dontmesswithdinosaurs.com

I am super stoked about this one. My paleoart is featured in a paper by Dr. Casey Holliday et al, identifying a vascular structure in crocodilians, dinosaurs, and other archosaurs which thermal imagery suggests has important thermoregulatory functions.

This new paleoart is based on thermal data from modern archosaurs, and shows what it might have looked like if you were pointing a thermal imaging camera at a Daspletosaurus gaurding its kill from two encroaching Deinosuchus first thing in the morning in the late Cretaceous Aguja Formation:

You can read the full scientific paper here:
The Frontoparietal Fossa and Dorsotemporal Fenestra of Archosaurs and Their Significance for Interpretations of Vascular and Muscular Anatomy in Dinosaurs

I also created this youtube video explaining the project in more detail.

Looking forward to see more #ThermalPaleoart from the paleoart community.

Here’s a Guanlong showing how this same vascular structure may be linked to the evolution and vascular nourishment of bizarre dinosaurian headgear:

I am excited to announce my first life-sized paleoart sculpture – a reconstruction of the Brazilian tapejarid pterosaur Caiuajara dobruskii for the new Living Dinosaurs exhibit at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I got so excited about this project and the great work they’re doing at the National Aviary that I made a youtube video about the project.

I started to write a big old complicated blog post getting into the nitty gritty of reconstructing pterosaurs but I got exhausted and confused (I struggle with blog posts!) so I decided to make a second video instead utilizing footage from a video chat I had with Dave Hone, covering some of the basics of up-to-date pterosaur wing reconstruction (which I was screwing up in my early designs). Check it out!

If you want to go further down the pterosaur reconstruction rabbit hole and learn, for example, why MOST pterosaur silhouettes meant to show scale are super wrong, you can check out the slew of pterosaur reconstruction posts I put up on patreon as I worked through the tricky process of bringing Caiuajara back from the dead as as sculpture.

If you want to learn more about Caiuajara, and see nice, high-res images of the fossils, check out the scientific paper by Manzig et al describing it. It’s open access!!

If you want to learn more about Archosaurs in general check out Dave Hone‘s blog Archosaur Musings.

You can also follow Dr. Michael Habib (who also advised on this project) on twitter @AeroEvo

Special thanks to everyone at the National Aviary that made this sculpture possible! especially Jennifer Torpie, Cheryl Tracy, Tricia Oneal, Carly Morgan and Robin Weber. Also big shout out to Alanna Regester at Silver Plume Exhibitions for the amazing work on the Living Dinosaurs exhibit. https://spexhibitions.com/

I’m excited to announce that my first life-sized paleoart sculpture is now on display at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania as part of their “Living Dinosaurs” exhibit.

Tomorrow I will be releasing a new video on my youtube channel about the art and science that went into creating this challenging new piece. Please subscribe to my Youtube page, and stay tuned to my Twitter & Facebook pages to help spread the word!

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).

I am honored to announce that I am featured on Yugen Blakrok’s new album Anima Mysterium. I am on track 4, “Hibiscus”. You can stream the entire album here for free:
http://bit.ly/2BfOcDh
If you like it I hope you’ll consider supporting her music by purchasing it on bandcamp (available in various physical formats for yall artifact collectors):
https://yugenblakrok.bandcamp.com/album/anima-mysterium

For those that don’t know Yugen is one of the most skilled and imaginative lyricists currently active and innovating in the world of hiphop and I have been following her work since around the time she released “Chatterboxin” several years ago. About two years ago I was taken by surprise when she randomly contacted me through twitter complimenting my album Gather Bones and wanting to collab. At the time I was living reclusive in my family’s mountain cabin in the Sierra Nevadas in California grinding through paleoart commissions to keep myself fed and pay rent, while Yugen was based in South Africa. Despite the physical distance we subsequently had a several long sprawling conversations via Skype and explored the seemingly endless territory of our overlapping interests, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic and musical. At the time I was still making a little music on the side, it was definitely on the side, and part of me was even turning over the idea of letting the historian wither in his cave in order to strictly focus on the visual aspects of my creative output. Those conversations with Yugen, however, completely reinvigorated my desire to continue to deepen my development and investment in music and lyricism, and shortly after one of those conversations I rode that wave of shared energy & recorded the verse now featured on the album.

Since then I’ve met with Yugen a couple times in Europe, where she is soon to be based for a time, and plans are in the works to shoot a video for Hibiscus and begin development of another project, which I will refrain from saying much more about now.

