There Be Dragons (in the Triassic)

Here's a freaky one for ya: Vancleavea campi, a non-archosaur archosauriform from the Chinlea Formation. Although known since 1995, the heavily armored, semi-aquatic beastie was only just now fully described, by Sterling Nesbitt, who also described my favorite Triassic critter, Effigia. Vancleavea may be a close second, however. I mean, look at this thing. It's got a long, sinuous body, short skull with nasty-looking fangs, and a long, laterally flattened tail with a dorsal fin formed NOT by elongate neural spines but instead separate ossifications that would have been attached to the caudal vertebrae by soft tissue.

Well, this is nice. Blogger isn't loading the picture upload, so just head over here to see a skeletal restoration and the bugger's skull. Also note the extremely small limbs, which make me wonder how much time Vancleavea spent out of the water. What's most interesting to me, though, is that the entire body, from the back of the head to the tip of the tail, was covered in overlapping scutes of varying morphologies. I have the paper if anyone wants a copy. Seriously, you need to read about this animal!

Nesbitt, S. J., Stocker, M. R., Small, B. J. & Downs, A. 2009. The osteology and relationships of Vancleavea campi (Reptilia: Archosauriformes). Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society 157, 814-864.

If a Crocodile and an Entelodont Had a Baby...

It might look something like Kaprosuchus saharicus, one of five new crocodilians described in a new paper by Sereno & Larsson. I heard about a few of these beasties at SVP, but they had very informal names: "DuckCroc," "BoarCroc," "DogCroc," etc. We've all heard about Anatosuchus before, but it gets a full description in this paper. Cretaceous Africa really saw some bizarre creatures: dinosaurs that were converging on gharials, giant big-nosed crocodiles that ate dinosaurs, and now these buggers, at least one of whom I can see chewing on smaller dinosaurs. National Geographic also has some life restorations, though I can't speak to their quality.

An Art Show Involving Horns and Frills

Tomorrow, I will point you all in the direction of a brand-spanking new art show--one that's totally online, and features several prominant web paleoartists! Think of it as a paleoart answer to SV-POW...it's very exciting, and I wish I could give you the link right now, but I haven't even submitted my final draft to Traumador yet. Oh! I've given too much away! Mark your calendars, dear readers, for tomorrow, March 1st, when horns, beaks, and frills will get their artistic due!

The Virtual Art Show Part 5: Effigia okeeffeae

From a distance, you would think that Effigia was a small dinosaur. In fact, although its family is from the Late Triassic, previously-named relatives have been considered to be very early representatives of the ostrich-mimic dinosaurs! It wasn't until Effigia was described in 2006 that the true nature of the family became clear. These were poposaurs, a group more closely allied to animals like Arizonasaurus than to dinosaurs. Aside from its crocodilian ankle structure and vertebrae, though, Effigia was just as "dinosaurian" (if not more so) than the theropods that shared its habitat. Aside from being fully bipedal, Effigia had a toothless beak, booted pubis, long, flexible neck, and lacked any kind of bony armor. What's more, Effigia's family may have predated the rise of dinosaurs. This suggests that dinosaurs may have been Effigia-mimics rather than the reverse.

Effigia and its cousins are wonderful examples of convergence, where two unrelated animals develop the same adaptations and look superficially similar. More familiar examples might be the resemblence betwee dolphins and ichthyosaurs, ore saber-toothed cats and saber-toothed marsupial predators. In all examples, similar body types evolved multiple times in wildly disparate synapsid groups, from pre-mammalian pelycosaurs and gorgonopsids to herbivorous brontotheres, machairodont cats, and even a few extinct and living deer!

Artist Notes

I hate this picture. I hate it so much. This was the last picture I tackled, and honestly, I was done with the show. The colors are terrible. Have you ever seen a neon-green crocodilian? Neither have I. The belly is too light, and I'm not sure what the f*ck I was doing with the eyeball. Then I gave it an orange beak. I was clearly under the influence of some covert drug. I actually knew after getting the "bottom layer" (neon green) down that it was a mistake, so I spent the rest of the time trying to cover it up with dark green scales. Didn't work, and this is probably the one piece I will burn when the show comes down in two days. Besides the cramp-inducing color scheme, the neck could use some of those tail vertebrae. In general, the proportions are alright, but the neck is too short and the tail's too long.

