiaries, especially since they often have the names to match. This is Zhenyuanlong, a dromaeosaur from the Yixian Formation.

I've heard speculation that finds of sauropods like Mamenchisaurus might have been what inspired the serpentine physiology of the Chinese dragon. Such a fun idea, and would bring the whole dragon thing full circle.

 Truly a moving sight.

 Stamps definitely won't get you any closer to the Pokémon League. Baseball cards, on the other other hand...

Speaking of, can we talk for a minute about the Pokémon TCG and the controversy surrounding all the card scalping that's been going on over the past few years? 

 I'm not actually sure how funny this is; it's just that every time I see the Mariner 4 spacecraft, all I can think is that it looks like a ceiling fan. 

And then I want an actual ceiling fan shaped like Mariner 4.

(Maybe there's one on Etsy.)

 I drew this to commemorate some... sort of milestone when Trainer Wants to Battle! had its original run. Unfortunately I completely forget what that milestone was. Some number of readers reached or something? Anyway. I still think this turned out pretty cute. This was Red's party at the time of making the illustration. I was going for quality, not quantity.

 I feel like the Scientists in Kanto are extremely shady. First they're messing around with the questionable practice of bringing back extinct taxa, and then one of them just hands a valuable museum specimen to the first 10-year-old to walk in the back door. Sounds like some under-the-table research to me.

Or, y'know, it's just a video game and I'm way overthinking it again.

 Has Jurassic Park taught these people nothing about bringing back extinct taxa?

Then again, this is the Pokémon universe and they have all sorts of crazy science stuff going on, like creating self-aware virtual life forms that can manifest physically, genetically modifying clones to be exponentially stronger than their progenitor, and engineering technology that projects a person's mind into a Pokémon. So maybe by now they've also learned to resurrect fossils responsibly.

 Thought I'd switch it up from Mars for a bit, and give some love to older space missions! Including the ones that... didn't quite perform nominally and probably ended up running into the Great Galactic Ghoul.

 I'll take "draw" every time! :)

 One last piece of Fossil Friday fan art (for now)! We were talking about Anzu wyliei one week, and someone asked why it had such long arms. MaggieJo suggested maybe they were for hugging, and then she wanted to see two Anzu hugging. I love oviraptorosaurs, so I jumped right on that idea. 

 This NPC line always kind of puzzled me, because it's this old guy claiming Lt. Surge was his superior officer. But Surge looks at least twenty years younger than this dude.

Also, the military doesn't even seem to be a thing in the Pokémon universe. So I'm not sure what Surge is even a lieutenant in anymore.

He probably gave himself that title just to sound cool.

Also, I had a lot of fun in these comics giving the Gentleman trainer class basically a Cthulu moustache. You never see a Gentleman's mouth. Maybe they don't have mouths. You're welcome for that mental image.

 Pretty sure this is an accurate representation of Phoenix's mission.

I had way too much fun coming up with some questionably edible flavors.

 Like I said: a fake moustache solves everything.

 My buddies at Virtual Fossil Friday have been giving me so many fun paleoart ideas lately! We'll get going on a subject and then MaggieJo Widdicombe will say "somebody draw that", and honestly I don't have much else going on, so I've been keeping a list and working through them as fast as I can.

The other week, she and Ashley Hall were super excited because a freshwater mosasaur has recently been found in Cretaceous fossil deposits in Montana. This is really interesting because mosasaurs have traditionally been thought of as marine animals, but apparently some made the move to fresh water. MaggieJo said it would be terrifying to be boating down a river and see a mosasaur lurking right beside you, and then wanted someone to depict that. Your friendly neighborhood paleoartist is on the case!

I had a lot of fun with this painting. Looked up lots of references of Amazon River dolphins, which are adorable. Also I fully support mosasaurs with forked tongues. Partly this is because they were closely related to snakes, which have forked tongues, so it makes sense. And is cute.

 I'm always amused by references to the real world in early Pokémon media. As the franchise progressed, Game Freak began to emphasize that the Pokémon universe is a completely different place than Earth (although geographically and culturally very similar), even to the point of gradually phasing out real-world animals and strongly implying that Pokémon are the only non-human creatures on the planet. But in the early days, before the lore was really solidified, it seemed more like the Pokémon universe was this alternate reality "Earth, but with Pokémon". It kind of makes me wonder what would have happened if Game Freak had continued in that creative direction.

But clearly Lt. Surge is from Unova

 I came up with this one at 3 am when I couldn't sleep. I'm glad something good came out of that night.

I'm also glad it was still funny the next day.

Also, I know the Easter egg on the side panel is nigh-illegible, but I just couldn't bring myself to omit it once I'd thought of it. Consider it an extra for those who bother to zoom in.

 What, you think Pokémon work for free?