The Penguin

Hello, patient readers. I've blogged about Raptors before, specifically Deinonychus and the problems of depicting dinosaurs in general. In an earlier post, I was wrestling with the then newly-popular preponderance of plumage on our favorite Terrible Lizards, and while I finally conceded that Deinonychus and Co. were probably fully feathered, I whined and hemmed about the amount of feathers and griped about how dinosaur lineages with no evidence for feathers at all were now being given fabulous coats. In the midst of this, I decried the new crop of bad paleo-art, using this image as my piéce de resistance: Credit: Luis V. Rey, from his blog . Essentially my big scientific argument ran along the lines of, "Looks dumb, therefore wrong". It seems now that I might have to eat that argument, slathered in Nelson Muntz' Gourmet Ha-Ha Sauce ...with one important caveat, which I'll get to later. Since writing that blog post - in fact, several years later - I'...

Hello there, gentle readers. As you may have gathered, I'm a dinosaur nut, the Terrible Lizards being the first thing I could draw reliably well. While I love drawing dinosaurs, I've found my technique getting a bit stale lately; it seems like I'm quite a bit behind the times in terms of dinosaur science and our understanding of these creatures. Much of this is cultural baggage left behind in the wake of Jurassic Park , but there's also a fair amount of aesthetic prejudice - that is, "I want my dinosaurs to look or act like this" - and God help any scientist who suggests otherwise. It's the Cool Factor: we want our 'Raptors deadly intelligent, hyperfast, scaly, and able to disembowel a sauropod in minutes flat; our T rexes must roar triumphantly through elegant, shrink-wrapped faces; our Ceratopsians and other large herbivores must be essentially bison or rhinoceras-like. Anything else offends our sense of dino-propriety. What do you mean, Deinonychu...

With all the attention given to the Terrible Lizards throughout their history, it's often easy to forget they weren't the only beasts terrorizing the world during the Mesozoic. In fact, the majority of reptiles of that era weren't dinosaurs at all, though they fell under the Archosaur lineage: Pterosaurs ruled the skies, whilst a variety of marine reptiles and crocodilians ruled the waters. This domination of other habitats by non-dinosaurs helps answer a nagging question about our favorite toothy monsters: with the exception of the avian-line dinos, why were dinosaurs limited only to the land? It's essential to lay down ground rules at this point, otherwise everything will become confused. First, as many a second-grader can (and will) tell you, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs, reptiles of air and water respectively, were not dinosaurs. In fact, dinosaurs are pretty much defined by a land-based lifestyle and body plan, including hollow bones and an erect posture. Only one...