dontmesswithdinosaurs.com

I like turtles.

In many of my paleoart illustrations turtles are either featured prominently, or there are turtles hidden somewhere in the environment for you to find. It’s my way of giving an audience something to relatable for scale and perspective in an otherwise alien environment, and hopefully reminding people that some groups of organisms have been around for a long long time, without changing too dramatically in the process. In this illustration Pappochelys, an ancient relative of turtles, are really easy to find, but one of them is afflicted with a life-threatening disease. Can you figure out which one? (Answer at bottom of post)

My most recent illustration reconstructs the 240 million turtle ancestor Pappochelys in it’s ancient Triassic German pond habitat, but perhaps not for the reason you might expect. As it turns out paleohistologist Yara Haridy at the the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin in collaboration with Dr. Florian Wittzman and Dr. Rainer Schoch have described a femur from Pappochelys exhibiting abnormal bone growth – the telltale signs of bone cancer. This is therefor the earliest example in the fossil record of cancer in an amniote. The paper describing this ancient cancer can be downloaded here (unfortunately not open access):
Triassic Cancer—Osteosarcoma in a 240-Million-Year-Old Stem-Turtle

One older example of cancer has been diagnosed in an ancient amphibian, but this Pappochelys specimen is significant because it’s a little further up the family tree, and is so specific in it’s growth patterns that it indicates that some of the fundamental genetic defects that cause bone cancer in modern humans and other animals may go all the way down to the base of the amniote family tree. That means you share some of your most fundamental DNA with this ancient turtle ancestor.

SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel for an upcoming video exploring this illustration and the science that went into it in more depth.

Did you figure out which Pappochelys is sick?

If you noticed the tumorous bulge in this older individual’s thigh, then you spotted the disease. Cancer tends to afflict more mature animals, as our genetic codes are subjected to more abuse throughout our lives, and thus accumulate more mutations, thereby increasing our chances of getting a mutation that causes runaway cell growth, thus resulting in cancerous tumors. Yara informed me that bone cancers tend to spread to the lungs, so we decided to illustrate our afflicted animal as lethargically breathing at the surface, perhaps trying to conserve energy. Although numerous more complete Pappochelys skeletons have been found, only one cancerous tumor has been found so far, so we really don’t know if the little one was killed by the cancer, or survived it to later die of some other cause, such as seasonal drought or some other disease. Predation seems less likely, as the bone preservation is exquisite, and doesn’t appear to show signs of having been passed through another animal’s digestive system. Despite this scary disease however, the relatives of Pappochelys went on to fully develop their shells and diversify into numerous habitats, ultimately surviving hundreds of millions of years to this day.

Thanks for reading, and again, be sure to SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel for an upcoming video with lots of turtle footage, further exploring the ideas that went into this piece (and lots of footage of living turtles and tortoises being awesome).

This summer I had the pleasure of embarking on an adventure into the Utah desert to survey some late Jurassic Morrison Formation outcrop lead by Dr. Mathew Wedel along with his colleague from Western University of Health Sciences Dr. Jessie Atterholt. Along the way I learned that Dr. Atterholt studies birds and that she was nearly done describing one of the largest and most complete enantiornithine birds from North America, and she needed paleoart depicting what this big old bird might have looked like. I of course jumped at the opportunity to illustrate a member of the floofiest branch of the Dinosaur family tree. Her paper, describing the skeleton of this ancient bird now named Mirarce is now published, and can be downloaded (for free!) here: The most complete enantiornithine from North America and a phylogenetic analysis of the Avisauridae

Mirarce on Utahceratops by Brain Engh

For those that aren’t famililar with the various clades of early birds, enantiornithines are a group of early birds known mostly from Asia, which were pretty advanced, and which some amazingly preserved fossils (including a baby encased in amber!) show us looked enough like modern birds that we probably wouldn’t think they looked out of place if they were flapping around in modern times. Like modern birds they had fully developed plumage, the ability to fly, and in some cases big fancy tail plumes… But unlike modern birds their shoulder girdles weren’t as developed for flight, a few species retained claws on their wing fingers and/or teeth in their jaws, and they lived alongside the dinosaurs as far back as 130-ish million years ago!