Fun Facts

Effigia is one of the only taxa to survive multiple reworkings of the taxa list for the show. It's my favorite example of convergence because, in some ways, it's more dinosaurian than the dinosaurs it shared its habitat with. My intention the whole time was to make its body outline look like an early dinosaur, but keep some of the traits that make it a crurotarsian, namely large scutes 'n' scales. There's a loss of osteoderms in Effigia, but that doesn't mean its skin was completely naked. Crocs have plenty of non-bony scutes, so why not Effigia?

In closing, I really hate this picture. As Darwin as my witness, I swear to you, the Cetacea show will be far superior.

The Virtual Art Show Hiatus

Sorry, folks, but until Scott and I get back from SVP, I won't be able to post any more pictures from the show, and indeed there is one more: Effigia, but we need to take its picture (digitally). This was going to be accomplished on Saturday, but we both overslept and decided to leave it for our return. Scott left that day, and I leave tomorrow night.

Also, a few people have asked me if we're going to do prints. The short answer is: Probably. They will most likely be on foamcore, and I'm hoping to sell them for $20 apiece, which would cover copy costs on our behalf and give us a little bit of profit. It'll all be worked out when we return, and digital pictures are taken of all the pieces. Apart from the foamcore, buyers will also get the text and Venn phylogeny for that particular animal.

The Virtual Art Show: Part 4

Arizonasaurus babbitti

Although Arizonasaurus has been known since 1947, a clear picture of the beast was not provided until 2002, when a nearly complete skeleton was unearthed in—you guess it—Arizona. The new material revealed a spectacular dorsal sail formed by the neural spines of the vertebrae, a strangely persistent feature throughout tetrapod evolution. The skull is large and filled with vicious, recurved teeth. Arizonasaurus would have been a formidable predator. Sails have appeared in virtually every major group of tetrapods, including amphibians, pre-mammalian synapsids, several dinosaur groups, and even some modern chameleons!

The function of dorsal sails remains a mystery. It was once thought that, among cold-blooded animals like Dimetrodon, the sail helped to gather heat. And indeed, this may be true. But in larger, potentially endothermic animals, the sails may have been used primarily as display devices, almost like living billboards advertising an animal's presence. If the solar panel function is the primary one, though, one would expect to see more cold-blooded animals with sails. But while sails occur independently among several tetrapod lineages, they are quite rare overall.

Artist Notes

Arizonasaurus made it into the show more by sloth than anything else. In fact, you may recognize it from a previous post. We threw this sailbacked poposaur in because, most importantly, the work was already done, and second, we felt we needed another piece. Looking back, we probably didn't, but the addition of a sail-backed member of the Crurotari certainly brought some flash to the show. Arizonasaurus has the distinction of being the single piece resulting from a collaboration between Scott and I. A loooong time ago, back in Version 1.0 of this blog (now defunct and deleted--thanks, Google!), I did a fairly lengthy post about crurotarsians, and the centerpiece for that post was the inked drawing of Arizonasaurus, shown below. That picture, however, failed to really "pop," so I begged Scott to color it for me using his latent psychic powers and knowledge of com-poo-tors. He did a wonderful job.

Fun Facts

Arizonasaurus' sail is strange to me. It doesn't really rise until it gets past the shoulderblades, giving it a somewhat abbreviated appearance. This is in contrast to animals like Dimetrodon and Ouranosaurus, who have sails that begin at or cranially to the scapulae. Arizonasaurus also has unusually flared neural spines, meaning that there wasn't a whole lot of skin between the vertebrae of the sail. Again, this is unlike Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus, who had spike-like neural spines. Many other sailbacked tetrapods had flared neural spines though, including Platyhystrix (an amphibian) and Spinosaurus. One wonders if there was a functional difference between these constructions, or just different ways of building the same structure?

For more Virtual Art Show fun, click the "Virtual Art Show" tag, because I'm too lazy to link to all the individual entries. Scott has several of his own pieces up at Coherent Lighthouse, too, so be sure to check those out! And Raven--all you've gotta do is Tupandactylus! Get on it!

The Virtual Art Show: Part 3

The Dinosauria

The Dinosauria is one of the most successful groups of tetrapods that ever existed. The first dinosaurs appeared during the Triassic period, some 250 million years ago, but did not rise to dominance until 20 million years later, in the Early Jurassic, after a minor extinction event wiped out the competition. With their larger archosaurian contemporaries out of the way, dinosaurs proceeded to explode in diversity. There were three main branches of the Dinosauria: Ornithischia, a group which included the armored, duckbilled, and horned forms; Sauropodmorpha, the giant long-necked animals; and Theropoda, the (mostly) carnivorous dinosaurs.

