Hi everyone. It should be obvious that I'm WEEKS behind on everything, due in part to conference attendance (the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Toronto and the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in Portland, Oregon) and to TetZooCon, which happened last weekend (3rd and 4th December 2022). I have tons to write about and talk about. I'm not sure where to start, but I'm still catching up on emails and overdue work. A write-up of TetZooCon is here ... 2022-12-12 14:01:28 +0000 UTC
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Ok, I've decided to share the following -- it's destined for Tet Zoo but I figure I may as well share it here first. This article is a draft and the final version will be slightly different. Please keep the news here secret for the time being: I won't be able to publish the final article until the middle of November. Also -- I haven't yet finished compiling the required illustrations, nor have I yet written the captions for the images. Please keep this in mind.
To business then...
2022-10-31 13:27:02 +0000 UTC
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Hello dear patrons! As might be obvious from recent slow progress here, workload again means that I've been unable to achieve anything in terms of the backburner projects -- not a single bit of work done on the Heuvelmans project, nothing on The Big Book, nothing on Cryptozoologicon 2, nothing on the other things. It's frustrating but a consequence of being involved in so many other things. As you might have heard by now, Mesozoic Art - co-edited with Steve White, published ...
2022-10-31 12:58:46 +0000 UTC
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More finished cryptids for the Heuvelmans project. I haven't finished the text on them but here are brief comments...
South American sabretooth. At upper left we have my rendition of a large, striped, cat-like mammal from Colombia and Ecuador – supposedly with sabre teeth – that Heuvelmans included in his list. Heuvelmans wondered if it might be another surviving sabretooth cat, perhaps kin to Smilodon (which is known as a fossil from South America), but he...
2022-09-06 09:31:39 +0000 UTC
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The annoyingly slow work on the cryptids project continues, and here are the latest efforts: the pale Chinese bear the bai-xiong (or baixiong, it means 'white bear') and the mid-sized South American ground sloth - the ellengassen - that Heuvelmans listed in the Neotropical region of his list. I don't think that the baixiong should be regarded as a cryptid, since it's known from taxiderm specimens and even individuals that have been kept alive (Heuvelmans mentioned specimens ...
2022-08-19 18:18:52 +0000 UTC
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I've done more cryptids from the Bernard Heuvelmans list (see previous entries for some explanation), and I've now finished all the cats. As you can see, the remainder are a very attractive bunch. Here are thoughts on them...
1. The onza, a puma-like cat of Mexico regarded as distinct from the puma. Heuvelmans noted suggestions from the 1980s that this animal - if real - might be a surviving population of Miracinonyx, an animal regarded at the ...
2022-08-09 17:07:24 +0000 UTC
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I continue to finish and colourise the cryptids I'm illustrating for the Bernard Heuvelmans project. I've been working through the several cats on the list, and here are some initial results -- there are interesting things to say on the illustrating of all of these animals. In the montage above, you've already heard about (1) the Ile de Levant wildcat (I placed it in the montage for felid-completion reasons), but let's look at the new animals here...
(2) The mega-sized tabby-like crypto...
2022-07-27 12:45:01 +0000 UTC
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The slow work of compiling the giant cryptids montage continues in 'spare' time. Here are some recently completed carnivorans: they won't necessarily be closely positioned in the final thing, since Heuvelmans arranged the cryptids by geographical region, not phylogeny. I've grouped them together for this post only because it looks interesting. The animals shown in the montage above are -- remember that these are all from Heuvelmans's definitive 1986 list of 'creatures yet to be discover...
2022-07-19 15:02:41 +0000 UTC
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As some of you will know already, my background project on illustrating, discussing and montaging ALL the more-than-100 cryptids accepted as valid by Bernard Heuvelmans continues. I can only complete individual illustrations very occasional, so this project is taking forever. Also, I'm no good at colouring things - my skills with photoshop are poor, and my colour vision is rubbish as well. Nevertheless, I'm still committed to getting through the lot, and I thought I'd share some various recen...
2022-07-15 17:43:49 +0000 UTC
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A momentous event -- I managed to put time aside to get through the Eotyrannus proofs AND I FINISHED THEM, and resubmitted the whole thing. This means that the monograph - essentially the bulk of my PhD work, completed in 2007 (!) - is now essentially in press. That's a HUGE accomplishment, and I'll be throwing a party when the study is actually out. As you can see from the above, the paper will be in the open access journal PeerJ. The substantial publication fees were cover...
