Last time, we looked at some of Brian Engh’s preliminary sketches of pieces to illustrate our fighting-apatosaur hypothesis. But there’s more: some way into the process, Brian also came up with this very rough sketch, illustrating a different style of combat:

All the pictures in the previous post show various forms of ventral-to-ventral combat, but we’ve also been thinking about possibilities, and an important one is ventral-to-dorsal.

That could work in at least two ways. We can imagine a wresting match, where each animal tries to get its neck above its opponent’s, and to force it to the ground. There is precedent for this in the behaviour of various extant animals. (Or perhaps I should call it postcedent, since apatosaurs came first.)

But other extant animals have a much more violent combat style, based on striking blows rather than exerting steady force. Notably, giraffes do this, using their long necks as levers to crash their uncharismatic, highly fused mammalians heads into each other.

Could apatosaurs have done this? Not exactly: their heads were far too small to be effective clubs, and far too fragile to survive being used in this way. But the necks themselves would have been formidable weapons: we’re confident that apatosaurs striking blows would have done so with their necks, bringing them powerfully downwards on their adversaries.

Brian liked this idea enough to work the rough sketch above up into a completed drawing, which we also plan to include in the paper (and which, by the way, I unreservedly love):

So what style of combat did apatosaurs use? Ventral-on-ventral shoving? Wrestling to the ground? Striking downwards blows with the neck?

My best guess (and it’s only a guess, necessarily) is that among the half-dozen or so recognised species of apatosaurine, all these styles were likely in use. And this may explain the variation in cervical morphology that we see between species (though of course ontogeny and sexual dimorphism may also be at work).

In short, I think all of these scenarios are credible — and therefore perfectly legitimate subjects for palaeo-art *hint hint*.

On the morning of Tuesday 1st December, on SVPCA day 1, I gave my talk about apatosaur neck combat. In one of the afternoon sessions, I sat next to Bob Nicholls, and found myself thinking how awesome it would be if he sketched some apato-combat.

But I didn’t want to come right out and say “Hey, Bob, how ’bout you spontaneously illustrate our palaeobiological hypothesis?” So instead I used a tactic that Fiona often uses when she wants me to do something: she starts to do it herself, badly, and waits for me to take over. (This is often how I find myself cooking in the evenings.) In the same spirit, sat next to Bob, I started a horrible sketch of wrestling apatosaurs. Sure enough, Bob, saw what I was doing, internally decided it ought to be done properly, and produced this:

What I love most about this (beside the casual way he knocked it out in fifteen minutes) is the sense of heft about the apatosaurs. These are big, solid animals. Someone’s gonna get hurt.

I mentioned last time that, as I sat next to Bob Nicholls in an SVPCA session, I started sketching an apatosaur combat in the hope that my horrible drawing would provoke Bob to do a good one. That worked admirably, which means there is no good reason for me to subject you to my own sketch.

So here it is.

I think the main lessons to draw from this piece are:

1. I can’t draw heads.
2. I can’t draw limbs.
3. I can’t draw torsos.
4. I may be just about capable of drawing tails.

In defence of this picture, it does have something of a How And Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs quality to it, which people of a certain age may find nostalgic. (See also: How fat was Brontosaurus?)

During a break, I asked for Bob’s advice on how I can do better. I know I’ll never be an artist, but it’s fun to sketch (especially during mammal talks) and I’d like to improve a little. The main point Bob made was to think about where the light is coming from. Be consistent about that, and you get an immediate improvement in realism.

So here’s what I sketched the next day, with that in mind:

So what have we learned this time?

1. I didn’t consciously do this, but I ended up with a composition kind of similar to what Bob came up with, but worse.
2. In my desire to achieve the intertwined-necks pose, I made the necks too long and thin.
3. I still can’t draw heads.
4. Let’s just forget about the hindlimb of the one on the left.
5. Uh, and let’s forget the torsos, too.
6. But at least the light is coming from top right!

In short, as Stephen Sondheim put it, art isn’t easy. I wish I had more time to put into it.

