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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!