The Museum of Idaho has been hosting a travelling exhibit all about the Permian Era, and I managed to make it before they moved on! I love the Permian--I think it's so overlooked and underrated in culture because a lot of people just kinda gravitate toward what happened next: dinosaurs. But Permian critters weren't just the warm-up act for the main event--they were fascinating and successful animals in their own right. And, like the dinosaurs, their demise came about because of an unfortunate mass extinction. Gorgonops and Ulemosaurus and Lystrosaurus may not be household names, but in my opinion they should be. <3

I brought my drawing supplies, and although I was a bit tired that day, I managed to do a pretty nice marker sketch based on the lovely Dimetrodon mount in the exhibit. My sister says he looks like he wants treats from you. That's probably accurate.

They also had some fun animatronics scattered around the exhibit--it was awesome to see animatronics of lesser-known critters and not just big-name dinos. I really wanted to pat their tummies and bring them home and give them treats, but my cat would not approve.

 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.

 Was in the mood for some painting, so I whipped this together. I was watching a video about a turaco, a type of ground-dwelling bird native to Africa, and it struck me how well birds can disguise their long necks in their plumage. It got me to wondering if fluffy dinosaurs may have done the same thing. So here's Velociraptor nestled snugly in its feathers during another chilly night in the Gobi Desert of the Cretaceous.

 More amigurumi! I decided to make an adorable li'l Smilodon because carnivores are cute too! My secret goal is to make scientifically accurate plushies of underrepresented prehistoric animals. When I told my niece, she thought I was ridiculous. Never underestimate a pedantic nerd, kid. :)

In learning amigurumi I am also learning a surprising amount about embroidery! It's like two skills in one! A lot of the patterns I see call for safety eyes, but I've been trying to work on embroidering eyes instead because a) I'm too cheap to buy safety eyes, b) safety eyes aren't 100% safe; you can get them out of crochet if you try hard enough, and toddlers are always capable of more mayhem than you expect, and c) embroidered eyes can give a plush more personality and individuality.

Learning a new skill (or more like two new skills at once) is fun! Give it a go if you've been feeling down. Few things lift the spirits like expanding your horizons!

 I couldn't resist another paleontology parody poster. :) Yi qi is an adorable little theropod from the Mid-Late Jurassic of China. Its name 翼奇 means "strange wing" because it appears to have had membranous, batlike wings. So basically it was the closest dinosaurs ever got to being actual dragons. <3 Its name is pronounced "ee chee", so... you can see how this happened.

 I'm launching a new line of merch on Redbubble that's all about... reimagining historic scientists as cats. Yep. That's what cat moms do.

First up is Mary Anning, because she's my friend Ashley Hall's favorite paleontologist and I wanted to give the woman her due. Accompanying Meowry Anning is her furry friend Tray, who is also featured on Mary's statue in Lyme Regis.

Meowry is specifically excavating the famous holotype specimen of Temnodontosaurus that the real Mary Anning and her brother Joseph discovered in 1810-1812. Mary was actually just a tween at the time, but I wanted to include a real and recognizable fossil of hers in this illustration. (I mean, if you care that much about accuracy, she also shouldn't be a cat, so.)

More coming in following weeks!

 Made another fake paleo film poster. Clearly I have way too much time on my hands to sit around thinking about paleontology.

 In the latter half of the 20th century and first few decades of the 21st, for whatever ill-advised reason, there was a trend in a lot of paleoart to reconstruct dinosaurs and pterosaurs with weirdly scant amounts of soft tissue, leading to under-muscled bodies and even being able to see the fenestrae in skulls and other skeletal details that probably were not visible on a healthy living animal.

It's really important to remember that dinosaurs and pterosaurs had muscles and connective tissue and fat and organs just like every other animal. Just because a certain generation grew up seeing dinosaurs a certain way, doesn't mean it's not terribly, terribly wrong. So I drew this very unfortunate Lambeosaurus to remind us all to give our dinosaurs plenty of soft tissue.

I've been reading retro dinosaur books for fun, but I usually just find myself commenting on the artwork out loud to nobody (or my cat if he's around). I'm trying to be patient with the whole "the 20th century didn't know as much about dinosaurs as we do now" thing, but for Pete's sake, treat these creatures like real functioning organisms, not warty toothy movie monsters. 