The real moral of this story is: if I had a crack at drawing fighting apatosaurs, you definitely can. Let us know if you do — leave a comment. We’ll gather people’s contributions in a future post.

(See also the previous Fighting Apatosaur Art posts: Brian Engh #1, Brian Engh #2, Bob Nicholls. More to come!)

If we accept that the distinctive ventral projections of the gigantic and ventrally displaced cervical ribs of apatosaurs were likely the base of some form of soft-tissue rugosity — such as keratinous horns like those of rhinos — then does it follow that those necks were used in combat as we suggested?

Maybe, maybe not. As scientists, we are always open to other hypotheses. We’re looking for the simplest, most parsimonious model — the one which best explains the facts.

That’s why we like Mark Witton’s “neck-velcro wall-climbing” hypothesis, as shown in this actual scientific life restoration.

As Mark explained to me, apatosaurs may have used their neck-hooks for more than passive clinging. They may also have been used for inching up the rock-face: first one side of the neck advancing and then the next, in the manner of the “pterygoid walking” that snakes use to progressively swallow large prey.

This is why it’s important to present early-stage work at conferences (and as preprints). Otherwise, you may never hear about important alternative hypotheses like this until after the paper is out and it’s too late to include them.

Here’s the last post (at least for now) in the Fighting Apatosaur Art series — and we’re back to Brian Engh, who we started with.

Early in the process of putting together artwork to illustrate our apatosaur neck combat hypothesis, Brian tried out a whole bunch of outlandish concepts. Here are two that he showed us, but which were too speculative to push forward with. First, necks as big, floppy display structures:

As a piece of art, I really like this one: the boldness, the vivid contrasts, the alien quality of the animals. But as a palaeobiological hypothesis, it doesn’t really work: so much of the neck morphology in apatosaurs is to do with absorbing ventral forces that soft-tissue display structures down there don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Here’s the other one — which Brian titles “Apatosaur inflato-porcupine fish neck-bag”.

I particularly like the way the theropod being rolled around on the ground and repeatedly spiked. It’s no more than it deserves.

Does the idea of an inflatable neck make sense? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were sauropods that did something like this — plenty of extant animals inflate parts of their body for display purposes, after all — but I don’t think it would have been apatosaurs. Again, the characteristic features of the neck don’t seem well matched to this scenario.

Well, that’s all the apatosaur neck-combat art we have. If there’s to be a part 7 in this series, it will be made of artwork that you, dear readers, have contributed. Fire away!

Well, I’m a moron again. In the new preprint that I just published, I briefly discussed the six species of sauropod for which complete necks are known — Camarasaurus lentus (but it’s a juvenile), Apatosaurus louisae (but the last three and maybe C5 are badly damaged), Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis (but all the vertebrae are broken and distorted), Shunosaurus lii, Mamenchisaurus youngi and Spinophorosaurus nigerensis.

I did have the wit to say, in the Author Comment:

Although I am submitting this article for formal peer-review at the same time as publishing it as a preprint, I also solicit comments from readers. In particular I am very keen to know if I have missed any complete sauropod necks that have been described in the literature. In the final version of the manuscript, I will acknowledge those who have offered helpful comments.

Happily, several people have taken me up on this (see the comments on the preprint), but one suggestion in particular was a real D’oh! moment for me. Oliver Demuth reminded me about Kaatedocus — a sauropod that we SV-POW!sketeers love so much that it has its own category on our site and we’ve held it up as an example of how to illustrate a sauropod specimen. More than that: we have included several illustrations of its vertebrae in one of our own papers.

Aaanyway … the purpose of this post is just to get all the beautiful Kaatedocus multiview images up in one convenient place. They were freely available as supplementary information to the paper, but now seem to have vanished from the publisher’s web-site. I kept copies, and now present them in the conveniently viewable JPEG format (rather the download-only TIFF format of the originals) and with each image labelled with its position in the column.

Please note, these images are the work of Tschopp and Mateus (2012) — they’re not mine!