To date I have done very very few reconstructions of early birds, and all only as peripheral animals in larger paleoecological scenes, so when Dr. Atterholt told me about Mirarce I was happy to learn that enantiornithines had been found in North America, but I was surprised to learn that this specimen had been discovered in the Kaiparowits Formation in the now recently reduced Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument way back in 1992. It made sense that this bird was in North America in the late Cretaceous though, as fossils from Asia and Europe show us that birds evolved at least as early as the late Jurassic, and being flying animals would have been free to spread across both land and sea faster than animals requiring land-bridges to get from one continent to another. In fact the first illustration I was commissioned to do that involved early birds was my reconstruction of the early Cretaceous Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite, which features several speculative early birds which were included because bird-like tracks have been found at the site. The Mill Canyon site dates back to around 112 million years ago, which is around the time that a lot of non-avian dinosaur groups were finding their way into North America, probably via land bridges connecting N. America to Europe and Asia. So if large bodied flightless animals were making their way over, it stands to reason that the flying branch of the dinosaur family tree probably made it over to North America much much earlier.

The reason that not many Mesozoic birds have been found in North America is probably due to some combination of sampling bias (people just looking for big dinosaurs, especially in the early days of paleontology) and preservational bias (itty bitty animals rot, get eaten, or get destroyed by water moving sediments around quite easily, while somewhat larger animals with sturdier bones are more likely to get buried in tact in most depositional environments.) Due to that preservational bias it is perhaps not surprising that despite being the most complete enantiornithine from North America Mirarce is still pretty incomplete.

Enantiornithine skeletal reconstruction showing the parts of Mirarce that have been found (white) by Scott Hartmann

Broken and incomplete as Mirarce‘s skeleton is, it being found in North America still shows us some pretty cool things. First of all it was pretty big. Somewhere around the size of a fat raven or a slightly runty turkey vulture, it was one of the largest known enantiornthines, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t fly. In fact it may have been a stronger flier than most enantiornithines as it had a more developed shoulder girdle which shows adaptations similar to more advanced bird groups, although it evolved these adaptations convergently.

Mirarce‘s nicely preserved sternum (where flight muscles attached) and wishbone (an important part of the shoulder girdle of flying birds). Figures from the paper.

Because of it’s unique features and their similarity to other North American enantiornithines the phylogenetic analysis of all of these early birds indicates that the North American Enantiornthines formed a distinct late Cretaceous clade, perhaps evolving in isolation or semi-isolation in North America once sea levels rose and North America’s connectivity to Europe and Asia were reduced.

Mirarce – rough Car Sketches by Brian Engh

While driving accross Utah and camping in dusty sediments of the Morrison Formation, Jessie, Matt and I discussed a few ideas for the art and I made several sketches. For the sake of giving the public an easy takeaway we focused the art on communicating that Mirarce was pretty big and that it lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs. Fortunately the Kaiparowits of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument has yielded numerous spectacular non-avian dinosaurs, including the bizarrely ornamented ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs) Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops. I have seen a lot of egrets and other birds perched on or around large modern grazing animals, so I thought it would be cool to show something similar happening with one of the nonavian dinosaurs from the same time & place as Mirarce.

We decided to go with Utahceratops gettyi because it honors the late paleontologist Mike Getty, and also its slightly down turned brown horns seemed like they would make good perches. I did not know Mike Getty personally, but a number of my collaborators did, and I am assured he would have liked the idea of a couple of goofy birds perching (and probably pooping) on the face of his big weird Chasmosaurine dinosaur.

Photo by Tom Stables/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Big shoutout to Jessie and Matt Wedel for bringing me in on this project, and shoutouts Scott Hartman for his nice skeletal drawing. Also shoutout the coauthors Howard Hutchinson for finding the fossil, and Jingmai O’connor for being an ancient bird phylogeny master. Jeff Eaton gets a shoutout too because he is the Eaton whose name Mirarce eatoni honors because he did a lot of work in the Kaiparowits Formation where the critter was found.

Thank you all for entering.

Please check out this WINNER & HONORABLE MENTIONS VIDEO! So much cool art.

As always, if you want to support my art and make future contests and other fun stuff possible, please support my work on patreon.

Thanks again yall.

As if all the excitement of Dynamoterror being announced yesterday wasn’t enough, a project that has been active in the background for a long time was finally published today – Dr. Adam Marsh‘s redescription of the early Jurassic basal sauropodomorph (aka “prosauropod”) Sarahsaurus. I did two illustrations which are featured in the paper and which were commissioned by the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site Museum for eventual use in exhibits there. Here’s my reconstruction of this dragon’s weird little head:

You can find a link to Adam’s paper here:
Anatomy and systematics of the sauropodomorph Sarahsaurus aurifontanalis from the Early Jurassic Kayenta Formation

Sarahsaurus is fascinating and significant because it is one of the earliest known examples of a basal sauropodomorph in North America, which means it’s arrival is the beginning of a long story of adaptation and diversification by sauropodomorphs in North America that would later give rise to famous super giants like Brontosaurus, Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. But despite the fact that Sarahsaurus had a long neck, it was otherwise really crazy different from the more derived giant long necked Sauropods that we find abundant fossils of in the Late Jurassic. Check out this skeleton.