Individual dinosaur groups experienced high turnover rates until the Cretaceous period, when they diversified again, perhaps due to the appearances of early grasses and flowering plants. One group of theropods, the Maniraptora, gave rise to birds, the only dinosaur group to survive into modern times. At the end of the Late Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, a comet the size of Mt. Everest smashed into the Gulf of Mexico and blanketed the world in darkness and ash. Virtually all of the dinosaurs, as well as other large-bodied tetrapods (including marine reptiles) were annihilated. Even the prevailing group of birds, the Enantiornithines, were drowned out. Another, smaller family of birds, the Neornithines, somehow survived the fallout and diversified during the Cenozoic to include all living forms.

Artist Notes

I'm only responsible for the Allosaurus in this picture. Scott did the Brachiosaurus and Raven drew both the Triceratops and Corvus. Both of Raven's pictures are absolutely stunning. Her ornithischian has a certain William Stout quality to it, which is funny considering she doesn't know who William Stout is. Compared to the competition, I'm pretty unhappy with my contribution. It looks like a textbook drawing--the other pictures look like real animals. This is something I have to work on: giving my animals some life and personality. And context, as Scott would say. I'm also sad that my animal has pads on his left hand, but lacks pads on his right hand. I chalk it up to pathology or inattention to detail, take your pick!

Fun Facts

Why these four animals? We wanted to include a bird, an ornithischian, and a theropod. I chose Allosaurus and Triceratops because they were considered the anchor taxa before the dinosaur-bird connection was established. We were going to do a pigeon (or a dove, whatever the current saurischian anchor is), but went for the raven because Alaskans love their ravens. Also, Raven loves ravens (wonder why?). Originally, Scott was going to do the Triceratops, but we both thought that sauropods needed to be represented. The connection between sauropods and theropods isn't especially obvious to the common man, so we threw Brachiosaurus in there, too.

The Virtual Art Show: Part 2

Pterosauria

Pterosauria was the first vertebrate group to develop true flapping flight. Their origins are murky, because the oldest pterosaur fossils are already capable fliers! However, the fact that basal pterosaurs have both antorbital and mandibular fenestrae in their skulls indicate their archosaurian roots. Earlier pterosaurs, like Dimorphodon macronyx, had long, stiffened tails with bony rudders. Their wings were short, and the main wing surface ran from the end of the elongated fourth finger to the ankles. Furthermore, a hindlimb patagium ran between the elongated pinkie toes. This meant that early pterosaurs were clumsy on land, and may have spent all their time in the trees or on the wing.

Another group of pterosaurs, the Pterodactyloidea, arose during the Late Jurassic. They lost the long tails of their ancestors, elongated their wings, increased their walking abilities, and developed a menagerie of strange and wonderful headcrests. Two of the spectacular must have been Tupandactylus and Nyctosaurus. Pterodactyloids also diversified to tackle a wide range of foods and environments. Some, like Nyctosaurus, soared over the ocean, diving for fish like an albatross. Tupandactylus probably walked along the plains looking to scavenge or capture small vertebrates like an African hornbill. There was even a filter-feeding pterosaur from Argentina called Pterodaustro!

Artist Notes

Regular readers might remember that Nyctosaurus took an especially long time. Once again I must thank all my readers who commented and offered me tips and critiques on my drafts. Anyway, the final painting took its coloration from the Black Oystercatcher, a really beautiful Arctic seabird. Since Nyctosaurus is thought to have roosted around the Western Interior Seaway, I thought seabird colors would be fitting. However, gulls generally have pretty boring colors (although at one point I was considering the Black-Headed Gull) so I went with something more eye-catching. The toughest part was getting the crest to fit on the canvas--I was forced to shop off a few inches of the back-pointing portion to make it fit. The picture is almost life-size!

The Dimorphodon didn't require nearly as much work. Remember this awful attempt? It quickly evolved into a final draft which I turned into a transparancy and colored like a puffin. Why a puffin? Because ever since I was little, I'd thought that Dimorphodon's big ol' noggin looked puffin-esque. Ironically, it probably didn't live like a puffin. Puffins eat fish, Dimorphodon ate bugs and small terrestrial (and arboreal) vertebrates. Puffins roost on searocks and spend most of their time in the water, while Dimorphodon probably lived inland and, according to Mark Witton, may not have been the best flier. But I really like the color scheme, especially on the snout.