The financial backing and encouragement of my patreon supporters has been integral to my ability to continue making music. Music for me is a deeply self explorative and trial and error based endeavor, which means it takes a ton of time and is intensely personal. When you make albums that spasm through innumerable iterations over several years in order to evolve into their final form it is sometimes hard to see it as a worthwhile investment of time, energy and resources, especially when, like Gather Bones, they mostly get slept on. But thanks to my patreon supporters I don’t have to incur as much of the financial risk that taking the time to figure out music often takes. In a strange way the entire equation is based on trust on multiple levels: my patrons trust me to make the best work i can, i trust music made from the gut to resonate with others, and we all trust that through the power of human connection that music will find its audience. Thank you for your trust.

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.

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YOU HAVE BEEN SUMMONED TO RESSURECT ANCIENT CREATURES THROUGH ART AND SCIENCE!

I am excited to announce that I won the Lanzendorf National Geographic Paleoart Prize for 2D illustration this year, but there really aren’t very many competitions for paleoart so I’ve decided to pay it forward and host my own!

INTRODUCING THE SummonEngh 2018 PALEOART CONTEST/BATTLE

This contest is made possible by the generous support of my followers on http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself.

Here are the OFFICIAL CONTEST RULES!!
-Up to 3 entries per person
-Entries must be by art made by a single (1) person (NOT a production house, museum staff, exhibit company, studio etc.)
-Entries can be any media, 2d illustration, 3d sculpture, animation, dioramas, shadow puppets, interpretive dance etc etc etc (surprise me)
-Entries must be submitted by email with name, contact info (ideally including social media links) to TheSummonEngh2018 at gmail . com. Entrants are welcome to submit a short written statement for each piece (300 words or less) explaining it. They may also include links to scientific papers or other research and/or images or videos of their process.
-Additionally I will be creating an open facebook group page for the contest and entrants are encouraged to post art and in-progress pictures to social media with the hashtag #TheSummonEngh2018
-Contest opens October 1, closes November 1st at 12:01 am pacific standard time.

-The winner will be announced on November 9th (#FossilFriday). -The winner will receive a one-time cash prize of 50% of my donations on http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself collected at the beginning of November (minus paypal fees). The winner will be contacted shortly after patreon donations have processed and the cash prize will be paid out via check or paypal payment in a lump sum.

Due to paypal taking fees the final cash prize will be a little less than half of what you see listed on my patreon page at the end of the month of October. I will however show the winner the exact amounts as screen grabs from patreon & paypal once the payments are all processed so you know why the final prize amount is what it is.

Entries will be judged according to the following criteria by me (Brian Engh):
-Creativity and originality. Entrants are encouraged to explore new hypotheses, present new aesthetics, and generally NOT continue the tradition of unoriginality and copycatting that is so common in paleoart.
-Detail, story and mood. By detail I don’t necessarily mean photo realism or minute intricacies of texture (though that can be nice too), I’m more interested in whether or not the piece has enough going on in it that it makes the viewer want to look at in it more than once. If there’s a sense of life history, story, or mood that gets me every time!
-Scientific plausibility. I am not interested in what the internet consensus is on the most “likely” or “conservative” view is on the science of a given organism. Very often my experience working with experts in the field is that paleoart is significantly behind the latest science on both prehistoric organisms and living ones. Artists are encouraged to seek out and illustrate new hypotheses in the world of paleontology and incorporate the most up to date research on the anatomy, behavior and ecology of living systems. I believe that if significant and broad reaching research is used to fill in the gaps missing from the fossil record it will be apparent in the art.

Miscellaneous things I feel I need to say at the outset of this contest:
-I reserve the right to extend the contest or the payout time as necessary for whatever unforeseen logistical or technical issues, emergencies etc, or just because I want to.
-I reserve the right to ban/block/ignore and/or physically fight trolls, blatant plagiarists or anyone being generally rude & douchey. I expect and hope that there will be some discourse about paleoart generated by this contest, but please please please keep it civil.
-Artists, please be prepared in advance for people critiquing your work publicly once it is posted. This is part of being an artist, especially one whose work is based on science which is built on debate and independent analysis of data. Artists are definitely encouraged to show the research and sketching that went into a piece in advance of or in response to criticism. Artists are also encouraged to bear in mind that sometimes what people write in text format sounds ruder than how they would sound if they were talking to you face to face. Be chill homies, be chill.
-I reserve the right to end the contest for any reason, including but not limited to people being jerks online, so please keep it civil and respectful.
-Have fun!!!!

I look forward to seeing all kinds of amazing paleoart from all of you, and please don’t forget to holla at me on Twitter & Facebook!