I still can't get over this truly cursed Deinonychus from one book where not only were the hands all sorts of wrong (and reminded me way too much of aye-aye hands), but the eye was in the wrong fenestra. I was really shocked to see this from an artist who was pretty well-known for his dino art back in the day. If you make an occupation out of drawing dinosaurs, you ought to be familiar enough with them to know which fenestra in theropods is the orbital fenestra. And even if you didn't know that (but you honestly really should know that), spending just a few minutes with some research papers will set the record straight. There's absolutely no excuse for that kind of thing.

(And no, you don't get the excuse that in the 80's, in the pre-Internet days, it was harder to access scientific journals. If you're a professional paleoartist, you owe it to yourself and the world to make sure you're well-stocked with reference material. And, if you're in the 80's, you could totally just call John Ostrom, the man who discovered Deinonychus, and ask him about it because he's still alive.)

Put in the work, people. Taking the time to do your research may take you a few hours or a few days or maybe a week tops. But cringey paleoart will forever stand as a testament to your lack of effort.

... Okay, back to more rage-reading! I have such strange hobbies.

 I made this graphic for my Redbubble store, simply because every time I hear the name Sarkastodon this is where my mind goes. Non-Ice-Age prehistoric mammals need more love anyway. Pop culture keeps forgetting that there are 61 million years of really interesting evolution between dinosaurs and the Pleistocene. 

I also wanted to render a prehistoric carnivorous mammal with a little bit more of a unique color scheme than I usually see. So much paleoart tends to make extinct carnivores either look like leopards or like tigers, but there are a lot of other coat colors and patterns a mammal can have.

I'm probably the only one who thinks this is funny, I know.

 The other day I was reading about a group of birds called the jacanas, at least one species of which (the comb-crested jacana) has a really interesting parenting behavior--if the male, who is primarily responsible for raising the chicks, thinks his brood is in danger, he scoops them up under his arms and runs away carrying them. If you see a jacana doing this, it looks utterly bizarre until you realize what's going on.

So, naturally, my next thought was that it would be great to see a dinosaur doing this. Here's Struthiomimus being a good dad and carrying his brood to safety.

I'd like to point out that even though some dinosaurs appeared to have been born precocial, or able to move and feed themselves right after hatching, that does not imply no parental care in the species. Many modern species are born precocial simply because their parents are always on the move and the babies need to get going ASAP, but they still receive plenty of upbringing. Consider nomadic herbivores like horses and giraffes, whose babies can walk within hours after birth but still spend considerable time being raised by Mom. So it's a mistake to find fully-developed dinosaur hatchlings and assume they were abandoned, sea-turtle style.

(I'd also like to point out that the closest modern relatives of dinosaurs - crocodilians and birds - both exhibit extensive parental care before and after hatching. There is no reason to think dinosaurs stupidly plodded away from their clutches and had no instinct for rearing the next generation.)

Dinosaur paleoartists, study bird behavior. You'll be glad you did.

 You say "K-Pg extinction" and this is just where my mind goes.

 I drew this graphic for my Redbubble store, because I thought it would be a funny visual pun. Albertosaurus's species name really is sarcophagus (which literally means "eater of flesh", so it's fitting for a theropod), so I couldn't resist the wordplay. (I know what is depicted here is a funerary mask and not an an actual sarcophagus, but Tutankhamun's funerary mask is what most people immediately think of when they think Egyptian mummies.)

The lettering is based off demotic, the everyday script of ancient Egypt that arose in the mid-first-millennium BC. Which, yes, is anachronistic because Tutankhamun dates from about 800 years earlier, but demotic was a more intuitive script for me to work off than hieratic, which is based on hieroglyphic. 

(Just wanted to cover all my bases for any Egyptologists out there. Apologies for going into pedantic detail about a silly doodle.)

 A few months ago on Virtual Fossil Friday, we got an awesome Zoom tour of the Whiteside Museum of Natural History, located in the Permian Red Beds of western Texas. I got to learn more about Dimetrodon than I ever knew I wanted to know, and I came away really wanting to make this graphic for my merch. My dad is from Texas, and I'm proud of the Lone Star State being home to the largest species of Dimetrodon, D. grandis. They really do make them bigger in Texas!

I find drawing Dimetrodon a fun challenge, because it's not just a big lizard with a sail on its back--it's a basal synapsid, a cousin to mammals. Synapsids aren't even reptiles; they're a totally different branch of amniotes. That's why I feel it's important to portray them as something fundamentally different than reptiles despite the superficial similarities. These creatures were on their way to becoming mammals and their life reconstructions need to reflect that.