Atlas and axis (C1-2)

C3

C4

C5

C6

C7

C8

C9

C10

C11

C12

C13

C14

C15 (and the rest of the skeleton) is missing, which makes this a very nearly, but not quite, complete sauropod neck.

Reference

• Tschopp, Emanuel, and Octávio Mateus. 2012. The skull and neck of a new flagellicaudatan sauropod from the Morrison Formation and its implication for the evolution and ontogeny of diplodocid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 11(7):853-888. doi:10.1080/14772019.2012.746589

I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe. Here it is, for those who haven’t seen it:

(This is the fifth and most recent version that Mark has created, taken from 9 things you may not know about giant azhdarchid pterosaurs.)

It’s one of those images that really kicks you in the brain the first time you see it. The idea that an animal the size of a giraffe could fly under its own power seems ludicrous — yet that’s what the evidence tells us.

But wait — what do we mean by “an animal the size of a giraffe”? Yes, the pterosaur in this image is the same height as the giraffe, but how does its weight compare?

Mark says “The giraffe is a big bull Masai individual, standing a healthy 5.6 m tall, close to the maximum known Masai giraffe height.” He doesn’t give a mass, but Wikipedia, citing Owen-Smith (1988), says “Fully grown giraffes stand 5–6 m (16–20 ft) tall, with males taller than females. The average weight is 1,192 kg (2,628 lb) for an adult male and 828 kg (1,825 lb) for an adult female with maximum weights of 1,930 kg (4,250 lb) and 1,180 kg (2,600 lb) having been recorded for males and females, respectively.” So it seems reasonable to use a mass intermediate between those of an average and maximum-sized male, (1192+1930)/2 = 1561 kg.

So much for the giraffe. What does the azhdarchid weigh? The literature is studded with figures that vary wildly, from the 544 kg that Henderson (2010) found for Quetzalcoatlus, right down to the widely cited 70 kg that Chatterjee and Templin (2004) found for the same individual — and even the astonishing 50 kg that seems to be favoured by Unwin (2005:192). In the middle is the 259 kg of Witton (2008).

It occurred to me that I could visualise these mass estimates by shrinking the giraffe in Mark’s image down to the various proposed masses, and seeing how credible it looks to imagine these reduced-sized giraffes weighting the same as the azhdarchid. The maths is simple. For each proposed azhdarchid mass, we figure out what it is as a proportion of the giraffe’s 1561 kg; then the cube root of that mass proportion gives us the linear proportion.

• 544 kg = 0.389 giraffe masses = 0.704 giraffe lengths
• 259 kg = 0.166 giraffe masses = 0.549 giraffe lengths
• 70 kg =0.0448 giraffe masses = 0.355 giraffe lengths

Let’s see how that looks.

On the left, we have Mark’s artwork, with the giraffe massing 1561 kg. On the right, we have three smaller (isometrically scaled) giraffes of masses corresponding to giant azhdarchid mass estimates in the literature. If Don Henderson (2010) is right, then the pterosaur weighs the same as the 544 kg giraffe, which to me looks pretty feasible if it’s very pneumatic. If Witton (2008) is right, then it weighs the same as the 259 kg giraffe, which I find hard to swallow. And if Chatterjee and Templin (2004) are right, then the giant pterosaur weighs the same as the teeny tiny 70 kg giraffe, which I find frankly ludicrous. (For that matter, 70 kg is in the same size-class as Georgia, the human scale-bar: the idea that she and the pterosaur weigh the same is just silly.)

What is the value of such eyeball comparisons? I’m not sure, beyond a basic reality check. Running this exercise has certainly made me sceptical about even the 250 kg mass range which now seems to be fairly widely accepted among pterosaur workers. Remember, if that mass is correct then the pterosaur and the 259 kg giraffe in the picture above weight the same. Can you buy that?

Or can we find extant analogues? Are there birds and mammals with the same mass that are in the same size relation as these images show?