Another note: I wanted to try a range of media for the show. Dimorphodon was going to be on a piece of illustrator board and done up with illustrator markers. Unfortunately, illustrator board sucks, and flattened the look of my markers. I also bought cheap-ass markers because the good stuff (Prismacolor) was like $85. Anyway, the piece looked flat and faded, and I didn't like it at all, so I threw it out and started on canvas. I'm far happier with the canvas version!

Fun Facts

I didn't want to include Pterosauria in the show originally, because I wasn't convinced that the group should be included in the Archosauria! In fact, my position on their phylogenetic affinities is still tenuous, and rests solely on the skull features of Dimorphodon, who has both antorbiteal and mandibular fenestrae. Still, Euparkeria has both, too, and is not considered an archosaur proper. Nobody's done a good job of explaining to me why the group is currently placed close to, or within, the Ornithodira. I think Benton (I forget the year) did a good job of explaining why hindlimb features "shared" between ornithodirans and pterosaurs are convergences, and not the result of common ancestry.

Note: Once again, this format is FAIL.

Other posts in the Virtual Art Show:

Simosuchus

Stomatosuchus

The Virtual Art Show, Part One

Simosuchus clarki

"Clark's pug-nosed crocodile" is known from a single well-preserved skull from Madagascar. As a notosuchid, Simosuchus belongs to a group of small-to-medium sized crocodilians that reached the zenith of their diversity during the Late Cretaceous. The group ran the gamut of feeding ecologies. Simosuchus itself was probably an herbivore, given its leaf-shaped teeth and squared-off snout. It also would have been barely a meter long. Simosuchus would have been on the lookout for the dinosaurs it shared its habitat with. While one may think that such a small animal would be easy pickings for a carnivore, Simosuchus was probably adorned with the armor plating of its more modern relatives to protect it from harm.

Artist Notes

Simosuchus was one of the easier animals to restore for the show. Early on, I decided not to try and guess what kind of body it had, because the creature is only known from a single skull. So I did a headshot, and used a combination of crocodilian armor scutes and wonder gecko coloration for the general look. The actual painting took a long time, though, longer than any of the other pieces (except Effigia), because it was my second piece and I'd never painted before. Scott taught me how to do a "wash" by incorporating water into the acrylic paint. I used a wash for the lower jaw, although it seems pretty unsuccessful now. My pet wonder gecko, Big Boss, provided the splotch pattern. After coloring in the neck scutes, I decided they looked too flat, so I used my smallest brush and painted a white "apex" across each one. I think it looks nice. I don't especially care for the ventral scales, but by that point I was ready to move onto the next animal.

Fun Facts

Scott and I couldn't decide whether to do Simosuchus, Anatosuchus, or both. At one point, we were going to adorn each text board with sketches of related animals. I really wanted to get Chimaerasuchus in there, too, but I couldn't find its description. We did end up using a Simosuchus skull drawing I threw together one night. In the skull drawing, I emphasized Simosuchus' large palpebral bone, something that is not very apparant in the painting because of the spot pattern.

Note: The addition of more than one picture, plus both centered AND left-aligned text means that this post's format will be FAIL. It's not ugly on purpose--it's ugly because of eBlogger and my inability to read HTML fluently.

The Archosauria, and Welcome to It

The Art Show, a project Scott and I (and Raven) have been obsessing over for the last three months, is finally done. We took all our physical pieces to the coffee shop on Saturday and said our farewells. On Friday, we had run all the 11x17" descriptive text pieces (and some digital art) over to Kinkos to get them transferred onto foamcore. The next morning it was done, and we were quite happy.

So the show will be hung by the coffee shop's owners on the 1st. Scott and Raven and I all intend to post a "virtual art show" on our respective blogs, with our respective pieces, including digital representations of the foamcore text pieces and our own notes. Aside from short autobiographies, we were unable to inject any "artist comments" into the show itself (something I would have liked to have done). For those in town, all three of us will be at the coffee shop on Friday the 3rd from 5-7 p.m. Com'on down and say hello! For the rest of you in Readerland, I'll start posting my Virtual Art Show the second Scott gets me jpeg's of my pieces.