If you look through Adam’s paper you’ll see, uhm, A GODDAMN TON of beautiful images of Sarahsaurus’ gorgeously preserved, mostly complete, articulated skeleton. One of the most compelling features is a powerful, fully articulated hand with strong claws. It’s death pose appears to be the result of strong tendons in the animal’s hand contracting as rigor mortise set in, pulling the clawed fingers inward to a contracted position.

This articulated dino paw appears to have had the ability to grasp things, somewhat like that of a modern sloth or bear. That inspired this illustration of the animal rearing up against and more or less grasping a conifer in order to reach the foliage.

But despite these apparent adaptations for feeding in a bipedal mode, the large trackways which match these prosauropods and which appear in the fossil record in North America at around this time show diverse locomotory capabilities. These animals sometimes walked upright, sometimes would drop to all fours and walk quadrupedally, and at the Red Hills Parkway site in St. George Utah, Paleontologists Andrew R. Milner and Tracy Thomson have found and are in the process of describing a series of large four toed scratch tracks, deposited in a muddy river bottom along with numerous other scratch tracks, all of which point to various animals swimming, their buoyant air-filled bodies floating at the surface with the clawed toes of their paddling feet just barely slicing through the dense sediments at the bottom. The only animals in the Kayenta formation that would have made big four-toed tracks like that would have been prosauropods like Sarahsaurus.

Swimming prosauropods are, for some reason, maybe my favourite thing ever. These strange sloth like dragons, paddling along the flooded rivers of the early Jurassic, adaptable and durable, able to not only survive in tough environments but thrive in them well enough to give rise to the largest land animals that ever walked the planet, and all while looking like total weirdos.

This image, based on the amazing swim tracks from the Red Hills Parkway site is just a tiny excerpt of my much larger Kayenta Timeline illustration, a work in progress for the Saint George Dinosaur Discovery Site Museum. When completed these illustrations will be part of an exhibit on the Kayenta Formation which will feature fossils from each of the localities at different stratigraphic (rock layer) intervals represented in the timeline. And Sarahsaurus certainly wasn’t the only charismatic dinosaur living at this time… Another, much more famous dinosaur which Adam has been working on a re-description of is also featured in the timeline, and also depicted in a way you’ve never seen before…

If you’re in southern Utah, or passing through on your way to or from Salt Lake, Vegas or Los Angeles, definitely stop in St. George and check out the museum – it’s only about 5 minutes from Interstate 15, the same exit as In-N-Out Burger, and It’s built over another early Jurassic track site in the Moenave Formation, which is just a bit older than the rocks Sarahsaurus was found in.

The floor of the museum is covered with dinosaur tracks, showing a variety of behaviors including swim tracks, which were deposited there around 200 million years ago when theropod dinosaurs paddled out into an ancient lake to prey on fish. It’s one of those rare places where you can stop for a few minutes to grab a bite to eat and find yourself looking at fossils left by dinosaurs who were also stopping to grab a bite to eat two hundred million years ago.

If you’d like to support my work and see more behind the scenes material on the process of creating the Kayenta Timeline and my other projects, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Dr. Andrew McDonald at the Western Science Center in Hemet CA and Doug Wolfe of the Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences, Springerville, AZ have been quite busy finding and describing new dinosaurs from the under explored Late Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. I have been quite busy helping them bring them back to life. Introducing Dynamoterror dynastes and Invictarx zephyri!

A link to the paper describing Dynamoterror can be found here:
A new tyrannosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico
And you can find the paper describing Invictarx here:
A new nodosaurid ankylosaur (Dinosauria: Thyreophora) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico

Dynamoterror is a new tyrannosaurid, a member of the same family as T. rex, and at around 80 million years old it’s one of the earliest ones yet found in North America. This is significant because there was a major shift in which predatory dinosaur clade ruled the top predator niche in North America during the Cretaceous period. Before the tyrannosaurs took over they were for a long time much more diminutive. For most of their history tyrannosaurs were small to medium sized dinofuzz-covered beasts living in the shadows of a diversity of huge terrifying flesh eaters descended from the allosauroid lineage, which split off from the tyrannosaurs way way back in the Jurassic Period. Some of the allosauroids, like Acrocanthosaurus (pictured below in at the early cretaceous Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite) got just about as big as the largest tyrannosaurs, but never evolved the ridiculously massively built jaws and fatty banana-thick teeth that derived tyrannosaurs were smashing through armor and bone with.