References

• Chatterjee, Sankar, and R. J. Templin. 2004. Posture, locomotion, and paleoecology of pterosaurs. Geological Society of America, Special Paper 376. 68 pages.
• Henderson, Donald M. 2010. Pterosaur body mass estimates from three-dimensional mathematical slicing. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30(3):768-785.
• Witton, Mark P. 2008. A new approach to determining pterosaur body mass and its implications for pterosaur flight. Zitteliana 28:143-159.

I’d hoped that we’d see a flood of BRONTOSMASH-themed artwork, but that’s not quite happened. We’ve seen a trickle, though, and that’s still exciting. Here are the ones I know about. If anyone knows of more, please let me know and I will update this post.

First, in a comment on the post with my own awful attempts, Darius posted this sketch of a BROTOSMASH-themed intimidation display:

And in close-up:

Very elegant, and it’s nice to see an extension of our original hypothesis into other behaviours.

The next thing I saw was Mark Witton’s beautiful piece, described on his own site (in a post which coined the term BRONTOSMASH):

And in close-up:

I love the sense of bulk here — something of the elephant-seal extant analogue comes through — and the subdued colour scheme. Also, the Knight-style inclusion in the background of the individual in the swamp. (No, sauropods were not swamp-bound; but no doubt, like elephants, they spent at least some time in water.)

And finally (for now, at least) we have Matthew Inabinett’s piece, simply titled BRONTOSMASH:

I love the use of traditional materials here — yes, it still happens! — and I like the addition of the dorsal midline spike row to give us a full on TOBLERONE OF DOOM. (Also: the heads just look right. I wish I could do that. Maybe one day.)

So that’s where we are, folks. Did I miss any? Is anyone working on new pieces on this theme? Post ’em in the comments!

Building on the pioneering work of Myhrvold and Currie (1997), Darren Naish (circa 2003) conceived a theory of sauropod defence that has not been as widely accepted as he might have hoped. Sadly, other projects captured Naish’s attention, and his interest in writing up his theory waned. All that now remains of this sadly unpublished work is this speculative life restoration:

References

• Myhrvold, Nathan P. and Philip J. Currie. 1997. Supersonic sauropods? Tail dynamics in the diplodocids. Paleobiology 23:393-409.

Building on the pioneering work of Karbek (2002), Darren Naish (circa 2004) conceived a theory of sauropod locomotion that has not been as widely accepted as he might have hoped. Sadly, other projects captured Naish’s attention, and his interest in writing up his theory waned. All that now remains of this sadly unpublished work is this speculative life restoration:

We can only lament the loss of this unique perspective to science.

References

• Karbek., T. R. 2002. The case for Stegosaurus as an agile, cursorial biped. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 22(Suppl. to 3):73A.

Here’s an awesome thing that just landed in my mailbox: the new monograph on the Thirioux dodos by Leon Claessens and his collaborators. They’ve done a better job describing what’s cool about these specimens than I could, so for the rest of this post I’m just borrowing their text from the Aves3D site, where you can view 3D models of whole dodo skeletons and many individual elements (not to mention zillions of elements from lesser, non-dodo birds):

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) skeleton on exhibit at the Durban Natural Science Museum is one of two unique skeletons discovered and assembled more than a century ago by the amateur naturalist Etienne Thirioux. Thirioux’s two dodos are unique, not just because they are the most complete skeletons in existence, but also because they are the only two skeletons comprised of the bones of either a single individual bird (the Port Louis dodo), or the bones of (only) a few different birds (the Durban dodo). In contrast, all other known dodo skeletons are incomplete and are typically put together from separate fossil bones uncovered at a marsh called the Mare aux Songes.

Port Louis dodo skull – Claessens et al 2016 figure 6

The Thirioux specimens contribute greatly to our understanding of the anatomy of the extinct dodo and are the subject of a new, major monographic treatise:

Anatomy of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus L., 1758): An Osteological Study of the Thirioux specimens.
Leon P. A. M. Claessens, Hanneke J. M. Meijer, Julian P. Hume, and Kenneth F. Rijsdijk (Editors).
Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 15, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Vol. 35, Supplement to No. 6.

