A favourite of mine is being reappraised! Sinosauropteryx.

I still remember that day vividly… in the middle of excited rumours at the SVP that year, there it was: the cover of an issue of Nature in 1997 with the first published photograph of the fossil of Sinosauropteryx on the cover… right at the newstand!… The fossil that would really change it all. That was officially the first fossil that unequivocally showed feathers on a non-avian dinosaur… and got a lot of people fuming! “They were NOT feathers” fiercely argued the “Birds are not dinosaurs camp”… but after all these years, analyses anfter analyses they were proven wrong and the filaments or “protofeathers” that surrounded like a halo the skeleton made it look almost exactly Messel-like… microscopic study corroborated ot and now we even have the possible colours of the protofeathers!

The typical specimen of Sinosauropteryx was about 60 cm long. A bigger specimen was reported as 1 meter… and other similar species like Scalliopteryx were even bigger. But… there was an issue still pending… Currie and Chen 2001 reported that:
“The [smaller] specimens of Sinosauropteryx prima show skull and orbit proportions, and bone texture typical of immature stages.

In April 2024 Andrea Cau published a photo of an undescribed 3.8m long (!) Yi Xian specimen labelled as Sinosauropteryx that is housed in a Chinese museum. The hand and foot are distinct from the holotyoe and the tail is relatively shorter. Legs are also typically longer and theropodian. Quoting the description: ” According to Cau’s caption: “This is the so-far-undescribed “largest Sinosauropteryx”, an amazing 3.8 m long (!) specimen housed in a Chinese museum and claimed to be a Sinosauropteryx. Although not yet included in my matrix, this specimen confirms the hypothesis developed in my latest paper that “compsognathids” are not adult morphs of small size, but juvenile semaphoronts of larger tetanurans. This specimen would surely improve the systematic placement of the Jehol Biota “compys”. “After testing in the LRT this specimen indeed nests with the smaller specimens.”

Are we now solving the Phil Currie and Chen’s observations from the early 200o’s and we have finally found an adult or subadult Sinosauropteryx while the original specimens were immature individuals? Celebrating the possibility here’s my take on a family of Sinosauropteryx wading a Yi Xian lake’s toxic waters… and a comparison of three specimens… from the smallest to the biggest yet found. Please note that this is still not completely verified… but in the meantime we have the picture of an upscaled parent of an all time favourite dinosaur!… warning, this may change in the future!

In the meantime> a kind reminder of an unmissable event:

Getting one (or two) of my dreams realised, step by step…

As Carmen would say: “Why and how do you get this junk? Look’s terrible”… well it came all the way from Brazil from Rodrigo Henrique Gomes. And indeed at the beginning didn’t look very promising… but guess what happened next… little by little, step by step “Dave”, the sinornithosaur, my dream fossil came true…

After more than 20 years of having had it in my hands at dear Mark Norell’s AMNH office looking to Central Park, NY… and having been unable to sleep that night after seeing one of the most perfect examples of feathered dinosaurs EVER… well… the only alternative I could ever lay my hands on this for my shelves. was after a frantic, decent (or half decent) paint job. I still think needs a bit of retouching…

… and next came another biggest challenge… loook at this! It still doesn’t make much sense to me, but the (In)famous Ubirajara was at my desk too!

Carmen had to admit that…the whole lot made much more sense now!

Tour de Force in Napoli.

It’s been 20 years since the last time I did a talk and exhibition in Naples… and I madly wanted to return, this time specifically to see in person the Paleo-Aquarium murals commissioned to me by the Museum Darwin Dohrn with the aid of Marco Signore. The Darwin Dohrn Museum is dedicated to the two giants of science and evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin and Anton Dohrn, It promotes the knowledge of the evolution of marine biodiversity. It is a building next to the marvellous Naples Aquarium and its vintage (mostly) local marine life live displays…. the two marine museums are all dedicated to marine environment in general, but I proposed to my friend Marco Signore that, taking advantage of our visit, we could also do a talk about… dinosaurs!

The museum gladly accepted.

My visit started right away with the prehistoric “aquarium”. I was amazed by the excellent printing and effect achieved… so much so that it would have been even better to use more space… unfortunately we didn’t have it! The main mural is ten meters long (both sides different) from the Ediacaran fauna to the Cenozoic, forth and back…and the Whale Evolution mural might be made bigger in the future, to at least four meters long.

We definitively love Naples… a sea of human contradictions and emotions for us, Pompeii, Ercolano… and we can go on forever … and we were later treated to a relaxed audience that was as interested in a dinosaur conference as much as any Danish or Mexican audiences would be (for me still the best audiences I’ve ever had!) and asked all the right questions… even debating Spinosaurus, Jurassic Park and … Dinosaur rEvolution... indeed a well informed crowd! … The framework were incredible marine life exhibits. I recommend visiting both the Darwin Dohrn Museum and the Aquarium even if only for the exhibits… Still… there you go: Dinosaurs can reach everywhere and we had even discussed the possibility of having a version of Dinosaur rEvolution split into two buildings… everything is possible!

