Today is a big day for paleontologists Dr. Julia McHugh and Dr. Stephanie Drumheller because today they published a paper describing some pretty fascinating (& grisly) dinosaur feeding traces from the Mygatt Moore Quarry in Western Colorado. This is one of several new discoveries featured in Jurassic Reimagined part 2, which I am planning on releasing in its entirety on June 12.
Thank you all for your patience and support. If you want to help me make more projects like Jurassic Reimagined possible, please consider supporting my work directly on patreon: http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself
And you can see more of my work on my website, http://dontmesswithdinosaurs.com/
This video started as a response to a frequent critic of my art, but developed into something I’ve been needing to do for a long time: clearly articulate my broad-scale view of paleoart in a historical and biological context.
In an effort to help artists, I’ve created a folder where I will be uploading resources for paleoartists. In it you’ll find a .pdf of Alligator hindlimb muscular reference compared to birds to help artists reconstruct dinosaurs and other extinct archosaurs. http://dontmesswithdinosaurs.com//PaleoartReferenceForAll/
My hope is to encourage more fun and interesting conversations about these works and paleoart more broadly. In my own career I’ve sometimes felt like scientists and paleoartists have attempted to repress new ideas, perceiving them as a threat to their reputation or the marketability of their past works, or just because they really like oldschool dinos even though new evidence contradicts them. Unfortunately this resistance to change has the effect of slowing down the development of paleoart and the scientific research and exploration surrounding it while also discouraging many up and coming artists and scientists.
I propose we embrace the near-certainty that all of our paleoart is far from an absolute truth, but is rather a human expression of our understanding of the current science. As such, we should expect those views – and our paleoart – to shift and grow and develop with the times as new discoveries come to light, both from the fossil record and the study of our modern world. If we embrace this perspective, it becomes easier to let go of beloved images of prehistoric animals based on old science (while continuing to love them as great artistic and scientific accomplishments of their era), which frees our imaginations to explore new ideas, with an emphasis on those based in good observational biology, and depict new hypotheses in scientific paleoart. Emerging scientific ideas about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals influence and inspire pop culture, and new and exciting paleoart often then inspires and motivates new scientific investigations, which in turn feeds back into the art form.
Huge shoutouts to my collaborators and supporters, and everybody who thinks paleoart should be fun and positive and dynamic. I will continue to do my best to bring the latest science, new discoveries and perspectives and an openness to new ideas. Specific shoutout to the croc hindlimb anatomy champion Dr. Henry Tsai for providing me with the nice photos of Alligator dissection.
I stumbled accross something big in the Morrison.
Here’s ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Monument Paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, long-time collaborator/client and person who got me involved in field paleontology, next to it for scale, while it’s still in the ground:
For those of you who like measurements, it’s 201 cm long. Aka about 6 feet 7 inches. It’s really goddamn big. And even more goddamn rare.
Turns out, our Brachisoaurus is only the 11th specimen of this famous dinosaur ever found. And they’re all really incomplete.
I’ve been working around the clock for the past two months trying to finish my documentary on the Morrison Formation “Jurassic Reimagined”, spurred on by today’s coming press release. Between the difficulty of telling the complex story of the Morrison and the surprising diversity of other creatures we found in the Morrison’s Salt Wash Member (this is just the biggest) finishing all the parts of the doc by today in a coherent and compelling way proved impossible. But that’s a pretty good problem to have, and I look forward to sharing the full story of this Brachiosaurus’ discovery and excavation, along with the discovery of numerous other dinosaurs and other clues about the ancient environment of the Morrison they all lived in. For now here’s a few pictures and images as an early look.
Brachiosaurus #11 with Wes Bartlett, Darla the Clydesdale and his son Kobin for scale.
This Brachiosaurus was found while surveying in the Morrison of Utah with Matt Wedel and Thuat Tran. For more sneak peaks about what we found nearby, check out Matt Wedel’s blog SVPOW.
The excavation was made possible by a joint effort between Matt Wedel/Western University of Health Sciences, John Foster/the Utah Field House of Natural History in vernal Utah, myself, Dinosaur National Monument paleontologist ReBecca Hunt-Foster, paleontologist Yara Haridy, my friends Casey Cordes and Mallerie Niemann, and – without a doubt the most important segment of the workforce – the Bartlett family from Naples Utah and their two Clydesdale horses Molly and Darla.