We are pleased to make the Thirioux dodo skeletons available to the public for viewing on Aves 3D and Sketchfab. Please enjoy these wonderful scans of the skeleton of a fascinating bird, and check back on the site frequently, as we continue to upload more new dodo bone scans each week.

Sincerely,
Leon Claessens
for the Dodo Research Programme and the Aves 3D team

Congratulations, Leon and team, on a landmark publication. And thanks for all the free dodo visualizations!

For previous dödö-related musings, please see this pöst.

Port Louis dodo skeleton – Claessens et al 2016 plate 1

Publisher’s description here, Amazon page here.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future, but the short version is that I met Mark Hallett at one of my first SVP meetings in 1997 or 1998. Way back then, he shared with me his vision of doing a big, lavishly illustrated book on sauropods. Fast forward to 2011, when Mark contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to serve as a reviewer for the sauropod book that he was writing. I told him that because I was on the tenure track I had to be pretty jealous with my time, so there was a limit to how much time I could invest as a reviewer. However, if he would take me on as junior author, the book would become part of my professional output and there would be no limit to how much time I could put into it (words that would turn out to be prophetic!). Mark agreed, and after 5 years of hard work, mostly on Mark’s part, here we are. The wheels are turning and with any luck the book will be out before the end of the year.

Mark and I owe a big debt of gratitude to the people who did agree to review the book: Kristi Curry Rogers, Carole Gee, John Hutchinson, and Paul Upchurch. We couldn’t have asked for a better team.

Stay tuned!

I came home from SVPCA to find a heavy box waiting for me. It had my author’s copies of the book. I figured maybe they had gone out in advance of wide release, but nope, the book is shipping right now. This is welcome but unexpected. We only got the final files in a little over three months ago. I have no idea what alchemy the folks at Johns Hopkins University Press worked, to get the book out so fast, but I’m grateful.

We’ll have a book signing at SVP, at one in the LA area with both of us, and probably some local ones in Oregon and SoCal with just one author. I’ll announce those when we get them set up.

I have about a zillion people I need to thank, and I’ll probably do a FAQ about the book soon, but for now: it’s out.  JHUP page. Amazon page.

Quick heads up: Mark Hallett and I are both at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City. Tomorrow afternoon (Friday, October 28) at 4:15 PM we’ll be signing copies of our book, The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants. If you’d like to get a copy of the book, or to have your already-purchased copy signed, please come to the Johns Hopkins University Press booth in the exhibitor/poster area tomorrow afternoon. We’re both generally happy to sign books whenever and wherever, but if you’d like to catch us both at the same time, this is a good opportunity. We’re hoping to do another joint book signing in Los Angeles before long – more info on that when we get it arranged.

In the meantime, or if you’re not at SVP, or if you just like cool things, check out this rad claymation video of fighting apatosaurs, by YouTube user Fred the Dinosaurman. I love this. My favorite thing is that if you’re familiar with the previously-produced, static visual images of neck-fighting apatosaurs (links collected here), you’ll see a lot of those specific poses and moments recreated as transient poses in the video. This was published back in June, but I’d missed it – many thanks to Brian Engh for the heads up.

In the summer of 2015, Brian Engh and I stopped at the Copper Ridge dinosaur trackway on our way back from the field. The Copper Ridge site is 23 miles north of Moab, off US Highway 191. You can find a map, directions, and some basic information about the site in this brochure. The BLM has done a great job of making this and other Moab-area dinosaur trackways accessible to the public, with well-tended trails and nice interpretive signage. Brian has gotten to do the art for interp signs at several sites now, including Copper Ridge, and he put together this video to explain a bit about the site, what we know about the trackmaker, and the lines of evidence he used in making his life restoration. I’m in there, too, yammering a bit about which sauropod might have been responsible. We weren’t sure what, if anything, we would end up doing with the footage at the time, so I’m basically thinking out loud. But that’s mostly what I do here anyway, so I reckon you’ll live.