Oh, and there might not be an art book. That would be a real shame, because we can SELL the art book, and include bonus material, like a "making of" DVD or, more likely, pictures that we weren't able to shoehorn into the show itself, plus those artist comments I wanted to use. Scott is burned out on The Archosauria show, and doesn't want to go through the hassle of designing and printing an art book. I don't blame him, but it would be a cool idea for the future. You could all just flood his inbox with requests for an art book (scott dot elyard at gmail dot com). Hey, I'm just sayin'...

So yeah, it's out of our hands and I couldn't be happier. I look forward to seeing some of you (I hope) on Friday!

Proterosuchus? I Guess Not.

Apparently, Proterosuchus is not considered a basal Archosauria proper. I got the idea that it WAS thanks to my Dinosauria, 2nd Edition, but then I read on Chinleana that it's NOT. Rather, it's a non-archosaurian archosaurmorph. Makes me angry. I thought I was done with the stupid art show. So, okay readers, please point me toward an archosaur (preferably basal to the Crurotarsian-Ornithodiran split) that has an obvious antorbital fenestra and maxillary fenestra, because those are the features we're focusing on in the show's introductory text.

*sigh*

And hey, what's the current status of Euparkeria? According to the list of Archosauria synapomorphies in Dinosauria, 2nd Edition, it seems like that little guy would fit. Here is the list, according to the book:

1) An antorbital fenestrae;
2) The postfrontal reduced to less than half the dimensions of the postorbital or absent;
3) An ossified laterosphenoid;
4) The prootic midline contact on the endocranial cavity floor;
5) Teeth with serrated margins;
6) A lateral mandibular fenestra

Since Euparkeria has features 1, 5, and 6, I'm guessing it lacks features 2, 3, and/or 4. I was surprised to learn that the fourth trochanter is diagnostic of a more inclusive group and thus not a synapomorphy of the Archosauria, proper.

How Goes the Art Show?

With a cursed and looming deadline breathing down our necks, Scott and I are wrapping up the Archosauria art show, and believe me, we are finished with archosaurs...for the time being. All of my principle pieces are finished--Effigia wrapped up last night. It actually looks too doe-eyed, so I'm going to tweak the eye a bit. I will never again work with acrylic paints on toothy canvases, because the resulting painting looks entirely too uneven. For the next show, I may pick up oil painting (Scott will have to teach me) or, assuming I get a better machine, digital painting.

The brunt of the remaining workload falls squarely on Scott's shoulders, however. He's in charge of the printing and production of text banners. He's still got a Desmatosuchus in transit, and a bunch of text of his own to write up. It's not too terrible, though, and our practical date has been set for the 25th, that is, the date at which all work must be given to Scott. Unfortunately, I'm simply in the dark about Raven's progress. Scott tells me that she's been going through some rough times, and I sympathize, I really do, but at the risk of sounding like a heartless ghoul, I hope she gets her stuff done on time! And I'd love to see it, because the girl is good.

I still have a few things to do, too, honestly, I'm going to draw Proterosuchus' skull to illustrate what a basal archosaur skull looks like, and I still have to write a short biography. I hope to have both of these tasks finished by the time I hit the hay tonight. And then, dear readers, my part in this undertaking will be complete--that's a good feeling.

An art book will accompany the show, but production on it will not begin until after the pieces are hung. We're having a "meet the artists" day on October 3rd (not sure what time it starts), and the downtime will allow us both to argue about the contents of that hopefully-profitable tome. Happily, we will be able to include "bonus content" in the book--pieces that didn't make it into the show and more technical text to accompany each animal. The price will be set after we find out how much printing each book costs. If you want a copy, let me know, and I'll put one aside for you. Again, we don't know how much it will sell for.

So, in closing, we're all tired and sick of archosaurs, but it's good to know the end is so near. And I'm sure the show will kick ass once it's actually finished.

Dinosaurs Roll 20's

Mike Benton & Stephen Brusatte were kind enough to send me their recent Science article investigating why dinosaurs survived through to the Jurassic but not most other archosaurs. The study focuses on the 28-million year span between Carnian-Norian extinction event and the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. As it turns out, dinosaurs weren't the only "dinosaurian" critters on the block. Poposaurs, ornithosuchids, and rauisuchids all converged to some degree with dinosaurs, none more obviously than chatterjeeids like Shuvosaurus and Effigia. Clearly, these animals were all competing for similar resources.