When we got it back to the Utah Field House of Natural History (where you can now see it on display) the bone in the jacket weighed 1012 lbs. It was probably a few pounds heavier when we were actually getting it out though because the plaster was still damp.
The most complete humerus of Brachiosaurus.
Funding to hire the Bartletts on with their horses came from the Friends of the Utah Field House group in Vernal Utah. Absolutely every member of this team and every bit of equipment and ingenuity went into this difficult extraction. Because the bone was found in sensitive desert habitat in a remote gulch on Utah State land, we couldn’t take vehicles out to the site. The site isn’t terribly easy to hike to without a thousand pounds of fossils, so the engineering and logistics of extracting something that big proved fairly daunting. But (somehow) we (barely) pulled it off, and we documented every step of the way.
I can’t wait to show you.
In case you missed it, Jurassic Reimagined part 1 is here:
I am exceedingly happy and relieved to announce that Jurassic Reimagined part 1 is finally done.
Since releasing it few people were interested in seeing some of the visuals a bit longer, and wanted more information about the Carnegie Quarry and the strat column. Here is my illustration of the major Brushy Basin large dino lineages:
And here is a frame of ReBecca in the Quarry surrounded by an astonishing abundance and diversity of dead dinosaurs. The main takeaway here is that this was a remarkably productive ecology. Behold yall.
Originally we planned on doing this documentary as two parts, but it became clear in editing that the story was more digestible and the complicated post-production process more manageable if it were broken into three parts. So, this part 1 is a bit shorter than the other parts will be, but I hope it helps people understand and appreciate the Morrison on a foundational level that will hopefully give significance to the forthcoming parts 2 and 3. Unfortunately breaking the first video into two parts meant that I needed to regroup and re-record narration, as well as generate some more art, sound and motion graphics to clarify the story, and subsequent refinement, hence the various delays.
I am aiming to realease part 2 toward the end of the month, but I have been consistently humbled by the challenge of trying to tell the complex story of the Morrison and it’s ecology of giant dinosaurs. The incredibly time consuming task of editing and refining and modifying the immense volume of footage we’ve shot over the last five years has proven exponentially more time consuming a process than I was used to dealing with, and that added to the already time consuming task of creating motion graphics and original music to augment that footage has proven a really complex and somewhat overwhelming task, so please bear with me.
Ultimately though, this project has been delayed numerous times in large part because the time I’ve spent in the Morrison has been a perspective-altering experience, and it has made me determined to try and tell the complicated story of the Morrison and express the feelings that story gives me as best as I can. The history of life on our planet is recorded in the geology at a scope and on a time scale that is truly unfathomable, and yet in that vastness there are the countless stories of living beings, our fellow earth creatures recorded in the stone. This documentary is my feeble effort to exalt those distant kind and our living planet of which we are an inextricable part. I hope that comes through more than anything.
I hope you like it. My collaborators and I are excited to share with you what we’ve been working on.
For the past five years I’ve been following a team of paleontologists and filming their expeditions searching for and digging up dinosaurs in the late Jurassic Morrison Formation. On January 7th we’ll show you what we’ve found.
This documentary was funded in part by the following:
Canyonlands Natural History Association
Utah Friends of Paleontology
Western University of Health Sciences
Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum
Way back in the age of the dinosaurs there was a diverse group of bony fish that evolved rigid fins tightly packed with mashed-together fin bones that they used to fly through the water in pursuit of a wide range of prey. This group is called the Pachychormid fish, and a new paper coauthored by paleontologist Anthony Maltese along with a shimmering bait-ball of other fishy researchers, explores the evolution of the pachychormids into numerous ecological niches by analyzing the distinctive shape of their specially adapted wing-like fins. The whole paper is open access, so if you want to take a deep dive into the intricacies of pachychormid fin evolution you can download the whole open access paper for free here!
In 2017 I had the pleasure of collaborating with Anthony on a bunch of artwork for the traveling exhibit Savage Ancient Seas by Triebold Paleontology Inc., some of which features these fascinating ancient fishes. We’re now finally releasing that art broadly online as it features two(!!) updated reconstructions of pachychormid fish – Protosphyraena (above) and Bonnerichthys (gulping below).
