For those who don't know me (or happened to miss the time when I posted regularly) I'm a professional writer and journalist, who occasionally is lucky enough to write about paleontology. I'm also an artist. So last year, I approached The Bitter Southerner with a weird idea: an article that would act as a nature documentary to the vanished world of the Cretaceous deep south, with my illustrations and prose acting as a camera. The editor gave me a pretty quizzical expression, but since I'd done a lot of work for them before, he threw caution to the wind and told me to go for it.
I spent the next several months researching, talking to people, and sketching, sketching, sketching. Then erasing. Then sketching some more. Then painting and cursing at the screen. All during SVP, I was hunting down paleontologists and painting in the corner of the lecture halls. Then it was time to write, and figure out how, exactly to create a nature documentary in prose. More cursing. More cursing at the screen. But after lots of blood, sweat, and tears, it's finished and published and now, finally, I can share it.
So what is it? Well, picture a David Attenborough documentary, captured wholly in text and image, with its subject landscapes no human has ever seen. Imagine an article building on the ideas of Robert Bakker's Raptor Red. Imagine a narrative that leaps from animal to animal across a world poorly understood even by paleontological standards.
Or hell, maybe I'd better just show you. The following is an excerpt from The Lost Continent of Appalachia. Please do enjoy it!
Morning on the Alabama sea. Waves lap in under blue skies. Miles out from shore, sunlight drifts in gentle curtains through clear waters, caressing the sides of a high, jagged reef. The waters are too hot for corals; instead, walls of bivalve mollusks sit in scaffolds dozens of feet high, their shell surfaces encrusted with barnacles and long strands of algae. Marches of immense clams gape into the currents. Shoals of fish dart and swirl, chasing tiny shrimp. An octopus-like ammonite creeps from outcrop to outcrop, tentacles probing, stalk eyes bulging, its coiled shell shining in brilliant colors. A muffled chorus of clicks, squeaks, and croaks echoes along the reef.
Diving into these waters as a human would be like slipping into a warm bath. Even this far from the equator, seawater temperatures hover at a year-round average of 90 degrees or higher. Hot oceans lead to low currents and frequently stagnant waters — the lower reaches of the inland sea suffer frequent drops in oxygen, fueling vast dead zones. Fueled by the heat, massive hurricanes sweep along the coasts, churning up the bottom and carrying tracts of organic material out to sea. But the turbulent ocean supports riches, too: The combination of shallow waters, abundant sunlight, and upwelling nutrients feed a variety of monsters. An immense shadow slides over the mollusk reef. The fish panic, contracting into mirrored walls or exploding into dizzying clouds. With a squirt of sea water, the ammonite pulls inside its shell. Sculling overhead is a 40-foot Tylosaurus, her flippers tucked against her sides, keeled tail moving in slow, sinuous strokes. She’s a mosasaur, a descendant of small monitor lizards that colonized the sea in the earliest Cretaceous. As competing families vanished or turned to specialized fish-eating, the mosasaurs exploded in size and colonized every ocean in the world. The waters of Alabama alone play host to the portly, clam-crushing Globidens, the swift Platecarpus, shy Clidastes, and Tylosaurus, ruler of them all.
This mosasaur is formidable, with long, heavy jaws and a crushing bite. She moves through the water with the lazy assurance of an apex predator. Years ago, she claimed a stretch of the surrounding sea with access to both deep water and high reefs, and now she knows it by heart: the best spots to settle in for a nap, where the cleaner fish gather to nibble at parasites and flakes of dead scales, and most importantly the spots where she can lurk undetected, waiting to seize anything — fish, diving bird, or smaller sea-lizard — outlined against the surface. Her black eyes scan the riot of colors. Most of the time she guards her territory jealously. But once a year, she makes an exception — for her mate.
He’s coming now: a 46-foot titan, his scarred, barnacle-encrusted head swiveling. A broad tongue laps out, checking her scent trail, trying to assess whether she’s receptive. She circles around, investigating him in turn. She knows him well: Like her distant kin, the modern Komodo dragon, Tylosaurus sometimes form loose but long-lasting relationships, splitting for much of the year before coming together in the breeding season. Despite their familiarity, both are cautious. Mosasaur courtship can swing from tender to violent in a heartbeat, and both bear literal scars from past failed romances. A reintroduction is called for.
