Deinonychus antirrhopus marker sketches

Oklahoma 112 million years ago - Shortly after the arrival of the wet season, in the middle of the land in North America that will one day encompass the Antlers and Twin Mountain Formations, a huge, 12-metre-long male Acrocanthosaurus has just driven away a pair of Deinonychus from their Tenontosaurus kill and lifts the carcass up in its jaws as the Dromaeosaurs, compelled to make another kill, watch from a distance; a pair of Sauroposeidon and two more Tenontosaurus pass by in the background.

Shortly after the arrival of the wet season, in the middle of the land in North America that will one day encompass the Antlers and Twin Mountain Formations, a huge, 12-metre-long male Acrocanthosaurus has just driven away a pair of Deinonychus from their Tenontosaurus kill and lifts the carcass up in its jaws as the Dromaeosaurs, compelled to make another kill, watch from a distance; a pair of Sauroposeidon and two more Tenontosaurus pass by in the background.

In the middle of the Jurassic, a Dubreuillosaurus battles a Lexovisaurus on one of the tropical islands that will one day become Normandy in modern-day France.

Quick sketches I’ve made of the Cretaceous dinosaurs Caudipteryx and Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai

Deinocherius mirificus, the Great and Powerful

A male Pteranodon longiceps and two members of his harem soar across the shallow tropical sea that covers what will one day be Kansas, 81 million years ago in what is now the Niobrara Chalk Formation, while a Styxosaurus passes by at the ocean's surface.

Sketches of Camarasaurus lentus, Neovenator saleri and Ornithmumus velox

A Fight against the Tyrants

A long Allosaurus fragilis tries to bring down a small juvenile Diplodocus carnegii running amongst a herd of larger, nigh—invincible adults, but will he succeed or fail?

I grew up watching the original WWD as a kid, so with its 25th anniversary still fresh in people’s minds, I wanted to pay homage to the show that inspired my enduring fascination with dinosaurs and paleontology with a redraw of this promotional image for the special “The Ballad of Big Al”:

Big Al resting in the shade

Paleo-Profiles: Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurus rex is a species of giant coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur that inhabited the island continent of Laramidia 68-66 million years ago at the very end of the Cretaceous in what is now the western half of North America, and is the younger species of the genus Tyrannosaurus with the oldest species being T.mcraeensis that lived about 69-68 million years ago in what is now New Mexico. With fully-grown adults Measuring up to 12-13 m (40-43ft) long, weighing up to 8 tons and standing about 4 meters (13 ft) tall at the hips, T.rex was the last and largest member of the Tyrannosauridae, the dominant family of large theropod dinosaurs that thrived in North America and Asia during the Late Cretaceous, and is widely considered to be one of the largest and most powerful of all theropod dinosaurs and one of the largest terrestrial carnivores ever to have walked the earth. As an active hunter and scavenger that would have stalked its prey in the thickets of dense vegetation with energy-efficient walking speeds of 4.6 km/h and ambushed them with short bursts of speed of T.rex had a wide, 1.5 meter (5 ft) long skull with large fenestrae or openings that reduced its weight, forward-facing grapefruit-sized eyes placed behind its narrow, highly-sensitive snout that gave it binocular vision far exceeding those of modern birds of prey, very large and highly-developed olfactory lobes that gave it a superior sense of smell and a long cochlea that was attuned to hearing low-frequency sounds, a pair of small but powerful forelimbs that could carry weights of up to 200 kg and hold on to prey animals that were subdued by the theropod’s jaws, large pads on its feet that cushioned its feet and silenced its footsteps, heavily-built jaws that were lined with 30 cm (12 in) long teeth that were designed to prevent struggling prey animals from escaping, and its bite force of over 3,600 N is considered to be the largest of any carnivore in Earth’s history besides those of the fish Dunkelosteus and Megalodon and enabled the massive predator to crush bones repeatedly and fully consume the carcasses of its ceratopsian and hadrosaur prey. Juvenile Tyrannosaurus had much lankier builds and narrower heads than the adults and preyed upon smaller herbivores such as the small ceratopsian Leptoceratops and the ornithopod Thescelosaurus, and the size of the prey animals increased as the juveniles grew into their larger, heavily built adult forms. Fossil evidence suggests that T.rex adults may have cannibalized juveniles that were not their own, and like in many other tyrannosaurs such as Albertosaurus and Daspletosaurus, it is also possible that the adult males, which may have had bright colors on their bosses, lacrimal bones and throat pouches in order to impress the females, might have engaged each other in brutal fights over territory or mating rights with their jaws and forelimbs. Recent evidence from some fossil enamel isotopes published in 2022 also indicates that T.rex may have also opportunistically scavenged on the carcasses of marine reptiles that washed up on the shores of the Western Interior Seaway.

Paleo-Files: Torosaurus latus

Torosaurus latus is a species of giant chasmosaurine ceratopsian dinosaur that inhabited the island continent of Laramidia 69-66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous in what is now Western North America, from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the north down to New Mexico and Texas in the south. This “perforated lizard”, which measures 7.5-9m (25-30 ft) long and weighs 6-11 tons, can be distinguished from its more abundant and famous relative Triceratops for having a pair of large openings in its neck frill, and its skull, which measures about 2.7-3m (9 -9.8 feet) long is also the largest known any land animal. A controversial study from 2010 tried to position Torosaurus as a mature form of Triceratops, but has been heavily criticized by the majority of researchers in the years since, and subsequent studies of the morphology between the two ceratopsians have shown that they should remain as separate genera. Despite being one of the rarer ceratopsians of its ecosystem, Torosaurus latus was nevertheless a wide-ranging inhabitant of the lush floodplains that stretched across Maastrichtian-aged Laramidia and lived in small family groups alongside other dinosaurs such as Anylosaurus, Anzu, Dromaeosaurids and Troodontids, Edmontosaurus annectens, Ornithomimus, Pachycephalosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and the azhdarchid Quetzalcoatlus and the giant titanosaur Alamosaurus in the southernmost parts of its range.

A nigh-exhaustive sheet of illustrations I’ve made of some of the various Kami or nature spirits that inhabit the magical island continent home of Keiko Yamamoto and her friends, complete with scientific names as if they were described by an inter-dimensional team of paleontologists and zoologists. All these creatures, which were once revered by the animistic Ancient Aetherosians for centuries and possess both positive and negative traits and can be either helpful or harmful to humans, aren’t known by their binomial names in-universe and are found throughout Aetherosia’s forests, wetlands, mountain valleys and deserts, and many of them are the tutelary spirits of their lands, such as Julius bring the tutelary guardian of their Hills of Fire. These Kami (non of which are shown to scale here) come in a variety of shapes, sizes snd abilities, and will be touched upon in future posts. But for now the most common nature spirits that occupy the herbivore niche are Lophosaurus and Megapodosaurus, the piscivorous Phoenicoterusaurus is fnound near rivers and lakes, and the dominant top predator is the horned Carcharodontosaurus relative Ceratovenator ferox, which was once widespread throughout Aetherosis but was heavily hunted by goblins and humans alike for its horns, which were said to have medicinal properties, during the 50-year-long Arpan-Thuban War, and was thus driven to extinction with the last-surviving members of the species such as Julius, hiding in the Hills of Fire. It is only with Keiko’s magical assistance and her affinity with the natural world that these creatures come to her aid in preventing the Arpanians and Thubanians from seizing the Golden Orb during the final Battle of the Forest of Hope.

Happy Canada Day 2025 to all my Canadian fans and supporters!

Sketch of a Dippy dad watching over one of his kids