Brusatte, Benton, Ruta & Lloyd aim to dismiss ancient dogmas that dinosaurs were somehow "superior" to their competition, perhaps thanks to their bipedality. If this were the case, we'd assume that dinosaurs arose quickly, but that's not how it went down. Sauropodmorphs diversified during the Late Triassic, but theropods and ornithischians didn't really take off until the Jurassic period, when competing low-browsers and carnivores conveniently went extinct.
As it turns out, ornithodirs and crurotarsans had virtually identical rates of evolutionary change. Despite that, crurotarsan groups (like phytosaurs, poposaurs, rauischids, etc.) were more common and in virtually all cases, much larger than their dinosaurian neighbors.

So what happened? How did dinosaurs survive through the TJEE while neighboring families, often of similar body types, die out? There may not be a clear-cut answer, but Brusatte, et al. chalk it up to chance. Perhaps during the aftermath of whatever led to the great dying, dinosaurs had some advantage that we can't understand right now.

For me, bad luck is a great explaination. Look at the end-Permian extinction. Virtually every dicynodont that wasn't called Lystrosaurus bought the farm, and there's no reason why that pig-lizard should've survived while its brethren burned. Lystrosaurus was no more "evolved" than its cousins. It was sheer luck that propelled the little bastard through the hard times. Maybe they bred like rabbits, which would also explain their subsequent global domination...Likewise, why should Coelophysis live while Marasuchus and Effigia succumb? All three were fully bipedal and fast-moving. Maybe Effigia's herbivorous diet limited its resources during the aftermath. Maybe Marasuchus didn't breed fast enough.

Maybe in the Roll for Inititative, Coelophysis and its cousins rolled 20's.

One More Request!

I can hear you now: "The only time Zach ever calls...I mean, blogs, is when he wants something." Well, lately that's certainly true, although I intend to do a REAL blog post tomorrow. The Art Show is an omnipresent spec on the horizen, dear readers, and that spec is growing ever larger by the day. By the hour, no less.

But once more, I come to you in need of assistance. Or rather, Scott needs assistance (again). Remember when you guys were so kind in sending me all of your Euparkeria papers? Actually, if you have any more, that'd be awesome...although technically Scott finished that little bugger just last night.

But now, while his Stomatosuchus canvas remains moist from the multitude of oil paint layers, Scott has the crazy idea to do an aetosaur from scratch. Well, that's not completely true--the background has been finished for months but sits unused. So while Stomatosuchus' background dries (remind me never to use oils) and my Dimorphodon gets some color to its patagium, Scott intends to restore the beast head-on (literally) as it chews on vegetation.

Problem: All of my aetosaur papers feature steamrolled specimens in which the armor is nicely preserved to the detriment of the actual skeleton. But all I need are papers regarding aetosaur heads 'n' teeth, really. So if any of you have said references, please do send them over. Scott would greatly appreciate it.

And hey--the second the pictures are hung at Sidestreet Espresso downtown, expect to see them, as well as unused pieces (bonus material!) on the blog.

Oh, and one more thing, directed mainly at Ms. Raven: Status report, dammit!

September 27th: The Deadline Looms

You know that art show I keep talking about? You know, the one about the Archosauria as a group? Well, our deadline for finishing all the art, text, framing, etc., is September 27th. That's...hmmm...about three weeks away. My heart just skipped a beat! Well, I've had months to complete my pieces, right? Well, yes. But have I? No. Just to give you a helpful update, here are the pieces I'm in charge of and their statuses (stati?):

Nyctosaurus: Essentially finished. Needs some more paint to cover up pencil lines on the crest, and some detail work on the black outline, but pretty much done.

Simosuchus: Completely done.

Dimorphodon: Starting that one today. I will not be painting it, but instead markering it, with illustrator markers on bristol board. I should probably buy some bristol board. The big-headed rhamphorhynchoid will be adorned with tufted puffin colors! Fun!

Effigia: The sketch is finished, the transparancy is made, I just need to start the final work. Like the puffin-pterosaur, Effigia will be handled with brush pens. I am far more comfortable using pen-type mediums than paint, because paint (in my hands) is less precise and messier.

Allosaurus: Luckily, I just need to sketch and ink an Allosaurus. Nothing fancy. It will be part of a "montage" of dinosaurs showing that the Dinosauria is just one part of the greater Archosauria.

