Wishing a dangerous night to all crews who celebrate

🦶🦶

Due to a briefly mentioned but highly important plot point, and due to the Giganotosaurus and Argentinosaurus skeleton mounts at the Fernbank Museum making an appearance, I hereby declare Bugonia to be by far the best dinosaur movie of 2025.

Feelin' normal

It's the holidays, so I'm finally getting a chance to revisit some personal pieces.

I saw me some Avatar. Good, but uneven. More thoughts here: boxd.it/c7wOZr

While I do have genuine criticisms, I still want to be positive overall about the new Tomb Raider reveals, just to offset some of the completely insane takes of permanently internet-brained and terminally miserable sectors of the fandom. It's really one of the worst there is.

The Game Awards are weasely slop, but it does actually feel pretty neat to know that are several video games in the pipeline that I'm actually really looking forward to playing. Haven't felt that for a while.

What mainstream AAA media seems to think modern dinosaurs look like is in many ways kind of further from modern dinosaurs than 1990s era dinosaurs looked.

Cancelled Core Design Anniversary Edition T. rex, you were but a candle in the wind...

Why do none of the new Resi games have Claire Redfield or Jill Valentine in them. We don't need Leon agaaaaaiiinnnnn

!!!!!!!!! youtu.be/lAmkl1jL0fo?...

I strongly encourage my palaeoart peers who work in the museum display sector to write explicit "no AI modification" clauses into their contracts. Even if your employee contacts at a given museum are trustworthy, you can't rely on outsourced 3rd parties to not butcher your work without said clause.

Quickish Nanotyrannus lethaeus anatomy study. Really cool to see two papers more or less back to back that very conclusively reestablish NanoT as a distinct taxon.

Well-preserved Triceratops skulls have a sharp falloff on the rear frill from a vascular texture to "scooped out" cavities. It is likely these cavities were filled out by neck musculature. Many reconstructions overlook them, ending up with necks that are prorbably far too skinny.

Going to invent time travel specifically so I can go back in time to 2017 and laugh with vicious mockery in the face of undergraduate me as he very confidently gave a presentation on the case against Nanotyrannus. Oh young Matthew, what a fool you were.

Toe time

Arms finished!? Next focal area for 100% manually sculpting will be the feet.

Hands

What it is about dinosaurs that seems to turn off artist's brains when it comes to acceptable levels of derivativeness? I am so, so sick of seeing commercial/comissioned dinosaur artwork that in any other sub-field of illustration would be considered extremely blatant plagiarism.

Two cinema visits today! Good Boy was a creatively spirited little horror that I think probably would have been better at half the length, & the Perfect Blue restoration was a masterpiece, until it wasn't (even considering different ways to read it, I really dislike the ending).

No, *you're* spamming a T. rex WIP too much.

The dewlap is finished... I can foresee a very stupid universe full of poor choices where I also decide to manually sculpt the individual scales across the full body. But I do think it's time to commit to some custom alphas, now.

Almost done with the dewlap

Alright, we're working again. I thought I might have switched to alphas by now, but the wrinkled throat needs a more specific flow.

Was just doing a quick test to make sure the mouth could close, and accidentally created a monster.

Obligatory "I can't decide which MatCap looks nicest for posting WIPs" post.

I felt like I was on a roll this evening but my tablet started malfunctioning, and I don't feel like fighting with the mouse...

More fun with the Spore vehicle creator... A totally inconspicuous red and blue truck.

Couldn't sleep, tried something in Spore...

Today's cinema trips! I might raise the Avatar 2 rating to 5 just because of how blown away I was by the artistry of it all. It was actually my first viewing, I missed the original release, and figured that TV would be an inherently lesser experience, so I decided to wait.

Watching Snowpiercer, spotted John Sibbick's Archaeopteryx.

A dumb analogy - you wouldn't look at a freshly ironed shirt and conclude that fabric doesn't crease.

I think the allure of soft tissue has made people too comfortable with taking slab fossils at face value. It's not like they aren't useful at all for inferring life appearance, but you have to consider that these are non-rigid 3D objects that have been compressed into a 2D plane.

As of this week, three out of the four research chapters from my PhD have been published. Data from the fourth is currently being adapted for an in-progress paper. royalsocietypublishing.org/.../10.../rs... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Forgot to announce I have a new paper out this week! Animals that are more front-heavy have thicker, differently shaped forelimb bones to deal with the extra load. Limb bones alone may thus be useful proxies for body shape - but posture complicates things. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Style test for a tutorial series I'm putting together. Will probably redraw the life head shot, as I kinda rushed it.

A lighting turnaround of the new-look Spicomellus I made for the PR materials. Was really cool to see this clip + the turntable on BBC news last night. I'm really happy with the copper patina vibe I settled on for the colours. This was my first time working in Substance Painter!

Introducing a crazy new look for Spicomellus, based on new osteoderms unlike anything we've ever seen before. I was brought in to produce a life reconstruction based on the new material, published today in Nature by Maidment et al:

Hi all, me, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and the amazing UK-US-Moroccan team are delighted to announce that.. we have a new specimen of Spicomellus AND IT'S WAY WEIRDER AND WAY COOLER THAN WE EVER IMAGINED!!

I've been on a bit of a genre binge these last few days.

Insane movies to watch back to back

Watching tonight - not the most conventional double feature ever, but I don't get into the city as often as I'd like, and I'm not missing an IMAX rerelease of one of my all time faves.

All set up for @dinoconuk.bsky.social! Come by table 4 tomorrow... I have dinosaurs if you have coin.