I have to say: I was honoured and amazed that people were almost fighting to purchase the few Extreme Dinosaurs Part Two books that I managed to bring…. and the discussions and exchanges continued well after the talk itself.

So thank you (once again) to Marco Signore and all the staff from the Aquarium and the Darwin Dohnr Museum that were so helpful in this event. Maybe we’ll see each other real soon again!

The Deed is Done! Dinosaur rEvolution is a resounding success at the Horniman Museum!

Not many people know the troubles we have had to go through to finally bring this exhibition to Europe. The odyssey was in danger to become a disaster: a container had been shipped from Australia and had to go through the Red Sea to arrive on time…. well, everybody knows what is going on in the Red Sea and we were in real danger of being attacked by rebels… so, the ship had to go all the way around Africa to finally arrive… just a week before the opening. Yes what you see here is the result of a whole week working against the clock by Peter Norton and the people of the Horniman Museum… until the final couple of days I couldn’t help to supervise the tremendous efforts, because nobody knew when would it be arriving! …. and guess what, despite everything and the fact that the space was too small to add some of the bigger skeletons (That had been already featured in the first versions of the exhibition in Australia and NZ)..,,. the results were amazing! We have always to adapt what we have to the hall… no matter how small or big…The Horniman exhibition resulted to my eyes in something almost intimate, welcoming, colourful and spectacular. The array of rare casts is staggering. From David Sole’s complete Scelidosaurus skeleton to a precious, perfect cast of the quilled Psittacosaurus… especially dear to me since I was responsible for the first illustration ever done of it in the year 2000! Even the animatronics were reasonable for the site… Adding the therizinosaurs with Peter Norton’s exclusive new reconstruction of Falcarius was a plus… and we were lucky those two could fit!

The sight of nursing moms precisely underneath the Oviraptor nest was simply awesome!

The exquisite Psittacosaurus needs seen to be believed! And Scelidosaurus… the same!

My favourite animatronic… we manage to convince the cChinese makers to make it as close as possible to what we needed, instead of doing a Jurassic Park clone!

People were surprised by the sizes… Velociraptor vs Avimimus were too small for the minds of many,… but we had to convince that everything in this exhibition is life-size!

Needless to say. the dinosaur-bird connection was also a surprise to so many. The reaction of the public was going to be the most outstanding feat of this whole event. The first day I was wary that we would have an audience split into rowdy kids and bored parents… but, by the second day the reaction was quite the opposite. The kids were having a field day obviously, but this time the not-so-kids and parents were paying very much attention and followed the numerous explanatory texts. Dinosaur rEvolution indeed! Every time I saw someone interested in anything specific I would try to cautiously intervene and expand the explanations… some even recognised me!… and the reactions were amazing. The whole purpose of this exhibition is to shake-up the expectations of all the dinosaur exhibitions done before… and I think we have been succeeding. People come out with a completely different view of dinosaurs and rather shocked by the fact that they were either , small, feathered or quilled… or gigantic oddities… whatever! They came out with the notion that they were after all a veritable variety of animals… not monsters… and curiously the one that scared the kids the most was thjs re-creation (or more like an animatronic caricature) of one of my better known paintings of Deinonychus!

But this is not just an artwork showcase exhibition… this is party time for all dinosaur lovers! And yes, the first day we had Dave Hone and partner with James Pascoe and his gang of Dino nerds, just arriving from visiting Crystal Palace’s restored dinosaurs. appeared on the scene!… and also Janet Smith was there . I’m immensely grateful for their support… Carmen and Patricia were also there… and many more.

Needless to say the next days the dinosaur mania increased to the levels of being sold-out every day. The images speak for themselves. They had to queue and come in in separate groups so the place would not be overcrowded.

And the paleoart workshop was giving us the first budding paleoartists of the week! Rainbow Deinonychus anyone?

Parallel to the exhibition there was a dino-sculpting workshop and it perfectly complemented what was happening in the other building(s)… I wish we have had more space and time to actually bring all of them at once to the exhibition and they could model their clay sculptures based on what they saw!

The interaction with the audiences continued and someone added a very special high praise phrase : “this is better tnan the NHM!”... their words, not mine… but it makes worthy all of our efforts.

We are especially grateful to Cressida Diez-Finch, Sian Brett and all the team of excellent workers at the Horniman Museum for such hard work and dedication. The exhibition will last at the Horniman until November. Extreme Dinosaurs Pt 2 (with the first chapter dedicated to the exhibition) is selling at the shop of the Horniman… for the second time but this time with more reason than ever. Hopefully many more will come, and even more: next time we would be able to find a bigger space…. we need it! The battle of Theropoda and Ornithischia continue, with only one of them as the winner...And it can be either in England or the rest of Europe… keeping fingers crossed!