This was a particularly fun image to create because it features a bunch of animals from the Western Interior Seaway that all appear to have adaptations for feeding on small bodied shoaling prey, so we tossed them all together in one scene feeding on bioluminescent cephalopods! In our modern oceans it is not uncommon to see numerous species of predators feeding on dense aggregations of small squid, krill, or fish, so we thought it plausible to feature these cretaceous animals all existing in a similar ecological space as they assault a swarm of breeding cephalopods.
Arguably among the least recognizeable animals here are the pachychormid fish. This is in large part because their fossils are rare, and complete skeletons even rarer.
Bonnerichthys is fun because Bonnerichthys had ridiculously wide gulping jaws, big filtering gills, and reduced teeth. These features, all indicate that Bonnerichthys was an OG plankton eater – these 15+ foot long fish were gulping down clouds of lil’ snack organisms way before modern whales and whale sharks made it all mainstream. As a result of their generally chill-mode plankton-scooping lifestyle, they had broad wing-like fins well suited for gliding. From my paleoartist’s perspective Bonnerichthys is most accurately described as a dizzyingly big aquatic muppet / reaper of tiny souls that looks like it glided with unsettling ease out of the creator-spirit’s forehead and disappeared into the drunken cosmic midnight when She signed off on all the mesozoic fishes, even the ones the Forge Ogres put in there as jokes.
The other pachychormid featured in the art is called Protosphyraena. Protosphyraena’s teeth were oddly angled blades that seem to have projected slightly forward, like a horrible buck-toothed barracuda that no orthodontist would be dumb enough to work on. Protosphyraena’s beauty was on the inside… Somewhere. This sleek marauder had all the hydrodynamic signs of being fast as hell, with a set of narrow fins like the wings of a falcon and an overall body-plan strongly convergent with modern swordfish, right down to the sharp-n-pointy nose.
Basically if you had mystical ballista that launched 2m long fish at your enemies and you wanted to inflict THE MOST DAMAGE, you would want to load that ballista with Protosphyraenas. And yes there’s good reason to think that creepy witch-that-got-turned-into-a-tree nose would have stabbed the absolute murder out of stuff. As a general rule, If you see an aquatic animal with a big long stabby or slashy-looking nose, it probably looks that way because it’s for WRECKING UP gangs of smaller animals with frighteningly accurate underwater swashbuckling. Seriously though, WATCH THIS RIGHT HERE:
“But why bioluminescent squid?? Why not a shoal of schooling fish, like every other marine predator paleoart ever?” you quite reasonably inquire. Here are my reasons.
1) I grew up in coastal California, & if you spend much time near the ocean at night you see bioluminescence. That’s because bioluminescence is extremely common in the ocean in all kinds of animals including squid and other cephalopods. Unfortunately photographs and video don’t do a good job capturing the magic of the relatively faint sorcery-light emitted by numerous ocean organisms. Video does however capture my honest reaction to it:
2) There is evidence that cephalopods (squid, octopi, ammonoids, belemnites & relatives) were extremely abundant in the Western Interior seaway. And everybody likes calamari. In fact, the internal shells of cephalopods like belemnites, squid, and primitive octopi have been found in the gut cavity of many of the vertebrate predators featured in this illustration, including Bonnerichthys. Here’s a picture of tiny fossilized shells that were found by the THOUSANDS in the gut content in a specimen Bonnerichthys. These tiny invertebrate remains have been interpreted as the little internal shells of small primitive Octopi or other cephalopods.
Cephalopods are an extremely important part of ocean food webs today, and the fossil record suggests that they might have been an even bigger player back in the cretaceous, as they appear to have filled some of the ecological space now filled by smaller fish.
Here’s a few more images of animals featured in this scene that I illustrated and designed for museum signage, plus a version of the bait-ball scene labeled with the names of all the other critters:
I owe a big thanks to Anthony Maltese and Mike Triebold for hiring me on to do the art for Savage Ancient Seas, and a big congratulations to Anthony and his co-authors for their detailed work on these strange fish. Prior to creating the artwork for the exhibit I hadn’t even heard about Pachychormids, but I grew up in and near the ocean, so I had a great time drawing from my personal experience and fascination with marine biology to breathe life into this exhibit. Although fish and cephalopods don’t get nearly as much love in paleontology as things like dinosaurs and cats with long teeth, they are really important players in the history of the planet, and their fossils give us huge insights into ecology, evolution and even our own origins. Also, marine animals can be really really pretty. I hope my art helps spark interest in these bizarre and fascinating denizens of the world’s oceans though time, so that more of our species might better understand and appreciate the marine ecosystems of our planet both past and present.
