Tewi embracing Reisen for Mother’s Day

“Reisen, you’re the closest I’ll ever have to a mother moon rabbit who cares for me, nurtures me and protects me, even if I keep playing pranks on you.”

“As always, Tewi…”

Happy Mother’s Day, Keiko!

Keiko Yamamoto embraces her mother Minami, a mage joined her husband Hitoshi as a loyal member of the Order of the Philosopher’s Stone, which was tasked with guarding the legendary alchemical substance, once used thousands of years earlier to forge the Golden Orb among other magical artifacts of power and war, from the hands of the warring goblin empires of Arpan and Thuban, in a loving, tender hug for Mother’s Day.

Kanako’s Honorary Mother’s Day Gift

At a picnic held in the middle of a glade of blooming cherry trees, Kanako gets delighted surprised at the bouquet of roses given to her by Suwako and Sanae, who both consider her their caring, loving, spiritual mother for nurturing and safeguarding them as acolytes of the Moriya Shrine, and she then gives everyone cups of green tea to sip together.

Happy Mother’s Day 2025! A female Maiasaura provides a mouthful of ferns for her hatchlings to eat as her mate watches from behind. Maiasaura peeblesorum was a hadrosaur from the Campanian-aged Two Medicine Formation of North America that gained widespread fame and recognition as the first large-bodied dinosaur known to have practiced parental care after its nests and eggs with embryos inside were found in the 1970s at the height of the ground-breaking Dinosaur Renaissance. It soon turned out that, as with other archosaurs such as crocodilians, parental care was a widespread feature among dinosaurs, including birds, as evidenced by the discoveries of eggs and hatchlings belonging to the hadrosaur Hypacrosaurus, the early Jurassic prosauropod Massospondylus, ceratopsians such as Psittacosaurus and Protoceratops, the oviraptorid theropods, and many others.

Two Columbian Mammoths, male to the left and female to the right, bring the newly-born calf of the longtime resident females on a walk to the water-hole with the herd matriarch following in the background.

Happy Mother’s Day 2025! A mother and calf of Opthalmosaurus icenicus, the icthyosaur from the OG Walking with Dinosaurs, swim together 164 million years ago in the shallow tropical Jurassic seas of what is now the Oxford Clay of southeastern England.

Two Limusaurus looking for ferns to eat and a Guanlong chasing a large, beetle-like insect both scamper past the massive, pillar-like legs of a Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum browsing on the leaves of a conifer 160 million years ago in what will one day be the Shishugou Formation of northwestern China.

A male Stegosaurus stenops leaves the edge of a water-hole to reunite with his thirsty mate and offspring after they’ve both endured a long trek across the sand dunes to reach it, 155 million years ago in what is now the Morrison Formation of Colorado.

Paleo-Files: Cretoxyrhina mantelli

Cretoxyrhina mantelli, whose name menas “Mantell’s Cretaceous Sharp-Nose”, is a cosmopolitan species of giant mackerel shark that evolved from Cenomaian-age ancestors and lived around 95-70 million years ago in subtropical to temperate waters worldwide, including waters as cold as 5 °C. At 8 meters long and 4,944 kg in weight, C.mantelli was one of the largest and most formidable sharks of its time, and a major component of the Western Interior Seaway ecosystem that is represented by localities such as the Niobrara Chalk Formation and the Pierre Shale. As a fast-swimming, stockily-built regional endotherm that had acute vision thanks to its huge eyes, powerful kinetic jaws that were more robust than those of the modern mako shark, and an average cruising speed of 12 km/h, Cretoxyrhina was capable of reaching burst speeds of up to 70 km/h in order to inflict fatal blows onto its prey, sometimes to the point of propelling them out of the water, and its razor-sharp, 8 cm-long-teeth had thick enamel that was built for stabbing and slicing large fish such as Xiphactinus and smaller sharks such as Squalicorax, marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and small mosasaurs, and archosaurs such as pterosaurs and dinosaurs. Although it was mainly a pelagic hunter, Cretoxyrhina could occasionally scavenge from time to time , and the status that it held as the chief apex predator of the Late Cretaceous seas was only challenged by giant species of the mosasaurs Mosasaurus and Tylosaurus such as M.hoffmani and T.proriger respectively, and competition with these bus-sized reptile predators could have driven it to extinction by the start of the Maastrichtian, along with the closing of the Western Interior Seaway.

Paleo-Files: Ubirajara jubatus

Ubirajara jubatus is a species of composognathid theropod that lived about 115 mya in what is now the Crato Formation of Brazil, coexisting alongside the small paravian Cratoavis and strange pterosaurs such as Ludodactylus and Tupandactylus. One of the most striking dinosaurs ever to hail from the Southern Hemisphere, Ubirajara is unique among compsognathids for possessing a pair of three long display feathers on its shoulders. The only proposed holotype fossil, from which Ubirajara was described in 2020, was unearthed in 1995 by a German museum and was held in its collections for a few decades until it was returned to Brazil in 2023.

Keiko and co. approaching the ruins of an ancient bomber WIP

Meet the Real Dire Wolf

A digital impression of the large Ice Age canid Aenocyon dirus, the iconic heavily-built, bone-crushing pseudo-wolf whose ancestors split apart from other Canid genera 5.7 million years ago, evolved from A.edwardii and A.armbrusteri in the Pliocene and flourished throughout the Pleistocene, preying on horses, bison, and other large herbivores, and is distantly related to modern grey wolves and other species of the genus Canis, but is nonetheless a member of the subtribe Canina of the tribe Canini alongside the genera Canis, Lupulella, and Cuon. because Aenocyon dirus is known to have inhabited a wide variety of habitats ranging from grasslands to forests and from cold tundra to dry deserts and isn’t related to any Canis species, its coloration in life might have been far different and unique in some way from most other canid genera.

Medusaceratops lokii is a 6-meter-long relative of the centrosaurine ceratopsian Albertaceratops that was described in 2010 from fossils found in 1993. It inhabited that is now the Judith River Formation of Montana 77.5 million years ago and was part of a diverse Campanian-age fauna of dinosaurs and other animals that included the closely-related Lokiceratops mangniformis, the basal chasmosaurine Judiceratops tigris and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis, the tyrannosaurs Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus and the giant crocodilian Deinosuchus hatcheri. Medusaceratops and its relatives also prove that ceratopsians are among the most impressive and morphologically-diverse dinosaurs ever known to science.

WIP of my pencil-art depiction of the infamous air raid on Guernika on April 26, 1937 that soon became Spain’s greatest historical tragedy.

A color-pencil impression of Epidexipteryx hui, one the smallest and most bizarre dinosaurs from the Jurassic Period, engaging in a non-fatal dominance display

Random sketches of two WW2 British tanks, three Pacific War fighters, the newly-described species of Allosaurus and two species of Stegosaurus