 Life's been kind of crazy and stressful and weird, and I haven't had many opportunities to do more sketching at the Idaho Museum of Natural History, but today I managed to get over there to see my buddies from Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument who were paying the museum a visit. They brought some fascinating Pliocene-era fossil casts, and I decided to try giving mammals another go because I don't feel good at drawing them.

Today the Borophagus skull stood out to me, so I decided to try a reconstruction. Borophagines, also known as bone-crushing dogs, are usually portrayed as pretty nasty critters, but their skulls were actually really cute. They had slightly upturned snouts that would have given them shorter-looking muzzles than most modern canids, almost like something trying to be a bulldog. It was fun to portray one looking not ferocious for once.

 I actually reached 100 followers on Facebook, so I celebrated with a little thank-you doodle. I thought it would be fun to have the subject be a species that lived around 100 million years ago, and I picked Oryctodromeus because I have a lot of experience drawing it by now (and I thought the tunnel-number idea would be fun).

There's a little mammal popping in to say hello because smaller burrows have been found branching off from orycto burrows, and it's thought that mammals may have done their own tunneling inside the burrows.

I'm really grateful for everybody who enjoys my art (and maybe my writing)--I'll keep doing my best to create a bright spot on an Internet that can get really scary sometimes. Let's all be kind to each other--that's what really makes things better.

 I drew this to put on graphics in my stores. Because whenever you say the phrase "dinosaur renaissance" this just keeps popping into my head.

Apologies to Dr. Bob Bakker. But he'd probably like this so I'm not too sorry.

(Yes, I know what the actual dinosaur renaissance is. That's why Deinonychus is playing the role of da Vinci.)

My friend Ashley Hall is moving on from Museum of the Rockies and won't be co-hosting Virtual Fossil Fridays anymore! I'm sure Maggie Jo will continue to do a wonderful job hosting, but I'm going to miss seeing Ashley every week too. I drew her a couple of things to express my appreciation for everything she's done for science outreach at MOR during her time there.

She asked me to draw a picture of her riding a Parasaurolophus (her favorite dino), so I had to remember a lot of things I forgot about horseback riding from when I would go to visit my equestrian aunt as a kid. (Horses kinda terrify me with their extreme jumpiness and their ability to sense your lack of confidence. Carnivores are more my speed.) I also included her cat Samhain because I always look for excuses to include cats in things. :)

 

And then I drew her as an actual Parasaurolophus because why not. She used to work at the Page Museum at Rancho La Brea*, so I drew her with Smilodon, one of the tar pits' iconic species. Love that place. I hope I get to visit it again someday.

Thanks for everything, Ashley! I'm secretly hoping she organizes another chapter of Virtual Fossil Fridays in her new location. Double the paleontology, double the fun!

*For those not in the know, "la brea" is literally Spanish for "the tar". So when you say "La Brea Tar Pits" you are saying "the the tar tar pits". Let's be less cavalier with our linguistics, shall we?

This message has been paid for by the Coalition Against Tautological Place Names.

 Today on Virtual Fossil Friday, we were talking about the dwarf sauropod Magyarosaurus and how it was the perfect size for riding, and Ashley and Maggie Jo wanted me to draw this. :)

 Also on last Fossil Friday, Ashley mentioned it would be really cool if ankylosaurs camouflaged themselves by putting plants on their back, like the terrestrial equivalent of decorator crabs, and wanted someone to draw that. I thought it sounded like a fun challenge. I love talking to scientists because they come up with so many great ideas that I never would have thought of!

I'm not sure ankylosaurs had the dexterity to pick something up and put it on their back, but I did think it plausible that they could roll in mud, get dirt caked on their backs, and then let plants grow in the dirt! I'd love to see something like this trundling around the desert.

The ankylosaur in question is Pinacosaurus from the Djadokhta Formation in Mongolia. The only flora found in the Djadokhta Formation so far are conifers, so I essentially had to come up with the shrubbery carte blanche. Aside from a few sapling conifers, I also populated this guy's back with a mix of plants currently found in the Gobi Desert, and shrubs found in the American West such as manzanita, sagebrush, and yes, good old tumbleweeds. I'm not saying these plant groups were definitely present in the Djadokhta, but the climactic conditions were similar enough that similar plants were probably present. It's a fudge, but a well-researched fudge.

 Last Fossil Friday, Maggie Jo was gushing about Velociraptor (and why wouldn't one) and she came up with the pun "Velocirapper" and then she wanted somebody to draw that. Good thing there was a mad doodler in the audience.