Want to see imagery of glowing breeding squid that directly inspired this art? Check out this video on firefly squid breeding aggregations in Japan, but imagine you’re looking at these with insanely sensitive marine predator night-vision: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/video/firefly-squid-of-honshu/
The architecture of the Tyrannosaur skull was shaped by millions of years of evolution toward developing bigger jaw muscles, stronger skull bones, and increasingly thick, robust serrated teeth capable of puncturing through bone. From huge coprolites (fossil poops) packed with mulched bone, to huge shed tyrannosaur teeth lodged deeply into other dinosaur’s bones like they’d been shot into the animal with a rifle, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that T. rex had what was probably among the most powerful bites we know of from the animal kingdom, and perhaps the strongest ever among terrestrial animals. Some hard biting modern dinosaurs – parrots specifically – exhibit extensive cranial kinesis – or the ability of the bones of their skulls to flex and move. A bunch of other animals, from fish to reptiles to birds and some other dinosaurs show clear signs of cranial kinesis, so that lead Ian Cost & his team to try and figure out whether this was going on with Tyrannosaurs. In a new study, Dr. Ian Cost & colleagues test whether or not cranial kinesis was part of the suite of biomechanical adaptations that enabled T. rex to bite so bafflingly hard./>Turns out, probably not. Their computer models indicate that the numerous bones in T. rex’s head must have been tightly fused when the animal was alive, more like crocs and turtles in that regard than birds.
This new illustration was commissioned by one of the coauthors, Dr. Casey Holliday who is/was several of the other author’s PhD advisor. I gotta give an extra big shoutout to Casey for supporting his Phd student’s work even after they move on from his lab to their more permanent career positions. Not all academics are willing to invest in paleoart, especially for papers they’re not lead author on, so i really applaud his willingness to help push the scicomm for this paper with original art inspired by this new science.
I expect a few people will balk at this art either because it’s gory and/or because my T. rex reconstruction doesn’t look like all the other more slender, classically reptilian-looking tyrannosaur reconstructions people are used to, and that’s fine, I’ve been balking at all that paleoart ever since I first saw the grotesque relics of the T. rex named Sue back in 1999. Unfortunately it seems that in typical fashion for internet discourse all discussion of Tyrannosaur reconstruction has boiled down to two apparently irreconcilable sides SCALY vs. FEATHERY. I would like to make it extremely clear that I’m not on either side because I don’t see them as mutually exclusive, and honestly we don’t even know what the few sparse Tyrannosaur “scales” really are.
I encourage anyone interested in paleontology or paleo reconstruction to walk in a river bed or along a beach and look for carcasses. When you find a carcass, take a picture. Keep re-visiting it for several weeks, taking pictures each time. See how long it takes for natural deposition to bury it (or if it gets buried at all) and watch how it falls apart in the process. Studying this process is called taphonomy. If the carcass is from a bird or a mammal see what falls off first and what actually gets buried. From what I’ve seen, light weight floofy integument often detatches and blows away on the wind or floats away when water transports or begins to bury carcasses.
This simple observation has bearing on how we interpret dinosaur family trees in terms of where we might expect to see feathery structures. People seem to have no problem with the fact that mammoths and woolly rhinos frozen in permafrost – arguably the best preserved fossils of any extinct megafauna ever, and only tens of thousands of years old – have very often lost most or all of their hair.
Whooly rhino with almost no hair left…
Consider that the ONE and only highly complete large tyrannosaur fossil yet found that preserves extensive body covering is a 20 foot Yutyrannus and it’s completely floofy with feathers(and, imo still terrifying af). Now imagine how long it would take to bury a 7 ton tyrannosaur… Which begs the question what would the skin texture of a dead Tyrannosaur that all the hair-like feathers fell off of look like? Here’s what the largest living dinosaur looks like without it’s feathers:
Unfortunately the few skin impressions from other large Tyrannosaurs are scattered and tiny and show a texture that could be described as scaly, or that could just as well be described as deeply wrinkly. There is now evidence that the “scales” on birds scales may be derived from reduced feathers, and may likely evolved independent of crocodylian “scales” which are formed in a variety of other ways. Either way, the few tyrannosaur skin impressions looks to me (and others) much more like the tiny wrinkly scales on the legs of birds or the naked wrinkly skin on the necks and wattles of many birds, than they look like crocodilian or lepidosaurian scales.