I love the smell of desperation in the morning! Smells like...failure. Wish me luck, dear readers, in completing this task. I haven't even mentioned all the text I have to write for each piece, and a little autobiography about myself for a booklet we're handing out. And I have to bug the museum for some informational handouts...

Three weeks! I got this, guys!

Begging for Euparkeria

Hey, does anybody out there have a PDF of the original description, or perhaps a redescription of that most basal of archosaurs, Euparkeria? It's more for Scott than me, although I'd be lying if I said I didn't also want to read about the little scamp.

EDIT: I have the greatest readers in the world. A thousand thank you's, guys. Scott sends his gratitude as well.

Effigia...Again!

Well, I must really like Effigia, because I keep drawing the damn thing. There's a reason for that, though. Effigia okeefae is one of the creatures in the ensuing Archosauria art show. Thus, this newest draft. It is measured, and superficially similar to the last attempt, but one striking difference does present itself: integument. Effigia is usually drawn with fairly smooth skin, much like a dinosaur. Of course, the little beastie is a crurotarsian (a poposaur, in fact, close to Arizonasaurus), so I would expect it to be covered in scales and scutes. I don't think that the type specimen had any bony scutes or armor plating, but that doesn't rule out lighter keratinous scutes.

So tell me what you think, dear readers. I may have gone a little overboard with the scutes 'n' scales (it was an irritating process).

Dimorphodon...again!

Much better than the maiden attempt, if I do say so myself. I'm always amazed at how big pterosaur heads are relative to the body, even in a basal form like Dimorphodon. One curiosity about this particular animal is how short the wings are compared to other pterosaurs of similar size. Mark Witton has suggested that perhaps the pelican pterosaur was not as eager to fly as his cousins, a contention he further backs up by noting that its bones are much denser than other pterosaurs. I tell ya, this art show is starting to fill up with pterosaurs. First Nyctosaurus, then Dimorphodon, and Raven is restoring Tupandactylus!

*phew* After drawing pterosaurs for so long, it'll be nice to start my next critter: Simosuchus!

Effigia: The Jar-Jar Crurotarsian

I don't mean to insult the coolest example of convergent evolution since the marsupial mole, but it's tough to not get a kick in when Effigia's species name is okeefae. It sounds like something you'd hear while watching The Phantom Menace, as in "Ooh! Meesah like Effigia okeefae!"

At any rate, Effigia is another subject for the Archosauria art show. I imagine you're all familar with Carl Buell's wonderful reconstruction. My goal was to make the little bugger look a bit more...you know...crurotarsian. It's closest relatives were big-bodied, scute-covered, bony-armored crocodilian critters. It did, however, famously converge on theropod dinosaurs. While it seems to have lost its bony armor, I'm sure it retained some keratinous covering. Bizarrely, Effigia lost its teeth and developed an ornithomimid-like beak--it was probably an herbivore. I think it's tiny little arms are ridiculous-looking, but they were fun to draw.

I'm not entirely sure how the ankles worked. Effigia did not develop an ornithodiran ankle structure--it retained the "crocodile-normal" ankle which relies on a pully structure to move the ankle with the leg, so I wonder how flexible the ankle was on its own. The animal clearly walked bipedally (look at those tiny forelimbs) but how fast it could walk (or run) is puzzling to me.

This drawing is basically taken from Nesbitt's 2007 description, so the proportions are right on the money. The length of the femur is unknown, as is the number of cervicals. I shortened the neck but stayed close to the description's proposed femur length. My big question is what kind of integument Effigia had. I don't think it had crocodilian plating, but I doubt it was entirely free of scutes and plates, too. I'd like to reach a comfortable middle ground, if for nothing else than to emphasize in the show that this is not a dinosaur, but converged on dinosaurs.

As always, comments and questions are more than welcome.

Introducing Guarinisuchus munizi

A new paper today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B chronicles the discovery of a new dyrosaurid crcodylomorph from South America, even thought the family is known from Africa. This suggests that before the K/T Extinction event, these crocodiles invaded the Atlantic Ocean and covered the distance between the two continents, even migrating upwards to North America during the Paleocene. Although I told Will that I thought this new croc was closer to geosaurs than modern crocs, a mere glance at the life restoration (above) makes me think differently. I am no expert on Crurotarsian phylogeny, though, so if somebody can enlighten me about Neosuchian relationships, I'd appreciate it!

And check out the paper! It is, for now at least, open access.