The Penguin

Eras of Life, from PosterPlus (Sorry I don't know who the artist is) I always loved the "Prehistoric Life" picture books for kids, with their huge two-page spreads of each geological era. I used to lay on the floor, propped on my elbows as I read and re-read my favorites: the Cretaceous, of course, when dinosaurs really got down to the business of being gigantic war-lizards; the Pleistocene, with its ice ages and giant twisty-horned/tusked/toothed shag-carpeted megabeasts; Oligocene South America, which warranted its own page due to the weirdness of its fantastic critters: bus-sized sloths, giant killer chickens, "camels" with elephant trunks and unpronounceable names, sabertooth cats that were actually marsupials but not really. The Progression of Life was very simple, like a chapterbook - first came the rather boring Precambrian (jellyfish and sea-pens, yadda yadda...) then the CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION! followed swiftly by the Ages of Fish, Amphibians, Mammal-Like R...

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...