Little hair-like feathers can sprout between the scale like structures on birds legs, and/or amidst thickened wattly wrinkle-skin. And no, I don’t buy the argument that T. rex lost their feathers because the had larger bodies. By that logic a tiger should be naked (or more naked) than a black footed cat. That’s not how biology works. So, because T. rex are much MUCH more closely related to birds than they are to crocodilians, so I did my best to reconstruct T. rex based on large carnivorous birds that have wrinkly neck skin and have few or no predators…
And that isn’t to say I think this is the ONLY way to reconstruct T. rex. I think it’s entirely plausible that they had independently evolved an integument completely devoid of even vestigial plumage. But we’ve seen that. Like, A LOT. And from where I’m standing neither the phylogenetics, nor modern analogues for those phylogenetics, nor the fossil skin impressions nor taphonomy make that the only unequivocal choice for paleoart reconstruction.
I’m sure some people will think this illustration is just another illustration glorifying predation and gore in paleoart, and on one level they’re totally right. People are compelled by violence, and me more than most. But I think there’s decent reasons to take advantage of that innate fascination with carnage. First, I think it’s important to remind ourselves how tiny and finite we are. For me at least, beholding one of the most extreme predators in earth’s history is a humbling experience, and in no small part due to the fact that my dismembered remains would fit tidily in its crop or stomach. Second, this is a study about biomechanics. Understanding the extremes of biomechanics is one of very few good reasons to study paleontology, as biomechanics have far reaching real-life applications. The biomechanics of T. rex’s jaws evolved so that they could smash the absolute shit out of things. I thus, cordially invite you to do some googles for images of animals with strong bite-forces eating. Try out search terms like “crocodiles killing zebra”, “Hyenas eating”, or “Alligator vs. turtle.” If your internet is like mine you will see ONLY HORRIFYING IMAGES. Alligators & crocs are the only living animals with bite forces approaching tyrannosaur levels of smash, and when they bite turtles the turtles literally POP. It’s fucking gross, but it’s real life.
While you’re at it check out the thickness of the necks and the gular pouches of these animals. These living animal’s skulls – even at the extreme sizes for their species – are much less massive than the skulls of a large tyrannosaurs, and only had a fraction of the ammount of jaw muscle as compared to T. rex. Also the NECK VERTS of mature T. rex are CHUNKY, have broad-based cervical ribs (which are for muscles attaching) and are often horribly gnarled with arthritis. They make the neck vertebrae of big crocodiles look almost *dainty*, and croc necks are surprisingly muscular. Also the big flat plates of bone where the neck muscles attach on the back of Tyrannosaur skulls are VAST, all of which is why my T. wrecks neck got more thickness than most reconstructions.
My work gets labeled as {overly} “speculative” a lot, and I see the word “monster” get used to refer to paleoart with teeth or blood or action in it like it’s a durogatory, but from where I’m standing it really seems like both of these labels are just ways for artists and fans of the art to try and separate things into arbitrary categories that don’t really have any bearing on how scientifically informed a piece of art is. In my view a scaly shrink-wrapped T. rex is also highly speculative. The artist just speculated that for some reason T. rex’s musculature almost didn’t exist or worked according to alternative laws of physics and that its skin covering had evolved into something not clearly suggested by the available fossils. That is a fiction, but so is every other paleoart reconstruction on some level. In mythology monsters are fictional beasts that embody ideas and values. Real data suggested by fossils informs the modern mythology of paleoart. I would argue that my art isn’t any more “speculative” or “monstrous” than images of clean T. rex’s sleeping or gently preening or whatever other cuddly Disney-fied reality people currently think is “counter to the traditional biases”. As best I can tell looking at the available evidence and the incredible fossils we have of T. rex these animals were giant stem-bird weirdos that drove their gnarled fangy smasher faces into things, propelled by stupid-thiccccc super-powerful turkey legs yanked backwards by muscles levering down most of the length of long stiffened crocodile tails. My goal was to make some art that looks like that.
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:
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.
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.