2022-06-24 17:35:41 +0000 UTC
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I said in the previous post that I had ONE illustration left to go for Ancient Sea Reptiles. That illustration was/is a life reconstruction of the peculiar Triassic marine reptile Helveticosaurus, a moderately large (c 3-4 m long), fang-toothed animal that might be related to sauropterygians. It's only known from one good specimen, initially described by Emile Kuhn-Schnyder in 1974 and redescribed in more detail by Olivier Rieppel in 1989. This reveals that the animal had mo...
2022-06-20 23:04:09 +0000 UTC
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OK, the pictures are - essentially - in place and the captions have mostly been finished. Only final editing and proofing, the cover and end-pages, and some tweaking of the illustrations... and Ancient Sea Reptiles (ASR) is done! It's due to be published early next year (Feb' 2023) by the Natural History Museum. Here are screen-grabs of various of the pages, as seen at proof stage (and thus not showing final formatting or final captions or images). This is all strictly FYEO!
2022-06-20 13:52:27 +0000 UTC
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Hello noble and wonderful patrons. Apologies for my silence: as you might have seen, the last several weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind... the major TV project I've been working on - the Apple TV+/BBC Studios series Prehistoric Planet - has finally come to fruition and seen its televised debut. I was involved in a great deal of the promotion and... what a ride. It was intense. I cannot talk about Prehistoric Planet here, but if you follow me on Twitter (@TetZoo) you'll ha...
2022-06-13 16:35:29 +0000 UTC
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Still at work -- in the background -- on the book Ancient Sea Reptiles, and I've recently made some progress with the mosasaurs needed for the cladograms and such. Turns out that I need six images (since the cladograms will show all of Mosasauria, not just Mosasauridae alone). The animals here are (1) Pannoniasaurus, a tethysaurine; (2) Platecarpus, a plioplatecarpine; (3) Tylosaurus, a tylosaurine; (4) Phosphorosaurus, a halisaurine and (5) Mo...
2022-04-22 18:34:38 +0000 UTC
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Lots going on right now. No progress with the Eotyrannus proofs.... but lots happening with Mesozoic Art, a new book I'm compiling with Steve White.
Meanwhile, work also continues on Ancient Sea Reptiles. I've been drawing lots of ichthyosaurs for the required cladogram I'll feature in the book. Am not yet done on tidying and compiling all the images - more are yet to come. But for now we see (1) Grippia, (2) Mixosaurus, (3) Ichthyosaurus...
2022-04-14 09:39:32 +0000 UTC
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Having done the plesiosaur images representing the main groups (see previous post), I've now arranged them into simplified cladograms to show our changing thoughts on how the groups might be allied. Above you see a 'modern' cladogram, based mostly on Benson & Druckenmiller (2013) but with a structure that owes much to proposals made by Bakker (1993) and then to work by O'Keefe and others. The main novelties here (emerging largely but not entirely from Benson & Druckenmiller (2013)) ar...
2022-03-31 15:00:27 +0000 UTC
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I've managed to do something I haven't done in a long, long time... namely, finish a bunch of drawings! My plan for Ancient Marine Reptiles - my in-prep marine reptile book with the London -Natural History Museum - is to feature cladograms very much like those included in Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. If you have an exceptional memory, you might know that I have previously illustrated a fair number of Mesozoic marine reptiles for the in-prep textbook. Here's an old ...
2022-03-29 18:55:10 +0000 UTC
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Hello supporters! My apologies for such a long silence... the workload continues to be absolutely crushing and I'm months behind on everything. The Eotyrannus monograph is still not finished: the proofs for the final paper arrived at the start of February and I still (as of mid-March) haven't had time to finish going through them, argh. The Mesozoic marine reptile book (working title: Ancient Sea Reptiles) is finished and I recently completed compiling the picture suggestion...
2022-03-16 10:36:57 +0000 UTC
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Great news. As indicated by this screengrab (showing the intro sections from all nine chapters), I've just finised the text for the Mesozoic marine reptiles book. That's a big deal. But I'm not at the end yet. Several of the chapters have been reviewed and I next have to incorporate the suggestions and corrections made by the reviewers. Some chapters haven't yet been for review at all. So .. still some work to do. After that, time to compile pictures and diagrams.
More updates com...
2022-01-17 21:33:50 +0000 UTC
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The end is in sight on the Mesozoic marine reptile book -- only two chapters need completion, and most sections of the book are either out for review or have been reviewed. I still have to compile the pictures. Anyway, here's a draft list of the book's sections and subsections. It should be clear that I really have aimed to be comprehensive, as best as I can given constraints of size and wordcount...
