Yes. I have been invited to give my usual talk at the famous Museo del Jurásico . “Reviviendo Dinosaurios”  this time! We will be there to open the proceedings and serve as a guide for the start of the “Hatching The Past” exhibition that  will see the MUJA as the starting point of a tour of Europe. As we know “Hatching the Past” started in Colorado with Charlie and Flo Magovern from Stone Co and now under the sponsorship of Peter Norton and Mar Gómez will be renowned the world over.

We will be there the first of July  from 11 in the morning (more details to follow). This will (paradoxically) be my first formal presentation in a Spanish museum. It will be a treat not only to be there (both the museum and surrounding landscape are amazing) but to finally have the opportunity to establish a dialogue with those Spanish friends and dinosaur fans that might be coming.

As you can see from these image of  obne of the notorious mounts of the museum, my recent revamp of my old  “Tyrannosaurus Sex” image fits just nicely!

Only museum in the world with life size dino-copulation… they had to be Spaniards after all!  Así que,“Dinosaurios: Huevos y Bebés” están aquí… ¡Nos vemos en el Museo del Jurásico!

The discovery of Pegomastax and Tianyulong made this a thing of the past and transformed not only our image of heterodontosaurs but also of ornithischians too… yes that famous “porcupine” Psittacosaurus -that I broke to the world in an illustration for my book “Extreme Dinosaurs!”  done well before the year 2000- doesn’t look that weird any longer. If we consider that the newly discovered, extremely fuzzy heterodontosaurs are actually quite ancient (lower Jurassic)  ornithischians, this  testifies to the extraordinary diversity of the Dinosauria in the 169 million years of evolution, and a probable  wild range of different kinds of metabolism, associated not only with posture but covering (Insulation? Defense? Display?) integument too. It might be that the animal was even venomous too! Not that this is anything new, only that corroborates what some of us have been thinking since the 60′s and 70′s. The fibrous and fuzzy integuments date back to the origin of dinosaurs and are not exclusive to the evolutionary branch that gave origin to birds!

The strange spiny look in Ornithischia  was probably a common feature right from the start and kept evolving in animals like the fibrous, porcupine-like psittacosaurs  and  probably in the newly discovery integument of Triceratops too (more on that in a future post). Was it in any way related to the fuzzy integument that gave rise to proto-feathers  and feathers in theropods and birds? I would  say yes… but in a completely different way.

Here’s the old illustration that started it all (modified to show also Sinovenator the troodontid). I still have somewhere a sketch where I ventured a Psittacosaurus fully covered in spikes and fuzz… however I kept to the evidence available and never dared to to do a  fully furry-coated psittacosaur (after all there’s also evidence of pebbly skin for them)… except perhaps for the babies!

Just imagine how this multiple banner would have looked at the entrance of the Natural History Museum in London! (This is only the draft by the way).

Alas… it was never going to be.

Late last year I received an invitation to  illustrate and propose some ideas for the  new exhibition at the BMNH “Extinction. Not The End Of The World” posters and banners. I set enthusiastically to work on some ideas that might have enhanced not only an exhibition that was endorsed by no other than David Attenborough, but also do some designs that would make it work with the spectacular  settings of the museum. The spirit of the designs were to reflect that the world would be extremely overcrowded  without extinction and what is obvious: we are here because of the extinction of billions of species  and many species are not and will not be here thanks to Homo sapiens too. Unfortunately there was no luck and instead the museum selected this:

After visiting the exhibition, I think they were right after all. The event is a lot more low= key that I thought it to was going to be. In any case, that is what this blog is for: to show the sruff you >might< have seen but couldn’t for one reason or another…

In the meantime here’s the lonely Neanderthal…

And a Megaloceros… Extinct indeed!

In any case, the sequence we selected to illustrate the evolutionary suquence was a crocodile, Marasuchus, Coelophysis, T rex, Microraptor and Enantiornis.

