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!!
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:
I got a lot of stuff done in 2017, but my work is all over the place, so I thought I’d collect up the significant finished pieces and amass them here for the convenience of anyone interested. Many of these pieces were made possibile in part (if not in large part) by my patreon supporters. If you’d like to help make 2018 even more productive than 2017 consider making a small monthly donation through my Patreon page.
While most of the year was taken up grinding away on several big ambitious pieces, the year ended with a flurry of new commissions being started, and one really unique one being finished on a quick turnaround. The image below is an illustration depicting the interesection of Wilshire and La Brea in Los Angeles, as it might have looked about 15 thousand years ago.
The two mammoths depicted are based on skeletons found 15 feet below the current street level while excavating the terminal for a new Metro system in Los Angeles. The piece was conceived commissioned by Sherri Gust, CEO of Cogstone Incorporated, a leading paleontological and archaeological mitigation company based in California, for her company’s holiday card. Because the piece came to me on short notice, I had to act fast, and the entire project went from discussion with paleontologists Sherri Gust, Eric Scott and Ashley Leger, shooting reference of the fossils excavated, to finished rendering in about 2 weeks.
Most of my projects in 2016 were not such quick turnarounds, as this year saw the creation of my two largest paleoart pieces to date. Most recently completed was a 2 foot by 8 foot drawing of the Kayenta Formation paleoenvironment for the Saint George Dinosaur Discovery Site in St. George Utah. The piece is a timeline featuring 3 complex and distinct paleoenvironments over time, with dozens of animals, hundreds of plants, and even climatic changes in the weather.
Here you can see what about an hour of my time working on this piece looks like compressed into about a minute of drawing timelapse:
But this piece is far from finished, as it still needs to be digitally colored, printed, and incorporated into a new exhibit to be installed at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site. So, for the time being, the full scan of the grayscale drawing can only be seen by my Patreon supporters.
In addition to attacking big paleoart projects the long overdue final Earth Beasts Awaken video resumed production, and numerous shots for a key sequence are now in the bag.
I don’t want to give too much away, but an overview of the progress made so far, as well as a few other behind the scenes updates on Earth Beasts Awaken pt 3 can be found on my patreon.
The other major piece I took on in 2017 was a life sized mural depicting two fighting mastodons for the Western Science Center in Hemet California. This was my first piece to be printed and displayed at full scale, and it was my first piece depicting probiscidians. Naturally there was a steep learning curve when taking on both of these new challenges, and again, I documented my progress on patreon and posted an overview here.
Between the mastodon mural and rendering the Kayenta timeline I was busy with traveling to paleo conferences, meeting with researchers and museums to initiate projects and doing field work. My biggest journey was a huge road trip from southern California to Calgary Canada to attend the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. I convoyed up to the great north with paleontologists Andrew Milner, Dr. Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux, and had numerous adventures along the way and while there. While in Canada I collaborated with paleontologists Brian Gee and Yara Haridy on a quick reconstruction of some strange permian monsters with especially strange dentition, which you can read more about in my post Nightmare Mouths of the Permian.
While the initial paper the art was published on focused on the predator – Cacops – we included an easter egg in that the prey featured was Yara’s study species Opisthodontosaurus carrolli, which she has since defended her master’s thesis on. A paper about its dentition can be found HERE.
On the way back from Canada I stopped in Utah to assist paleontologists Andrew Milner, Rob Gay and Jessica Uglesich in the excavation of a significant Triassic bone bed right on the border of the Bears Ears National Monument. Despite being under staffed, under-funded and short on time, we managed to extract several huge chunks of stone packed with skeletal material including several significant discoveries and most of a new species just before President Trump downsized several Utah monuments in what amounts to little more than a land grab for the fossil fuel industry and a gesture of disrespect to the previous administration which established the monument. Here you can see a video of us excavating the massive fossil filled jackets:
In the background I’ve stayed active making new music, and I released a secret playlist of tracks in the works for my Patreon supporters.
I also put out a little video showing my music making progress, as requested by patreon supporters.