The allosauroids did however have terrifying jaws lined with razor sharp blade-like serrated teeth which would have efficiently flayed off huge hunks of dinomeat, and which inspired the name of one lineage, the Carcharodontosauridae, which means “shark toothed lizards”. So how did 40+ foot long giant bird-like predatory reptiles with mouths full of sharky/steak knife teeth lose their throne to the “tyrant lizards” (tyrannosaurs)? Nobody knows. But Dynamoterror brings us one step closer to discovering the first tyrannosaurs to evolve large body size.

Perhaps more importantly, the Menefee formation where Dynamoterror and Invictarx were found in New Mexico is a new and highly productive fossil bearing region which gives us a window into the world that early tyrannosaurs rose to dominate as top predators. By studying the changes happening from the upper Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous and into the upper Cretaceous of the Menefee we can start to speculate about what major shifts in the environment resulted in the downfall of the allosauroids in North America. Intriguingly, one of the major changes we see in the fossil record at this time is the rise of another group of organisms so successful and powerfully altering to the environment that they spread across the entire world in just a few million years, rapidly evolving to enormous size and which may well have shaken the ecosystem so dramatically that giant super predators had no way of coping. The bizarre, rapidly evolving monsters I’m talking about is, of course, flowering plants.

The plant fossils found during this time show us that flowering plants were on the rise and had completely overhauled the entire ecological architecture. Lotus and water lilies and duckweed clogged the watercourses and bogs, a diversity of ficus and other deciduous trees crowded the forest canopy with their broad leaves and littered the forest floor with their innumerable fruit, and all of these flowering plants when blooming wept sweet irresistible nectar which fed swarms of pollinating insects who happily facilitated these photosynthetic monsters bizarre transcontinental orgies by carrying their nutritious and durable sperm packets from nectar oozing plant genital to nectar oozing plant genital.

Early mammals, small dinosaurs and early birds also all got in on the action, gobbling up fruits and seed pods and pooping out the seeds of these new sprawling plants all over the world, rapidly spreading them into new habitats near and far. And this may have affected more than small animals and insects. There is some evidence that sauropod dinosaurs, those long necked supergiants who had adapted so beautifully to crane their lengthy necks up into the boughs of the huge conifer trees that had dominated the worlds forests for so long, appear to have suffered a dramatic decline in North America and Europe during this time. While sauropods appear to have declined, advanced armored dinosaurs like Invictarx, duck billed dinosaurs and the horned ceratopsians flourished and diversified, and many evolved increasingly baroque armaments in the form of spikes, frills, tail clubs and horns. If indeed these new formidable plant eaters arose as a response to a major shift in the plant food available to them, and for some reason tyrannosaurs were better adapted to kill and eat these new plant eaters, then it would seem that (indirectly at least) allosauroids in North America were defeated by flowers.

An exhibit on those bizarre horned dinosaurs that diversified in North America at this time can be seen at The Western Science center, and it features the skull of yet another new species of dinosaur I was commissioned to illustrate by Museum Director Dr. Alton Dooley and Dr. Andrew McDonald. This dinosaur has yet to be named, but has been affectionately nicknamed “Ava” by it’s discoverers at Triebold Paleontology Inc.

If you’re in the southern CA area I hope you’ll swing by the museum. There’s always something interesting going on there, and with all the new fossils they’ve been finding they’ll no doubt be looking for volunteers interested in learning how to do fossil prep.

My thanks go out to Museum Director Dr. Alton Dooley and Curator of Paleontology Dr. Andrew McDonald, as well as their amazing marketing expert/outreach champion/giant ancient monster skull museum selfie model Brittney Stoneburg for all they’ve done to keep me busy illustrating their amazing specimens.

We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences for their help in the field.

If you’d like to see more in-depth behind-the-scenes information on how I make my art, and the process of creating the Ava head reconstruction specifically, check out my patreon page.

I just finished another piece of art for yet another interpretive panel at yet another Utah BLM dinosaur tracksite near Moab Utah commissioned by ReBecca Hunt-Foster and Utah Friends of Paleontology (aka UFOP) as part of the Respect and Protect Initiative, which aims to help protect vulnerable cultural and scientific resources by educating the public about their importance.

This illustration is a coastal scene for the expansive and thoroughly trampled middle Jurassic “Dinosaur Stomping Grounds” track site, which is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the Moab area. It’s an amazing hike, and there is lots of tracks to be found, and new ones are being exposed by natural erosion all the time. I have one more Utah tracksite piece in the works, and once it is done, I plan on putting together a video guide to the amazing track sites in the Moab area, many of which have my interpretive art on interpretive panels installed at them, thanks to the efforts of ReBecca and UFOP.

