Twas windy… damned windy… and in gusts from all sides. This gull just makes it look so easy to hang in the air.
I stabilized the video at approximately the skull base to better appreciate the subtle adjustments. This is how I hope to slide through the new year.

May you admire all the weird and crazy trees despite that forest blocking your view.
(Me too.)

Tatjana + David

Finally managed some blog maintenance: wordpress is now updated, which required a php upgrade. Everything looks fine here except the old format video linkage, which now appears as text. If you see anything troublesome , please let me know.

I’ll be struggling with work load into the new year, but hope to manage a semblance of artwork. Look forward to a speed paint revival, albeit perhaps one or two per week.

Not all too surprising, female avatars show more skin. How much more, well, that’s revealing. The interpreted implications (maybe women just liking showing off their skin more) seem a bit out of touch to me, but the statistics are interesting.

Another week on the soon* to be tropic island of Usedom. Twas cold… minus 10. This view of the very windy beach from a walk after emerging from the woods. May your holidays be as cold and windy – but safe and warm – as ours!

I’ve now received and read through All Yesterdays and – as expected – find it fantastic. The general internet chorus is perfectly correct in highlighting this book, and I fully expect that it will become synonymous with a paradigm change in palaeontology, even though the change has already taken place. It hits the right buttons, fitting the message of scientifically plausible ballsiness with key images such as the skin-wrapped cat, and the goat-like Protoceratops group. It also manages fantastic imagery, my favorites including Ouranosaurus, Therizinosaurus and the camo Plesiosaur.

The book also stretches the metaphor a bit. Whereas John’s sleeping Tyrannosaurus is gorgeous, it’s not quite the revelation as far as resting theropods go, so that I personally feel bypassed by the text – which hangs  a non-RAWR theropod a tad bit too far out on the limb of scandal. Hmmm, must be for those not following Deviant and other internet discussions, methinks – a very real possibility.

Alone, this would be a minor critique, but the artists rush boldly beyond the staking of any limits, and so – for me – enters the problematic. Citipati with a duck penis is exactly that – a theropod with a duck penis. Stegosaurus humping Haplocanthosaurus is also what it is. For me, both become negative examples as the proposed novelty does not arise from the mental exercise of imagining the animal itself, but rather of taking a sensationalist biology news-bite and combining it collage-like with a dinosaur. Sure, there are ample cases of convergent evolution. Sure, early theropods experienced similar selective pressures. Yet – as handled – these two cases feel as plausible to me as a Kentrosaurus with zebra stripes. In a book about the animals themselves, or the science of interpreting them, these would be out of place. In a book about the limits of illustration itself, however, I’ll accept them as clever, or at least as functional.

I have a further issue with Homo diluvii, which presents a breasted, humanoid thing as commentary about the infamous historical misinterpretation by Scheuchzer in 1726 – an interpretation of an interpretation I have difficulty orienting within the focus of plausibly reconstructing extinct creatures. It opens all sorts of new boxes and rubs off on neighboring drawings, so that I catch myself asking if the venomous baboon and vampiric hummingbird are unecessary digs at recent scientific interpretations.

Nonetheless, I fully recommend it and hope to get those hot author drawings in mine some time in the future. I’m happy this year brought such a debate-inspiring book, as well as others, like Matt’s Mesozoic Birds and Steve White’s World’s Greatest Paleoart. I’ll leave you with a great video of Darren presenting the book.

John Hutchinson invites us to pick his brains. Fortunately for him, my David-Peters-Remote-Studies course on fossil analysis is progressing well and – hey, if it works for stone it should work for John’s grey matter. So I’m proudly present you with the cause of John’s ills … he’s got an anatomically correct, Wittonesque-nosed Tyrannosaurus lodged in his grey matter. I recommend he dangle something small and furry in front of his nose for a week or so, knowing that all dinosaurs find such synapsid bait simply irresistible.

It takes a while, it’s natural that it takes a while and you just have to fight your way through that.

Ira Glass

Yes, even the titmouse can seem majestic in a snowstorm like the one we had today.

Tis the season to self-publish your books, and I suspect this season won’t end so quickly. After the exciting release of All Yesterdays comes Matt Martyniuk’s Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds. I’m very much hoping both will do very well. I haven’t received my copy of Yesterdays yet, but I’m sure that Matt’s birds are every bit as ‘fresh’ in the way of artistic interpretation – which is fantastic because it’s a heavy science guide, presented for the time-traveling backpacker in the guide format familiar to any bird-watchers out there. We are presented with wonderfully fluffy specimens, occasionally in display pose and text. Lots of text. I’ll be chewing on this for a while, but I can assure you – it assumes a basic familiarity with vocabulary such as ‘remiges’, ‘phylogeny’, ‘tibia’ and ‘tarsus’ – only the last two of which make it into the glossary, but whereas Yesterdays seems primarily focused on the process and perception of artistic reconstruction, this guide is squarely focused on birds. Mesozoic birds.

One minor disappointment is the quality of formatting and presentational graphics. The phylogenetic trees and associated timelines could be presented in more inviting ways, or more graphically, such as each specimen’s time range, geographic location and habitat. (ie. was the Smokey Hill Chalk Member a woodland in the Cretaceous?)

Minor critique aside, this is the book for the dedicated dinosaur / bird aficionado – perfect to test that little know-it-all pipsqueak in every family, to see if he / she bites through this material.

Ah, can you smell that? Worldmapper just bloats up my chosen home once I select ‘non-religious’ as a deformation criteria. USA ain’t bad either and china, well… wow!

It has 8 legs, is mounted on a wall. It’s a spider, specifically unspider-like. It’s part squid, part happy accident, part alien Venom dude. It has visual tension because it both is and isn’t a spider. It’s art.

Click the steam punk ant above to read Alex Wild’s argumentation for the difference between fair use and infringement. In a nutshell, whether the ‘inspired’ artist is replicating the original work’s intention or not plays a large role.

I have little to contribute to the recent reports of a fantastic new paleoart book called All Yesterdays, other than to say – yup, bought it. After all, I still await my hardbound copy to arrive – sorry Apple, how could you not buy this on dead trees?

Some thoughts I hope to add to later:

1) I already feel conservative. While excited and very much anticipating this book, the celebration of odd could-have-beens is dangerously close to snorkeled Sauropods, sockmouthed ceratops and generally liberal interpretations among artists. The key is the artist’s understanding of anatomy and a position within the scientific dialog, I feel and I expect nothing but the best from John Conway. The book also seems to be embedded in textual context… and in my experience, Darren Naish can do no wrong. Just – there’s that nagging feel that the celebration of this approach is in some ways the antitheses to Julia Molnar’s launching pterosaur. Look forward to more after I finish gushing over the pages.

2) I love the idea of independent printing. Kudos to the team for doing this. Previously, I bought a print-on-demand book by Greg Paul. It will be interesting to compare. I’d love to see a brand effect arise from this. It would be great to have a venture like Irregular Books gain public recognition as a go-to place for quality palaeo images and I’d be more than interested in contributing.

Anyway – get yourself a copy, digital or not.