Some links:

http://whatsinjohnsfreezer.com/2013/04/24/3d_dinosaurs/

http://www.rvc.ac.uk/SML/Projects/Evolution3DDinos.cfm

Youtube videos: http://youtu.be/vwQR1Rh2Q9E and http://youtu.be/g7FSTgX6nOY

It is not the first time John and I haveollaborated together. He is noted for his research  in estimated mass and the relationship with kinetics (specially in big extinct animals). A while ago I illustrated his now notorious article debunking the possibility that T. rex was a fast runner… an article that annoyed a few, but simply and scientifically stated the obvious. Mass and gravity matters and T. rex was not simply an oversized chicken or a “roadrunner from hell”!

So we are back to NATURE…Since the article unfortunately didn’t make it to be the cover of the magazine, here you have it (as an exclusive) logo included and all!

You won’t see many prehistoric mammals in this blog… but after last year’s visit to Bristol University I couldn’t resist to take a few pictures and do a restoration of a fantastic Smilodon skeleton mount they (inexplicably, it should be put on display at the museum!) have in the vaults of the the Wills Memorial building, for the exclusive enjoyment of students, teachers and workers. The ferocious attack posture was an inspiration to give it the “Luis Rey treatment”… drama at its (mammalian) best!

Obviously I’m expecting to do a soon restoration of the “perfect” Scelidosaurus they have at the museum.

This section of the exhibition is a playground for children. It includes nest models and baby dinosaur models for the children to play and photograph themselves with… they also can be dressed as baby dinos under the attentive eyes of their gigantic parents!

And here  we have Nick Regester and Alenna Magovern showing their excellent printing job. They, together with Flo and Charlie Magovern have been responsible for this incredible mount. Hard, but rewarding work indeed! Congratulations to them!

This is my contribution to Dave Hone‘s new project. He is trying to gather funds for  research into a very well preserved Daspletosaurus skull that once again gives evidence that tyrannosaurs were cannibals or at least had fierce  battles between them. For more information  do visit https://www.microryza.com/projects/cannibalism-in-giant-tyrannosaurs. Very soon, there is going to be available a signed, canvased  limited edition  print of this artwork  to help fund the effort.

As we have seen before, we have come a long way in reconstructing tyrannosaurs and the new feathery coverage gives us a complete new dimension of how these animals may have looked. To show how I normally work my pictures I’m adding the original sketch that served as the basis… The title “cannibalism” also suggests scavenging… but there’s much more information that is being extracted from the remains that challenge any straightforward notion of scavenging.

Instead I wanted to show two adults battling and scarring each other… the battle might lead to the death of one or simply the scarring of each other… there’s also evidence that the some of the wounds would have healed… so the animal survived the bruising!

And it has been a mammoth task. Despite the obvious cover reference, we don’t pretend a direct comparison between the two books or indeed the artwork… we just wanted to show of how dramatically our view of dinosaurs has changed in only sixty years, using as a vehicle a publication that has been familiar to everybody fall these years.

Given that for technical reasons we spent an over long time to finish it (more than two years), it comes without saying that we had to keep changing and updating the enormous stream of new information we get from dinosaurology these days…  and all is captured  here. It is updated to the last minute! I have applied every possible digital and non-digital technique in anchoring Dr. Bob’s overflowing, expert narrative… and I’m hoping that the results are not disappointing. You will be the judge.

I am not allowed to show more than the cover for the time being (the book will be on sale in September… yes we will have to wait that long unfortunately!),  but in the meantime in this Blog I will be showing once in a while  snippets and artwork outtakes of the book that couldn’t make it to the final version… or artwork that differs drastically from what you are going to see there. There’s a lot of new stuff in my vaults now…Be prepared for a really thrilling ride in vertebrate evolution… just to give a little advance notice: any of my old T. rex  depictions will become outdated instantly… and this book (and Dr. Bob Bakker) are  to be hold responsible for it!

Cretaceous snow killed T. rex? Well… at least it adds some festive decoration on my very modern late-Cretaceous garden!  A very weather mild end of the world indeed… The famous “Home’s Garden”  scene from a previous post has been finally snowed… in the meantime I will have some extra good news in my next post. The wait is almost over!