ReBecca Hunt-Foster is now moving on from her job at the BLM to her new position as Park Paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument, but in the time she was with the BLM she lead the development of numerous interpretive sites on public lands in the Moab area. These sites now feature high quality interpretive signage, natural feature-protecting boardwalks / developed trails and increased public awareness thanks to her education and outreach efforts in collaboration with Utah Friends of Paleontology, the Moab Museum, the Moab Information Center and numerous other community organizations and granting agencies. ReBecca’s work at the BLM should serve as a reminder that a job isn’t just a set of minimum requirements to be fulfilled, it is an opportunity to test the limits of what you can accomplish even in the face of seemingly intractable obstacles. It has been an honor to create art with her during her time at the BLM, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate with her at Dinosaur National Monument.

I took on two unique challenges while making the art for this sign. The initial challenge I gave myself was attempting to do the art in acrylic (instead of my typical graphite and digital technique). Ultimately time constraints and my own lack of skill with acrylic lead to me compositing multiple layers of acrylic painting and graphite + digital. If you look closely at the details you may be able to make out details where these different art techniques are interacting.

The other challenge I took on was attempting to illustrate a big landscape scene showing the dunes meeting the sea. I did several iterations of this, including plein aire studies of the coasts here in California, and several attempts at executing in acrylic.

Ultimately however I ended up going back to my tried and true graphite & digital technique as it affords a level of control over detail that I have a really hard time achieving with other techniques and which I wanted because I like having both plants and animals identifiable within the broader environment.

Savage Ancient Seas is now open at the Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park Kansas. I definitely hope you’ll check it out, the skeletal mounts prepared by Triebold Paleontology Inc., are the best mounts of Western Interior Seaway creatures in the world, and it is a huge honor to have my artwork displayed alongside them.

Mosasaurs are really the star of the show, so I created a video on the process of reconstructing them for the exhibit, with a focus on the largest piece I created: a large mural depicting Tylosaurus:

Here’s a much smaller version of that mural for your online enjoyment, though you really do have to see it in person to get the full effect…

And here is my Mosasaur birthing scene, featuring Platecarpus:

I am excited to welcome you to the first natural history museum exhibit for which I created all of the art for the signage and displays: SAVAGE ANCIENT SEAS. This exhibit is a collaboration with Triebold Paleontology Inc., a company that specializes in the preparation and casting of rare fossils for museum display. I have had the pleasure of working closely with lead paleontologist at TPI Anthony Maltese as well as owner of the company Mike Triebold, to create the most detailed and comprehensive exhibit on the Western Interior Seaway ever created… And the the best part is it’s a traveling exhibit that will tour the country for years to come!!

The first stop is a museum in Overland Park Kansas (near Kansas City) called the Museum at Prairiefire. Stay tuned to their facebook page and twitter for updates!!

For this exhibit I created over 40 reconstructions of individual animals for signage around the exhibit, as well as information displays and 5 full color paleoecological reconstructions showing different parts of the WIS paleoenvironment and interesting behaviors indicated by the fossil record.

I plan on releasing some video content over on my youtube page in the coming weeks, so please subscribe there if you haven’t already, and stay tuned to my twitter and facebook page to see lots of new artwork.

I will be releasing final art work on my website here, and the first piece I want to show you is from the very bottom of the Western Interior Seaway: The Inoceramid Reef!

This dark and spooky scene is based on fossils found in the deep water offshore chalk deposits of the Western Interior Seaway. The main bio-structure of these deep water reefs was not corals as it is in modern deep water reefs, but rather bialves (clams/oysters) of all sizes, from giant Inoceramids such as Platyceramus that grew shells up to almost 3 meters accross (!!), all the way down to tiny oysters which encrusted these larger bivalves. Presumably a variety of sponges, cnidaria and other soft bodied organisms also colonized these structures, and intriguingly the encrustations of oysters are often on both sides of the larger inoceramid shells. This lead us to reconstruct the large bivalves standing up like modern giant clams, with a large foot rooting them into the soft chalky mud at the bottom. Also fascinating is the fact that these huge bivalves are often found with the tiny skeletons of little fish and eels INSIDE their shells (wowneat!). 

