My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

In 2022 Jason Osborne and I reconstructed the Early Oligocene toothed whale Ediscetus osbornei, and here is the artwork I created for Jason. The two Ediscetus are chasing a school of Spanish mackerel.

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

The third and final Severn Estuary painting (2022), this time showing the Late Devonian. "Denizens of the Beach and Copse" features a group of Elginerpeton, an Ichthyostega, fungi, slime moulds, algae, rhyniophytes, lycopsids, equisetids, & others.

New review: Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior is a concise, well-structured, and beautifully illustrated book that transcends being "merely" good popular science by also addressing professional palaeontologists.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2025/03/09/book-review-uncovering-dinosaur-behavior-what-they-did-and-how-we-know/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #AnimalBehavior #Ethology #Fossils #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Dinosaurs #Scicomm princetonupress@mastodon.social @princetonnature @serpenillus @bookstodon

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here's Western Interior Seaway mural 3, which I painted in 2021 for the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, USA. Featured are a school of Apsopelix fish, Squalicorax battling an octopod, and a Tusoteuthis with blue bioluminescence.

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

One last Platecarpus painting, from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, USA (I supplied them with four murals and three illustrations for graphics boards).

*Drumroll*... review #500! The Future of Dinosaurs is a fresh take on pop-palaeo that flips the script by charting the limits of our knowledge.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2025/02/28/book-review-the-future-of-dinosaurs-what-we-dont-know-what-we-can-and-what-well-never-know/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Fossils #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Dinosaurs #Scicomm @bookstodon

A new book for friends of #archeology and #deepHistory: Discarded. Imagine a future when Earth creatures could find the #technofossils of our time. What will they find? What remains the most of our "civilisation"? An exciting change of perspective on our more long-lasting ‘achievements’. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/22/technofossils-how-plastic-bags-and-chicken-bones-will-become-our-eternal-legacy

This #FossilFriday meet Bojophlebia - this cool ~309 million year old fossil insect was found in the Czech Republic. The scale bar on the image is 4cm, so we can estimate this animal had a wingspan of over 40cm. What it actually *was* though, has been subject to discussion. When first described in the 1980s, it was originally thought to be an early-branching member of the lineage leading to today's mayflies.

For #FossilFriday meet Dunbaria. Isn't this fossil gorgeous? It was found in ~285 million year old rocks in Elmo, USA. It's a member of an order called the Palaeodictyoptera. Those patches you can see on the wings represent the colouration of the wings in life, preserved in a fossil

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

In 2021 I teamed up with The Royal Mint and the Natural History Museum again to create the Mary Anning Coin Collection, the second collection from the Tales of the Earth series. Here's the Temnodontosaurus coin art . . .

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

A few more of my vignettes (rendered in 2021) for the book, called SEA MAMMALS, by Annalisa Berta. Here are Behemotops and Odobenocetops – two amazing weirdos.

This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought some older long-term residents from my wishlist second-hand: J. William Schopf's Cradle of Life from @princetonupress, George R.R. Martin's The Ice #Dragon from HarperVoyager, and Sean B. Carroll's Endless Form Most Beautiful from Weidenfeld & Nicolson #Books #Scicomm #Evolution #EvoDevo #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Bookstodon

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here are some crops from my grey/sepia painting of the straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus. It was commissioned for a London festival (2021), because these giants used to roam the land that London now covers.

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here's a monochrome painting of the straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus. It was commissioned for a London festival (2021), because these giants used to roam the land that London now covers. I call this picture Monarch of the Forest. Dr Steven Zhang helped me get the head correct.

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here are some more of my vignettes (rendered in 2021) for the book, called SEA MAMMALS, by Annalisa Berta. Here are some extinct Carnivora (not to scale).

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

In 2021 I created a bunch of vignettes for a new book, called SEA MAMMALS, by Annalisa Berta. They were quick to produce and a fun change from my big Mesozoic landscapes, which take weeks to complete. The animals here are not to scale.

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

and we flap into 2021 with Wulong bohaiensis, from Early Cretaceous China. This was the press release artwork for a paper describing "The iridescent plumage in a dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur" (Croudace et al).

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

Here are a few crops from a mural I painted for Wollaton Hall Museum (Nottingham, UK), 2020. This is one of the most detailed paintings I've ever created.

This has got to be the most amazing thing I’ve read this week, Evidence is mounting that large sandstone caves in Amazonian South America, large enough to comfortably walk through and the longest with 1,500 metres of tunnels, were carved out by giant ground sloths. Yes, ground sloths!

“The South American palaeoburrows might be the largest ichnofossils known so far.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00216-x