ANCIENT SEA REPTILES
Darren Naish
2022-01-15 11:40:23 +0000 UTC
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Hello dear patrons, Happy New Year for 2022 and apologies as usual for my silence. My workload remains CRUSHING and I truly despair on the getting of things done...
As some of you know, I was supposed to finish my Mesozoic marine reptiles book by the end of 2021. Buuut that hasn't happened; I'm killing myself working on it now (in 'spare time') and still have some way to go. The good news is that several chapters are done and some have been sent off for checking and reviewing. On that n...
2022-01-08 19:55:26 +0000 UTC
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Hello dear patrons, I hope you’re well and that things have been going as well as can be expected. My apologies as ever for lack of appearance here and for few updates, things continue to be heavy on the workload front – which is good, but means little time for the various projects I aim to complete. I have had to abandon progress on the textbook for the short term. HOWEVER, there is news, and here it is…
2021-12-15 08:11:55 +0000 UTC
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For no good reason other than that it seemed fun at the time, I opted to montage the bulk of the Dinopedia drawings I did -- and here they are (with contrast tinkered with so that they stand out more than they do as published). I personally really like these illustrations (sorry if that sounds vain, but it should be expected that artists like the illustrations they work so hard on), and most - albeit not all - of the people who've expressed an opinion seem to like them too. ...
2021-10-22 17:26:37 +0000 UTC
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Hello noble patrons, apologies once again for a delay -- workload is once again meaning that I'm not succeeding in producing content of the sort I aim to share here. As you might have heard, myself and colleagues succeeded in publishing our study on new baryonychine spinosaurs from the Isle of Wight (Barker, C. T., Hone, D. W. E., Naish, D., Cau, A., Lockwood, J. A. F., Forster, B., Clarkin, C. E., Schneide...
2021-10-07 13:32:50 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone. Once again -- so, so, so sorry for silence and lack of action here. The lack of new material doesn't reflect lack of background effort. Outside of the day job, I've been doing a fair bit of publicity stuff for Dinopedia (due out September 2021), have been dealing with the final proofs of the dinosauroid paper (due out soon), have been putting together a new palaeoart-themed book I'm editing with Steve White, have been organising TetZooMCon 2021 (happening Sept 3rd) AND have been ...
2021-08-11 18:30:42 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone - I am so, so sorry for the lack of new content here lately. I've just not been able to do anything. Or, at least, not produce anything that's ready for sharing. In 'spare time' I'm currently putting together my marine reptiles book, but progress is slow and there's nothing to share yet. Demands of work means that nothing else is really happening, though a few technical papers are set to appear over recent months.
I have just completed a new TetZoo article, and it's on...
2021-07-05 09:47:08 +0000 UTC
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You are, no doubt, wondering how things are going with this HUGE project which I really shouldn't have taken on. The answer: I've edited about 34 of the images so far (there are around 108 in total) and have provisionally thrown a few more of them into the developing montage... here's how it looks right now. Remember: this is all going to be published on a giant poster, so the final coloured images have to look fairly detailed. New additions here include the GIANT cirrate octopus Heuvelmans e...
2021-05-20 17:56:25 +0000 UTC
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Hello again, dear patrons. Epically overworked and really struggling at this end... but I wanted to share this advance sneak-peek of a giant project that I'm doing in 'spare' time. As a spinoff of my TetZoocryptomegathread project, I've opted to draw ALL the over 100 cryptids included in Bernard Heuvelmans's 1986 list... then colour them, then composite them together. Months of work! What you see here is merely an early phase in this project. I did actually upload a full-size version of the f...
2021-05-04 09:43:22 +0000 UTC
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Apologies again for long silence - I'm really struggling! The good news is that my new book with Princeton University Press Dinopedia(segments from which have appeared here in the recent past) is now finished, and in fact the page proofs have just arrived. As you can see, the cover is done and just about everything it in place. The book is due to see print in September this year - I'll be talking about it in time at TetZoo and might hold a launch event if that's possible. A bit...
2021-04-15 15:05:27 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone - I must apologise again for silence here, I plan to release new material regularly but things are so difficult, I'm struggling to keep up. A few articles have been published at Tetrapod Zoology lately: most recently a very long review of the Migo lake monster saga of the 1990s. That article is here... http://tetzoo.com/blog/2021/2/16/the-lake-dakataua-migo-lake...
2021-02-19 18:26:25 +0000 UTC
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