Kansius fossil on Inoceramid shell at RMDRC

One such fish, called Kansius, is depicted in my illustration swimming into and out of the enlarged siphon of the Platyceramus, suggesting that perhaps these two species had some kind of symbiotic relationship. Modern bivalves have evolved a variety of relationships with fish, both symbiotic and parasitic, so it seems quite possible something like that was going on between these associated fossil animals. Considering that bivalves are usually filter feeders, I’m inclined to speculate that perhaps by harboring a variety of life forms on the outside of the shell, and providing a space for small fish to hide within their siphons, these giant filter feeders were encouraging these little fish to feed on the outside of their shell, then deposit their nutritious fishy poops inside the shell where the giant bivalve’s filter organs and stomach are. I chose to depict the bivalves with elongated tentacles because some modern bivalves have these and because they look cool. In modern clams and scallops the tentacles are involved in feeding, and help to detect predators, which would come in handy for knowing when to close up the shell and protect your little Kansius poop farmers…

Megalocoelacanthus patrols the depths of the Western Interior Seaway

The big huge fish swimming above the reef is a Megalocoelacanthus – a huge 3 meter coelacanth known only from its big weird almost-beach-ball-sized skull (highly scientific measurement).

In addition to Megalocoelacanthus the other featured fish is a highly speculative reconstruction of a bizarre and enigmatic fish called Martinichthys. These things are super weird, and only known from their skulls, which have bizarre elongated noses that are worn off on the end, and reduced jaws with hundreds of tiny tooth sockets. You can check out a bunch of pictures of specimens on the Oceans of Kansas website. ?

The ONLY postcranial (non-skull) skeletal material known for Martinicthys is a few simple cylindrical vertebrae, so I had to reconstruct them based on species that are considered to be related, but this relationship is pretty tenuous as it is only based on similarity of their teeth. Teeth tend to be rapidly evolving and there is a ton of convergent evolution in the world of teeth, so we really have no clue what Martinicthys really looked like or what it was using it’s weird snubbed nose for. There is however one interesting clue: Martinichthys is only found in 1 layer of the Kansas Chalk, and at that layer there is a ton of coprolites (fossil poops) that are comprised entirely of smashed up bivalve shells… So based on Anthony’s suggestion I depicted Martinichthys booping it’s snoot into the small oysters encrusting the giant inoceramid to bust them up into eatable sized chunks. (but who knows. Nature, you crazy!)??

Aside from fishes and bivalves the illustration also features some of my most favourite invertebrates: ammonites. The two species featured are a scaphitid with a coiled shell called Clioscaphites, and Bacculites, a common strait-shelled taxa. Isotope analysis of the shells of these animals indicate they were both likely deep water species, and there is good direct evidence that Bacculites was a filter feeder. Some modern cephalopods are filter feeders as well, such as the bizarre Vampiroteuthis of the deep ocean anoxic zone, so I reconstructed Bacculites with tentacles and a webbed mantle similar to Vampiroteuthis.

Clioscaphites was also likely a filter feeder. For those that don’t know, ammonites had multiple air-filled chambers in their shells which they could flood with water to control buoyancy like a modern chambered nautilus. Based on the orientation that the shell would have floated at when it had air in its chambers it is thought that Clioscaphites would have floated around with the opening to its shell pointing strait up, perfect if your lifestyle is to bob around in the deep ocean and reach for the stars snaggling up little particles of marine “snow” (dead stuff falling down to the bottom). Many modern filter feeders use elongated sticky tentacles to collect food snack particles from the water, so I reconstructed Clioscaphites with this kind of filter feeding adaptation. Clioscaphites is also fun because there’s good evidence it was sexually dimorphic, with males only being about 2/3 the size of the females. So i included both – a big female and a smaller male with a modified tentacle called a hectocotylus which is basically an arm that functions as a penis in modern cephalopods. What’s extra fun and weird and sort of alarming is that in many modern cephalopods, such as some species of squid and octopuses they will detach their hectocotylus and either hand it to the female like “here have fun” or it will detach and swim toward her on it’s own (!!!!!!) like “DON’T WORRY BABY I’M ON MY WAY OVER!!” (yikes). 

Stay tuned for more Savage Ancient Seas art over the next few weeks. All the art is done, and the exhibit opens in mid June, so I’ll start going public with a lot of this art to promote the exhibit opening. When you start seeing it up on twitter and facebook etc, I hope you’ll share it around. I’m super excited about everything we were able to accomplish with this exhibit (and all since February!!) and I am so grateful to all of you, especially my Patreon supporters, for following and supporting my work and offering thoughtful feedback.