Stay tuned (to Brian’s paleoart channel) for Part 2, which will be about the Copper Ridge theropod trackway. And the next time you’re in the Moab area, go see some dinosaur tracks. This is our heritage, and it’s cool.

This is very belated, but back in the summer of 2014 I was approached to write a bunch of sections — all of them to do with dinosaurs, naturally — in the book Evolution: The Whole Story. I did seven group overviews (Dinosauria overview, prosauropods, sauropods, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, marginocephalians, and hadrosaurs), having managed to hand the theropod work over to Darren.

My author copy arrived in February 2016 (which, yes, is over a year ago. Your point?) It’s really nice:

And at 576 heavy, glossy pages, it’s a hefty tome.

My contribution was fairly minimal, really: I provided about 35 pages. Darren wrote a lot more of it. Still, I’m pleased to have been involved. It’s nicely produced.

Here a sample spread — the first two of a four-page overview of sauropods, showing some nice illustrations and a typical timeline across the bottom of the page.

And here’s one of the ten “highlights” sections I did, mostly on individual dinosaurs. This is the best one, of course, based on sheer taxon awesomeness, since it deals with Giraffatitan:

Unfortunately, not all of the artwork is of this quality. For example, the life restoration that graces my spread on Argentinosaurus makes me want to stab my own eyes out:

Still, putting it all together, this is an excellent book, providing a really helpful overview of the whole tree of life, each section written by experts. It’s selling for a frankly ludicrous £16.55 in the UK — it’s easily worth two or three times that; and $30.24 in the US is also excellent value.

Highly recommended, if I do say it myself.

Come gawk at this weirdo in public!

I’ll be signing copies of The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants at regional events the next two weekends.

This this coming Saturday, April 22, I’ll be at the Inland Empire Science Festival, which will run from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. There will be a ton of other special exhibits and activities, too. I don’t know all of them off the top of my head, but I know that Brian Engh will have the table next to mine, so come by and get two doses of awesome paleo art.

The following Friday, April 28, I’ll be at Beer N’ Bones 2017, which runs from 7-11 PM at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, Arizona. In addition to signing books, I’ll also be in the “Speed Dating a Scientist” thing, where small groups of people get five minutes each at a table with a researcher, to ask whatever they want. Not just paleontologists, but scientists of all stripes. That said, I know of a couple of other local paleontologists who will also be there as guests – Andy Farke and Thierra Nalley. I was at Beer N’ Bones last year and it was a blast. As you might suspect from the name, it is 21-and-over only.

I’ll have books for sale – at a healthy discount – at both events. Hopefully I’ll see you out there.

Cryptic Aquilops, by Brian Engh. Available as a poster print – see below.

One of the many nice things about getting to help name new taxa is that once you let them out into the world, other people can unleash their considerable talents on ‘your’ critters. Which means that every now and then, something cool pops up that you have a deep personal connection to. Things have been fairly quiet on the Aquilops front for a while, and all of a sudden I have news.

I’m still waiting for a plush Aquilops – c’mon, Homo sapiens, how has this not happened already? – but if you’d like a life-size Aquilops in bronze, sculptor James Herrmann has you covered. James got in touch with me last fall when the project was just in the planning stages. His timing was excellent – I’d just seen the presentation on camouflage in Psittacosaurus at SVPCA, and the paper by Vinther et al. was out a week or two later. I sent James some papers and photos of dead animals, he sent back photos of the work in progress, and now his Aquilops is done.

About the sculpture, James writes:

I am offering the sculpture for sale as a limited edition of 25.  The sculpture is life sized, it is approximately 60 lbs and is 33″L x 14”H x 11”W.  The price I am asking for it is $4500.  I am getting a slab of green soapstone for the base although it does display well without the stone so it will be bolted on from below and not epoxied. […] The gingko leaves and log part of the sculpture were made from molds taken from plants growing locally.