All set. It’s officially out now! Dinosaur rEvolution’s grand opening soon… first time in Europe.

https://www.horniman.ac.uk/event/dinosaur-revolution/

IN THE CAN… for 2024

Starting 2024 with a bang… I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but “Extreme Dinosaurs Part 3: Blogging!” might be ready soon. I’m giving the last touches and it will hopefully be available as soon as the design is corrected and completed… The contents are all new and different from the previous effort (Part 2). It is more like a miscellany of art remixed from recent projects. More like the original Extreme Dinosaurs from 2000., Plenty of paleo-provocation and nothing to do with the previous Part 2… well almost nothing to do. So far it is close to 140 pages, many of them double-page illustrations. …Hopefully, this will excite someone else than just me!

2024 will be much more than only Dinosaur rEvolution at the Horniman Museum… opening in February!

TetZoo… here we go again…

… its that time of the year again… the London event of the year it’s just a week and two days away. And we are going all the way. Chit-chat, discussions(with John Conway), explanations, arguments… agreements… (paleo)- advice… Elephant Talk! We will have available Posters, Extreme Dinosaurs II! books and these quality. limited edition canvas prints that we hope will entice some people: if some liked the T. rex/Triceratops oone…the Home Sweet Home artwork could never be really appreciated until now…. this is the right size… and allows for much bigger! … requests and orders welcome by the way! …

We will have a preview of February’s Dinosaur rEvolution at the Horniman Museum…. and even images of the new Hector Rivera’s/MUDE Mexican Mosasaur.

We will even formally represent Dinosauria Creatures with some cool collector’s 3D models in kit form… ready to be customised by the expert!

A Predation or Scavenging Scene?

Among the fossils that are all the rage these days is the famous “gigantic” Repenomamus Cretaceous mammal entangled with a Psittacosaurus, in what is apparently a battle to the death… rivaling the famous Velociraptor and Protoceratops battle from the Gobi desert. However, it has also been proposed that we are seeing a mammal famous for having bones of little psittacosaurs in its belly in some of its fossils, scavenging the carcass of an adult or subadult psittacosaur, As we know Repenomamus was a giant for its age, being the size and shape of (roughly) a badger…. to follow the controversy I decided to do two “ambitious angle” versions… a ferocious predation scene and a scavenging scene… which one would you prefer? It is a rather daring view… but what are we here for?

Dedicated to Isaac… he wanted it, he got it!

See the article here:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mammals-preyed-on-much-larger-dinosaurs-a-stunning-new-fossil-reveals/#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20size%20of,times%20larger%20than%20its%20assailant.http://Scientific American

In the forthcoming Gondwana Studio‘s Dinosaur rEvolution exhibition at the Horniman Museum in London (February), I will also have this update of a previous artwork, with the hypothetical notion that all the hatchling psittacosaurs were fully quilled but didn’t have the double fan of porcupine-like quills that is so familiar to us via the famous, very complete Psittacosaurus fossil that sported quills, skin and organic impressions preserved.

Classic Battle revisited.

Yes… they continue to be my favourites, but this time everything you see in this mural is based on real skeleton mounts in museums! The new Triceratops mount(s) that I’m basing these new ones in are supposedly very complete… and the head proportions are just really outlandish. Yes indeed they are big headed animals, even more so compared to their body… we have been used to the old Triceratops models and reconstructions with small heads… but I have seen this trend of increasing the head proportions of ceratopsians with respect of their bodies ever since I was surprised by the gigantic head of Pentaceratops compared with a rather small body… and now we also have the recently auctioned Triceratops “Big John”.

This might be the case only for the bigger headed ceratopsians, but still it is intriguing. So first thing I did was start doodling a sketch for each ceratopsian and finish them in colour accordingly.

You might remember my beaked T. rex from a previous blog post. Yes I like to create first my protagonists and they use them in different scenarios. He was also based on a real T. rex mount,. Skeletal mounts (with some modifications) are my own fact check these days… and this time the resulting insertion in the mural is a rather freak composition with dramatic posturing for all participants and a wild surrealist perspective.

I’d like to say, the best compliment I got for my new version of T. rex from someone in the net was “what’s that?”… yes I had to clarify that it was indeed based on a real picture of a skeleton mounted in a museum… Careful… familiar takes on such and such animal can induce laziness to the imagination and incite us to be less daring!

Home Sweet Home…

,

The task of trying to create new original artwork related to what is now called “Paleoart” is becoming more and more daunting. I spend many hours researching and thinking in new ideas that would thrill everybody… and myself… But with so much competition in this field, sometimes it’s getting more difficult than ever. Needless to say say lavish TV series like Prehistoric Planet make some of the art simply obsolete… but never mind, we are here to keep digging, inspiring and striving to surprise audiences… and TV series!

For me, many times the ideas are much more important than the artistic skills… and what better place to get inspiration than in nature itself… David Hone in last year’s TetZoo showed me some videos from the African Savannah that got stored in my mind… well they almost scarred my mind forever!

So here’s one that I’m sure nobody has seen before… A family of Mapusaurus finding safe home inside an Argentinosaurus (or any fellow giant titanosaur)…

Perhaps this is not looking as gory and it should have been. It might also not be completely scientifically plausible, but hey… we are here to provoke minds on what might be possible… or not! Good enough for you Dave?

This piece is not well appreciated on this size so, large print and/or prints on canvas are recommended and will be available. Please contact me in private if interested.