Introducing the new early ornithomimosaur dinosaur Arkansaurus fridayi, now formally described by ReBecca Hunt Foster years after its initial collection. I was commissioned by ReBecca to draw some figure art and do a reconstruction of the animal for the paper and press release, and its formal announcement marks the second new dinosaur taxa I’ve had the honor of colaborating with a publishing author to prepare a first reconstruction of. To add to the excitement, this animal has also been officially named the Arkansas state dinosaur. You can find the full scientific paper HERE: Hunt & Quinn 2018 – New Lower Cretaceous ornithomimosaur

We also prepared this life reconstruction with some data on the plants from that time, with some input from paleobotanist Nathan Jud, to try to show the good people of Arkansas what their state might have looked like over 113 million years ago when their now freshly minted state dinosaur was roaming around:

Now if you take a look at the paper or any of the other press images floating around you’ll quickly realize that all we have of Arkansaurus is this:

Yep, that’s it. Three big old long skinny metatarsals, and a few smaller toe bones. So when a friend asked “how the hell do you reconstruct a whole damn animal from a partial foot??”, I answered “with a BIG asterix* next to it.” Because quite frankly, all we know is that this foot compares favorably with other ornithommimosaur dinosaurs of similar age… To get a better sense of that comparison ReBecca commissioned me to do these figures of the metatarsals of a whole bunch of ornithomimosaurs:

The story of many ornithomimosaurs, like Arkansaurus, seems to be a story of elongating the legs and laterally compressing the metatarsals. In some groups the top of the middle metatarsal is actually pinched in by the other two metatarsals resulting in what is called an “arctometatarsalian condition”, which reduces unneccessary movement in the ankle, thus giving the animal a more efficient stride when running or trotting long distances. Along the way the ornithomimosaurs lost their teeth such that by the end of the Cretaceous all the various known ornithomimosaurs are toothless, and a bunch of them look superficially similar to ostriches and other modern ratite birds who independently evolved a similar body plan much much later.

This overall story towards efficient running (often referred to as “cursoriality”) is a tidy little narrative, that may apply quite nicely to some lineages. But as I was digging through the literature on other ornithomimosaurs something interesting struck me: these creatures aren’t all following that same narrative – NO – these weirdos were ALL OVER THE PLACE, both anatomically and geographically, and for a LONG DAMN TIME! Some of the earliest known taxa had already started laterally compressing their metatarsals, while other later taxa in other parts of the world had much more primitive looser ankles, and some retained this primitive trait well into the late Cretaceous. That realization lead me to take interest in modifying another of ReBecca’s figures – a timeline mapping ornithomimosaurs throughout time, accross continents, and according to the style of ankles they had. You see, I’m a lunatic and although ReBecca’s timeline was very nice, I thought it needed to be taken further. CLEARLY, the only way to reconstruct an animal known only from a bashed up foot is to reconstruct ALL of it’s relatives (OF COURSE).

(click it up big, it’s HUGE)

(seriously. click it up big.)

So check it out – The earliest animal presumed to be an ornithomimosaur is an African animal called Nqwebasaurus and it’s pretty much what we would expect a pretty basal ornithomimosaur to look like. It has four toes, small teeth in it’s mouth, elongated legs, but it’s not arctometatarsalan. What’s interesting about it is that it occurs all the way back in the very very beginning of the Cretaceous at around 145 million years ago, and it’s the only known ornithomimosaur from Africa. Did it originate there? Who is the next closest relative? Where are the other African ornthomimosaurs?? All good questions we don’t have answers to. Shortly after Nqwebasaurus on the timeline is an animal called Hexing, and it’s substantially different, with a more derived looking skull, and it’s in Asia. Shortly after that there are a handful of European taxa that are really really fragmentary (so I didn’t draw them), but what has been found of them has them looking like ornithomimosaurs, implying that by the earliest Cretaceous this group of animals was already substantially diversified and widely distributed.

Among the other early ornithomimosaurs Hexing, Pelicanimimus and Shenzhousaurus also all preserve some number of teeth, but the jaw morphology, tooth count, and spacing of the teeth vary wildly. Pelicanimimus, has a damn fine toothed comb in it’s mouth, while Shenzhousaurus has just a few larger teeth in the front of it’s jaws. This seems to indicate a high degree of radiation and specialization even among these early forms. It would be nice to say that none of the later ornithomimosaurs dont preserve any teeth, but this one weirdo Harpymimus has teeth on only it’s weirdly downward curving lower jaw, and it lived after our Arkansaurus, so ReBecca left it up to me to decide whether or not Arkansaurus should have teeth or just a beak (if you look closely in the forest scene I gave it wee little teeth).

Kinnareemimus is also interesting because while it’s not quite arctometatarsalan it’s damn close, and the legs are pretty darn elongated. It was likely a pretty efficient runner, and occurs way way before the first properly arctometatarsalan animals on the timeline. Then all the way at the end of the Cretacous you have Deinocheirus, a nearly T-rex sized hump-backed weirdo with a broad spoonbill like toothless beak and a totally chunky primitive ass ankle.

