Couldn't leave out the Grand Duke of astrophysics himself!  I know seal point cats are native to Thailand, but as far as I'm aware there are no established cat breeds that originated in India, so I just went with a geographically close area. I also just really wanted to draw somebody as a seal point cat. <3

It's so wonderful how so many people all over the world contribute to advancing humanity's understanding of the universe around us! 

My own diabolical genius of a cat figured out the whole laser pointer thing pretty quickly. He derived much more entertainment from watching his brother Mallow fail to figure it out. I'm absolutely certain cats can experience Schadenfreude.

 Still going with the science cats. James Clawrk Maxwell is, naturally, playing the acting force in the "Maxwell's demon" thought experiment.

Let's face it, cats are little demons. But they're cute so it's okay. <3

James Clawrk Maxwell is a Scottish wildcat because they're adorable. I was considering making him a Scottish Fold, but that's a controversial cat breed riddled with genetic issues. I decided to instead encourage love for Scottish wildcats, which are critically endangered. Save Britain's wild kitties!

 Still working through my extensive list of scientists to turn into cats. George Washington Clawver is a handsome breed of cat called the Havana Brown. 

It's a common myth that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter--it was around before he began his agricultural studies, but he did do a lot to invent and promote peanut products to encourage crop rotation in the South. Also cats playing in piles of things is just cute, so.

I designed another amigurumi--Scotoplanes globosa (the "sea pig" sea cucumber) with a hitchhiking juvenile king crab! This was a more involved design than the previous one, and I learned a lot working on it. To ensure that the sea pig was capable of supporting itself on its adorable little tube feet (and that its back tentacles would stay upright instead of drooping), I made an armature out of pipe cleaners and then crocheted tubes that I slipped over the ends of the pipe cleaners that were sticking out of the body.

I was going to do the same for the legs of the king crab so that it could actually hold on to the sea pig, but I didn't have enough red yarn. Ultimately, I think it looks better and more accurate with the thinner legs anyway, even if I couldn't incorporate the holding ability.

... Man, I'm so much of a nature nerd that I crochet holothurians. Not sure what that says about me.

And here are some WIP photos!

 

 Still going with this series, but nobody's told me to stop yet, so...

This one should more accurately be titled "Infamous Cats in Science", but that just doesn't have quite the same ring to it and I wanted to keep things consistent. At any rate, Cope and Marsh played a pivotal role in popularizing paleontology in the late 19th century and especially bringing to global notice the wealth of dinosaur fossils to be found in the American West--before the Bone Wars, most substantial paleontological finds had occurred in Europe.

I thought it would be fun to make them both black cats to show that, despite their bitter feuding, the two of them really weren't all that different, and could have - indeed, one might argue should have - been friends, if their stubborn pride and refusal to forgive each other hadn't gotten in the way. I'm not sure one can say whether or not they would have ultimately found more fossils if they had been cooperating, but they certainly both would have led much happier lives, which is more important.

Easter eggs:

- The bone they are fighting over is very specifically a Brontosaurus humerus. Marsh was the one who described Brontosaurus in 1879. Although I'm sure Cope wishes he'd gotten there first.

- Pawthniel Marsh is based off my own very fluffy black cat. Cope kinda resembles my sister's short-haired black cat. Neither of them have Victorian facial hair, I hasten to add.

Alan Turing may not be not a scientist in the strictest sense of the word, but once the pun popped into my head, I knew this illustration had to happen. :)

(Dr. Toebean has gotten himself rolled up in punch tape for a Turing machine, in case you were curious.)

 I have a big, long list of scientists I've been meaning to turn into cats, and I'm glad I was able to get the Herschels on there.

Cats for days!

P.S. Rendering telescopes is hard. I'm so grateful for the straight-line tool.

 I have so many ideas for scientists as cats. Unfortunately my ideas are limited by whose names I can make cat puns out of. But I am glad I got Carl Sagan in there.

(Seriously tempted to draw "Sir Pawtrick Moore" one of these days...)

 More science cats! Please don't let your cat poke radium. Not a good idea.

 Another illustration for my series of illustrations reimagining historical scientists as cats. Because that's what science geek cat moms do.

 Here's a bonus science cat! I couldn't leave out the Archduke of Physics himself.

 The next illustration in my line of scientist cats! This one was fun. Not the least because I got to draw Galapagos tortoises.

P.S. Darwin Cat is a British Shorthair breed. It just seemed to fit him.

My niece wanted to get into amigurumi and asked me to teach her, which necessitated me having to do lots of research and try to stay one step ahead of her, because I've been doing other types of crochet for a while but haven't tried amigurumi until now. I've actually become hopelessly addicted to it, and I've been having fun both learning from tutorials and trying to come up with my own patterns for things you don't normally see amigurumi of.

Here's my pattern for Stygiomedusa gigantea, a.k.a. the giant phantom jelly, one of the most beautiful cnidarians in my opinion. I was going to give it more tentacles, but I ran out of yarn. Still, I think it turned out really nicely.

I used this tutorial to make plushie loaf versions of my dear cats.

Chewie feels his plushie does not adequately capture his majesty.

Here are the latest graphics I've made for my RedBubble store!

Self-explanatory. Obey the cat.

It's the 90's hip hop/British cryptography mashup nobody was asking for. I dunno. This is just what my imagination does.

The world needs more goblin shark merchandise because goblin sharks need more love. I've fangirled these critters ever since I was a kid, and now I have fulfilled my lifelong dream of having one available on a t-shirt.

It's been a month for creepycuteness; I also just had to make merch for the incredible Scotoplanes sea cucumber genus, because they are amazing. Tube feet that they use to literally walk across the seafloor? A mouth surrounded by tentacles tipped with more tentacles? Giving free rides to juvenile king crabs? Don't put limits on sea cucumbers!

 I've always loved marine biology, and the weirder ocean life is, the cooler it is, in my opinion. Deep-sea fish have some amazing adaptations for their environment that make them look like some of the most alien things on the planet, and I'm not sure science fiction could ever have come up with a concept as strange and wonderful as the barreleye fish (which you may be familiar with if you play Animal Crossing).

One of my goals with my Redbubble store is to give more love and merch to species both extinct and extant that aren't as well-represented in general culture, but are beloved by science nerds. If you search "dinosaurs" on Redbubble, you'll probably get about a million designs featuring T. rex or Velociraptor or Stegosaurus. But what about people who love Scutellosaurus? What about people like my friend Maggie Jo Widdicombe who are over the moon for Pachyrhinosaurus? Nature is so varied and amazing in all its facets--I think we should be celebrating all of it, not just the species that have made their way into the common vernacular.

So I'm spreading the love for the barreleye, the most optimistic creature in the sea!

 Today on Fossil Friday, Maggie Jo gave a great presentation on crocodilians, and we were talking about how cool it is that alligators sometimes balance sticks on their snouts to lure in birds. Ashley said the gators are probably thinking "Shhhh... I'm a log", and I just thought that was so cute that I asked her if I could make a graphic of it. Gators need more love!

This behavior also speaks to just how smart crocodilians are, because using something as a lure definitely counts as tool use. Don't count out the ectotherms! They'll surprise you.

 Today on Virtual Fossil Friday, Ashley and Maggie Jo got to talking about pickled specimens in museum collections, and Maggie Jo coined the slogan "We Can Pickle That" and said she wanted it on a t-shirt. I asked her if she wanted me to make her one, she was very excited about the idea, and so here we are. (Always great when I can get an excuse to draw a squid.)

You can get the design on apparel, stickers, and other stuff in my store!

 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!

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!

 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.