I dig it. If you’re interested in getting one, please visit his website, HerrmannStudio.com.

Aquilops ’14. I was there, man. It was crazy. A Brian Engh joint.

Next item: back in 2014, Brian Engh created the public face of Aquilops with the wonderful graphic art he did for the paper and the press release. Now he’s gone back to the well and reimagined Aquilops, based in part on what we know of its paleoecology – that’s the image at the top of the post. He explains his new view of Aquilops in a thoughtful and wide-ranging video on his paleoart YouTube channel. (If you miss his rap videos set in the Daikaijucene, he also has a YouTube channel for music and monsters. And a blog. And a Patreon page. You get the picture.) You should also check out the two-part interview with Brian at the PLOS Paleo Community blog (part 1, part 2).

Here’s the aforementioned video:

Poster prints of Aquilops Classic and Next Gen can be purchased through Brian’s website, DontMessWithDinosaurs.com.

Finally, a couple of older Aquilops-themed art things that I didn’t cover when they happened. Lead author Andy Farke is also an award-winning homebrewer and he concocted his Eagle Face Oatmeal Stout in honor of our little buddy. He has lots more beer-and-dinosaur crossover goodness on his brewing blog – check it out.

Last fall artist Natalie Metzger did a bunch of drawings of extant animals wearing the skulls of extinct animals for Inktober. In the very first batch was this awesome squirrel looking unexpectedly badass in an Aquilops skull. I don’t know what it means, but I would totally play that D&D campaign. Natalie has a bunch more cool stuff on her blog and Patreon page, and she’ll be at the Rose City Comic Con in Portland this September, so go say hi and buy her art.

Really finally, I am not on Twitter – trust me, I don’t need less of a filter between my occasional stupidity and the world – but for all the rest of you, keep an eye on #Aquilops and, if you’re a heartless jerk, #Aquilopsburrito.

Have more Aquilops stuff I haven’t covered but should? The comment field is open.

References

• Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
• Vinther, J., Nicholls, R., Lautenschlager, S., Pittman, M., Kaye, T.G., Rayfield, E., Mayr, G., and Cuthill, I.C. 2016. 3D camouflage in an ornithischian dinosaur. Current Biology 26(18): 2456-2462.

Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours. Some of what I talk about will be familiar to long-time readers – dinosaur butt-brains and the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, for example. But I also just sorta turned off my inhibitions and let all kinds of speculative twaddle come gushing out, including the specter of sauropod polyphyly, which I don’t believe but can’t stop thinking about. David was a gracious and long-suffering host and let me yap on at length. It is more or less the kind of conversation you could have with me in a pub, if you let me do most of the talking and didn’t want to hear about anything other than dinosaurs.

Is it any good? Beats me – I’m way too close to this one to make that call. Let me know in the comments.

Oh, I didn’t have any visuals that really fit the theme so I’m recycling this cool image of speculative sauropod display structures by Brian Engh. Go check out his blog and Patreon and YouTube channel.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few sauropod-themed mugs, most of them designed by myself and relating to papers that I’ve been involved with. Here are most of them (plus a bonus):

From left to right (and in chronological order):

1. The Sauroposeidon mug that Matt made back in 2000 or so.
2. The first one I created myself: an Archbishop mug, showing the posterior dorsal vertebra pair D?8-9 — foolishly, in monochrome.
3. Xenoposeidon, of course, created in celebration of its publication.
4. The whole of my dissertation, printed very very small.
5. The introductory here’s-what-sauropod-necks-are-like illustration from our 2011 paper on why those necks were not sexually selected.

Not pictured: the Brontomerus mug. I made three of these: one each for the three authors of the paper. I’m not sure where mine has gone — I don’t think I’ve seen it for a long time. (If Matt still has his, maybe he can add a photo to this post.)

(Bonus: on the right hand side, the world’s only DRINK TEA YOU MORONS mug. I made it as a gift for my son Matthew, who is a huge fan of Bob The Angry Flower (as am I). It’s based on this this strip.)