So what does this all mean? One thing is certain: there is an unfathomable ammount of diversity in the fossil record that is still waiting to be found. The sustained diversity in ornithomimids tells us there are certainly huge ghost lineages on multiple continents going all the way back to the late Jurassic in Africa. That is cool. Without a doubt there was a lot of evolutionary experimentation going on, and the possibility of a variety of giant body sized weirdos between Beishanlong and Deinocheirus (who are presumed to be related) is tantilizing.

Another intriguing possibility is that there is some convergence at play. It’s entirely possible that some of the early forms in Africa and/or Asia actually arose from a different common ancestor than some of the later things that also evolved toothlessness and/or long running legs and/or loss of the fourth toe. Unfortunately the fossil record for this whole group of animals is pretty patchy and in the case of things like Arkansaurus, super fragmentary. So when you consider how powerfully convergent evolution shaped modern ratite birds into superficially similar dinosaurs in our modern age, it seems entirely possible that the same evolutionary patterns could have had plenty of time and space to manifest in multiple lineages way back in the Mesozoic.

For me, and no doubt for ReBecca here in north America, it’s particularly exciting to see that a large bodied ornithomimosaur was present in north America as early as 113 million years ago, and implies that right here in north America there is a huge evolutionary story with ties to Asia that is still waiting to be found… Oh, and Arkansaurus or something with feet very much like it left these gorgeous tracks at about the same time at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur tracksite in Utah:

Did you know that some prehistoric amphibians have terrifying teeth covering the entire roofs of their mouths?? Prehistoric monster teeth experts from the University of Toronto Bryan Gee, Yara Haridy and Dr. Robert Reisz have determined how the bizarre teeth covering the roof of the mouth of some prehistoric amphibians such as the chihuahua sized Cacops pictured above developed. It turns out, all of the thousands of tiny teeth these bizarre creatures used to capture and perforate their prey were made of the same ingredients as the teeth around the rim of their mouths, but bizarrely these teeth are not on the jaws, but rather on tiny plates of bone embedded in a flexible layer of tissue on the roof of the mouth. To make things extra nightmarish these tooth-carpets covered empty spaces in the roof of the mouth that their eyeballs would push down into when they swallowed, just like a modern frog. Except unlike a modern frog their eyeballs pushing into their skull would press the teeth down into the prey like a godawful amphibious iron maiden that can swallow you (if you’re a small animal).

You can read and download their scientific paper for free here (shoutouts open access!)
https://peerj.com/articles/3727/
And you can check out the University’s official press release with a video of David Attenborough feeding a bug to a giant monkey frog (with psychadellic skin secretions btw).

One of the things that really hooked me (puns intended) into doing this quick reconstruction of this wondrous little horror from deep time was the environment. Mark MacDougall et al 2017 describe the strange depositional environment that the skeletons of the creatures pictured in my reconstruction were found in. Turns out these fossils were deposited in an ancient limestone cave system, and some of the skeletons were found with calcite cave formations grown into and around them!

It’s unclear at this point whether the animals were actually living in the upper parts of the cave and got trapped deeper down, as well as washed in by seasonal storms from some outside environment, but the area around these caves in the Permian would have been semiarid, so we thought it was reasonable to speculate that these armored amphibians would’ve been hiding amongst the limestone boulders and crevices that were likely found around the entrances to these caves.

A few months back I just so happened to be exploring a similar modern environment in Nevada, where upthrust limestone has been eroded by water to form numerous caves of various sizes.

One of the things that struck me was how much cooler and more moist the caves were than the surrounding desert – even just a few feet within the entrance. I also found evidence of animals using the caves, from birds and small invertebrates to mountain goats and puma, who had littered the floor of one of the larger cave entrances I explored with a thick mat of goat poop and goat skeletons, one of which had been recently fed on by a puma.

Thus I thought it would make sense to show a similar dynamic happening at the entrance to a small cave in the permian, with both predator and prey utilizing this uniquely productive micro ecological space to survive in a harsh desert environment…

Just a reminder that if you are time traveling and exploring small limestone caves in Oklahoma about 289 million years ago, be careful when putting your hand into small crevices. A Cacops biting you would feel like the world’s slimiest/toothiest bear trap clamping down on your hand and mashing it’s toothy mouth-roof into your flesh by pulling in its damn eyeballs.

REFERENCES, YO:
Gee, Bryan M., Yara Haridy, and Robert R. Reisz. “Histological characterization of denticulate palatal plates in an Early Permian dissorophoid.” PeerJ 5 (2017): e3727

MacDougall, Mark J., et al. “The unique preservational environment of the Early Permian (Cisuralian) fossiliferous cave deposits of the Richards Spur locality, Oklahoma.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 475 (2017): 1-11.