As the fish shift and scatter around them, the two leviathans begin to dance, sliding and spiraling slowly through the water, tongues flicking gently against each other’s sides. Their pebbled flanks brush together, rasping in the water. Once or twice she breaks off when he presses too close, throat inflated in warning, bubbles curling from her open jaws. The male swerves off each time. Then, he returns, and the dance continues. They’ll keep up like this for an hour, breaking occasionally to gulp air, before the male twines around her in a quick embrace. After a few weeks of mating, he’ll be gone; after seven months, she’ll deliver a litter of four tiny pups in open water, a hundred miles from land...
Want more? Check out The Lost Continent of Appalachia over at the Bitter Southerner. I'll be posting bonus content--including some deleted scenes and art that didn't make the final cut--here in a few days. Keep an eye out!
Long-time readers may remember that five years or so ago, I created a collection of dinosaur family crests. They proved to be a decent seller in my shop. Eventually, I decided to retire them, along with some other design collections, to keep the designs in my shop more current. But I always intended to revisit the idea, and now I am.
The first of the new line is dedicated to the great thunder beasts of Sauropoda, featuring Brontosaurus rampant. It's available in my shop on a wide variety of merch. Purchases are always appreciated, of course, but at this time they'll be especially helpful in our efforts to move to WordPress.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and look forward to filling up the collection. I've begun figuring out Thyreophora, and after that will likely be Ornithopoda. And I suppose Theropoda will be coming down the pike. Stinkin' theropods. They'll be added to the collection at Redbubble, which can be accessed by this direct link.
One last thing: I would be remiss not to mention that Rebecca Groom does some absolutely delightful heraldic designs, including her Yi qi, currently available.
The devil never had a greater ally than this modern atmosphere of genial, amiable, pleasant tolerance, in which nothing is bad, everything is good, and black and white are smeared into an indefinite gray. Nothing matters if everybody is in good humor. (1)
We are living in the dark. The closing chapter of this age is dominated by the prince and powers of darkness. Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. The night is far spent; the blackness is more extensive and more excessive as it deepens just before the dawn. Mammoth Cave is not limited to Kentucky; it is universal!
Strangely enough, man never had more artificial illumination and less true light. Bodily, he walks in unprecedented brilliance, while his soul dwells in unmitigated night. He can release a nuclear glory that outdazzles the sun, and with it he plans his own destruction. He can put satellites in the sky, and left to himself, he is a wandering star to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.(2)
We not only live in the dark, we get used to it. There is a slow, subtle, sinister brainwashing process going on and by it we are gradually being desensitized to evil. Little by little, sin is made to appear less sinful until the light within us becomes darkness–and how great is that darkness! Our magazines are loaded with accounts of sordid crime, our newsstands with concentrated corruption. We are engulfed in a tidal wave of pornographic filth. Television has put us in the dark with Sodom and Gomorrah–right in the living room. We get used to it, acclimated to it. We accept, as a matter of course, its art, its literature, its music, its language. We learn to live with it without an inner protest.(3)
One may live in a twilight zone, in conditions of low visibility, until he finds the practices of this world less repulsive. He mistakes the stretching of his conscience for the broadening of his mind. He renounces what he calls the “Pharisaism” and “puritanism” of early days with a good word for dancing, smoking, and even cocktails now and then. Instead of passing up Vanity Fair, he spends his vacations there.(4)
Living on an island devoid of giant theropods, Hatzegopteryx was an azhdarchid pterosaur that acheived a status few of its brethren could hope for: top terrestrial predator. Read more about this "shoebill-hornbill-terminator" from Mark Witton and Brian Switek.
This year's edition of PaleoFest, held at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, IL is coming up in one month. Head to the museum's site to download the registration form. LITC's own Victoria Arbour will be speaking there! And I *miiiiiight* be able to go.
It got pretty darned cold after the Chicxulub impact. Fernanda Castano writes about new research modeling the post-KT global climate.
The US state of Arkansas is one step closer to naming its own state dinosaur, the undescribed coeleruosaur foot known as "Arkansaurus." For her part, Rebecca Hunt-Foster, who initially examined the fossils in the early 2000's, is working on getting the critter described. Check out that link to see loveable rouser of rabble Brian Engh's illustration, too.