I also managed to complete several other videos for my paleoart youtube channel, which I’ve amassed for your viewing pleasure here:
Also announced in 2017 was that a new ornithomimid – soon to be officially named by ReBecca Hunt-Foster – is the new state fossil of Arkansas. One of several pieces of art commissioned by ReBecca went out with the State of Arkansas press release. More on this creature later…
And finally here’s a floofy family of raptors squishing through the mud of the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite that I illustrated for a short film on the Moab area, coming soon to the Moab Information Center. I now have 6 pieces of art on interpretive panels and signage at four public fossil sites in the Moab area, and I will soon be completing more. Hopefully in the coming year I’ll find the time to put together a video tour of these fossil sites I’ve had the good fortune to be able to create paleoart for, thanks to the hard work and support of ReBecca Hunt-Foster.
Again I’d like to thank my patreon supporters for their generous support throughout the year. Many of these projects would not have been possible without their support, and I am deeply honored to receive their feedback and encouragement in addition to their financial commitment to helping me make my art. Words cannot convey my gratitude, so I will thus strive to convey my thanks by making 2018 even more productive and creative than years before. Stay tuned. Lots of exciting new projects are already in the works.
I recently finished this big drawing of the Kayenta formation, which is both a multi-environment paleoecological reconstruction and a timeline/strategraphic column. As you move through the timeline you step up through the layers of stone preserved in the rocks around St. George Utah, and every scene is based on specific fossil sites discovered and studied by paleontologist Andrew Milner and his crew. The finished full color piece will be incorporated into a museum exhibit at the Saint George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm – an awesome paleo museum in Saint George Utah.
If you don’t follow me on twitter or facebook you should be because I’ve been posting more regular updates on there, and if you’re a supporter on Patreon I recently uploaded a scan of the now finished grayscale drawing so that my supporters can see the ambitious art that they’re helping to make possible.
But this is only phase one. As is my typical process this huge drawing will be colored digitally to bring it to life and I will continue to post updates as I do.
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).
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.
Just last week the Valley of The Mastodons exhibit at the Western Science Center in Hemet CA opened, and it features my first paleoart mural. The mural depicts 2 full sized male Mastodons battling, and the older male on the right is based on the fossils of a Mastodon at the museum named “Max” who has several injuries to the right side of his jaw that are consistent with tusk strikes. The exhibit features more Mastodon fossil material on display than any Mstodon exhibit in the history of Mastodon exhibits and if you’re in southern California between now and early 2018 you should definitely check it out. After the Valley of the Mastodon exhibit closes, my mural will still be on display in the main gallery of the museum, right behind Max’s mounted skeleton.
I shot a bunch of reference footage and footage of me drawing/painting this mural which I plan on editing together as a video for my paleoart youtube page as soon as I can find the time.
As always, supporting my art on Patreon enables me to do the best job I can on projects like this and also makes doing behind the scenes posts and videos possible, so consider kicking me a few bucks on there if you can spare it and want to help me make the best art I possibly can. As a thank you to my patrons 9″x18″ poster prints of this piece are now available to my top-tier supporters or any supporters who have had my back for a while and haven’t requested a free print from me recently. Thanks yall.
An in depth update on Earth Beasts Awaken is long overdue, and in the last couple months I’ve managed to make a little progress. A new practical effects behind the scenes update is now up on my patreon. Yeah, it’s for supporters only, but a measly $1 pledge gets you access to it and a gaggle of other exclusive content, and that buck helps me immensely to make progress on these ambitious and often difficult projects.
Thanks again to all of you who have supported my art in various ways over the years. I have not stopped. There is a small cauldron of historian projects (music & music videos) simmering over the old hungry fire as we speak. I will however be dedicating my time to paleoart again this summer and fall, as I have landed several huge commissions. More on those later.
Ever since reconstructing Aquilops in 2014 I’ve been wanting to revisit it to explore another idea for it’s life mode and role in the ecology. Spurred by the request of Dr. Andrew Farke and Gabriel Santos to do a talk about making monsters and reconstructing prehistoric animals, I finally got around to illustrating this new interpretation. Check it out:
If you’d like to support my paleoart and my ability to keep making these videos, SUPPORT ME ON PATREON
And here’s my 2014 Boldly Displaying Aquilops (purchase button below):
Aquilops americanus, a new species of basal ceratopsian dinosaur.
Click HERE for a “field guide” to everything in the above image.
Also, subscribe to the Alf Museum’s Youtube page for a video of the talk I gave at the museum on this art.