How long did non-avian dinosaurs incubate? New research looks into the question by studying growth lines in the teeth of Protoceratops and Hypacrosaurus embryos, among other methods. Their conclusion is that it's likely that the rapid incubation we see in living dinosaurs is a later development, and most Mesozoic dinosaurs developed slowly. Read more from Carolyn Gramling for Science and NPR.
At Aeon, Alex Riley writes about recent efforts to understand what prehistoric worlds sounded like, touching on Vegavis, Parasaurolophus, and the bush cricket Archaboilus musicus.
At SV-POW, Mike Taylor cautions us not to rely on a photo to interpret a fossil.
Rebor has released three Deinonychus replicas as part of a larger Acrocanthosaurus and Tenontosaurus diorama, and they are quite lovely. Check out Everything Dinosaur's post on the set. Now, I look forward to the alternate universe version, in which a Tenontosaurus triumphantly bellows a victory song atop a heap of fallen theropods it has bested.
Lisa Buckley, inspired by some proselytizing door-knockers, decided to start making science-oriented pamphlets to hand out when the need arises, starting her "Science Tracks" series with OMFG Birds are Great!
How does one keep up with the ever-increasing amount of paleontological research? At the SVP blog, Dr. Darin Croft has some advice.
At Quartz India, Pranay Lal writes about the dinosaurs of Cretaceous greater India.
At Paleo-King, Nima brings our attention to an article from 2015 that reports the results of a paleoart survey of 115 paleontologists (of whom 100 responded). The article, published in Current Trends in Paleontology and Evolution, had the goal of creating a working definition of paleoart. One question was for respondents to identify paleoartists whose work they recognized, with interesting results (Doug Henderson and Greg Paul each had only 5 mentions apiece). It would be interesting to see this performed with a larger sample size and with more international participation: Spain accounted for 70% of the respondents. Direct PDF link here.
Sometimes a fossil in prep confounds one's expectations: so writes Anthony Maltese about a spectacular, unexpected Ichthyornis fossil he's currently working on.
If you're into turtles and you're into latitudinal diversity gradients, Jon Tennant has you covered, sweetheart.
Susie Maidment ran through hypotheses about the function of stegosaurian plates and spikes for the website Know it Wall.
Duane Nash wades into the great feathers vs. scales fracas at Antediluvian Salad.
We'll end with a little field trip to Mongolia, starting at Extinct, where Leonard Finkelman writes a metaphysical musing on the "ownership" of fossils, stemming from the debate over repatriating fossils from the American Museum of Natural History back to Mongolia. Also read the statment from Bolortsetseg Minjin, president of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, on the complicated matter. She also spoke to Palaeocast about it last year. While we're on the topic, head over to Prehistoric Beast of the Week and check out Chris DiPiazza's recent post featuring great illustrations of Mongolian dinosaurs..
Plenty going on this month! If you're not able to donate to these campaigns, help spread the word. It really does help, and folks running campaigns do appreciate every share. A couple of campaigns are closing soon at Experiment, a science crowdfunding site.
First is The end of an Era: Resolving the dinosaur extinction and the beginning of the 'age of mammals' in northwest Argentina. Ending in less than a week, a University College London team led by Anjali Goswami and Agustin Scanferla "will intensively explore new fossil sites in Northwest Argentina, where we have recently discovered dinosaur, crocodile, and other fossils from this period."
Next up is Geology of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of central Montana. A team from the University of Oklahoma led by Dean R. Richmond hopes to "describe the stratigraphy, sedimentology, and depositional facies of the Morrison Formation in central Montana." The crowdfunding effort will help cover the costs of analyzing a wealth of material that was collected in quarries last summer, including sauropod fossils, petrified wood, and freshwater and marine organisms.
Artists Raven Amos and Scott Elyard, who run the excellent art and design firm Cubelight Graphics, are holding their ninth art show soon, taking place at Espresso Cafe in Wasilla, AK. They've held a successful Indiegogo campaign to fund printing of their art for the show, but it's still worth chipping in to help meet stretch goals - as well as to get some great perks, natch. So, I'll be sharing one of Raven's featured pieces, the wonderful Styracosarus Jungle. I'm not alone in my love for Raven's work, which often hearkens back to pop art and art deco.
Also check out the promotional video for the show shared below. Congratulations on the successful campaign and best of luck at the show, Raven and Scott!