Camarillasaurus cirugedae

If you didn't know this already have a fact to brighten your day. This is my cat Boris when he played Jones in Aliens. He was picked because he would hiss on camera because he was not a nice guy.

Phylogeny of pigeons: academic.oup.com/auk/advance-... 🪶🧪 (📷Thierry Cordenos)

I may be on a roll.

All the king's rexes

The Jurassic but more purpler #FossilFriday

I have some time free if anyone wants to commission any bird art - ko-fi.com/c/6911096a6c

I don’t think I love anything as much as the surreal, alien palaeoart of the 70s into the early 90s. These compositions are all naturalistic, but they’re strange and hypernatural in a way that transcends realism. It’s a bizarre but profoundly moving approach to reconstructing the past.

All of these Beaked Whales are for a project featuring all 24 known species that’ll be out soon! #cetacea #ocean

happy mario day! this is yoshi, though he might look a little different from how you remember him 🐱 yoshi was a metailurin sabre-toothed cat that lived in late miocene eurasia, and its cursorial adaptations were well-suited to open habitats (art by mauricio anton)

I present to you: Ramari’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon eueu) sucking up a squid of the Mastigoteuthis genus. #dolphin #cetacea #whale #ocean

#FossilFriday #PaleoFest Composite juvenile skeleton of the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon at the Maryland Science Center

A boomerang made from mammoth ivory, from Obłazowa Cave, Poland. Dating to around 40,000 years ago, the object was shaped and well-used, with signs of polish in the areas where a right-handed person would have handled and thrown it. Photo: Sahra Talamo and coworkers (2025, scale=5cm)

Here's a sneak preview of the upcoming Jurassic World Institute Dinopedia artwork article, to give you an idea of just how high-quality the images I've received are. This is Carcharodontosaurus and Argentinosaurus, two of the dozens of animals Timothy Bradley illustrated for the JP Institute site!

I'm very fond of duikers and had the privilege of seeing quite a few in the forests of central Africa

A Brandt’s Cormorant rocking that electric blue! #birds #nature #wildlife #photography

happy #fossilfriday! bonus: this is megapterygius, a mosasaur from late cretaceous japan. at least 5 of its posterior dorsal vertebrae have neural spines that project anterodorsally, suggesting that it may have had a dorsal fin reminiscent of some delphinoid cetaceans (art by @adamrl.bsky.social)

Meet the spectacled bear! Also known as the Andean bear, it’s distinguished by the glasses-shaped marking on its face. An inhabitant of the tropical Andes, it’s currently the only extant bear species in South America. Photo: Melvin TOULLEC, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Fossils of Alberta

Revamped Spinothingie!

Also new here at Tet Zoo Towers... what, _another_ Greg Paul dinosaur book from Princeton? Yup, Sauropods and Prosauropods. It's for review. Like everyone, I have mixed feelings on these books; Paul's idiosyncratic taxonomy is an issue. #dinosaurs #books

Womp womp Art by Todd Marshall

New specimen of Alnashetri shows it to be a late-surviving non-alvarezsaurid alvarezsaur retaining unreduced forelimbs and representing an independent evolution of miniaturization: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪 (📷Makovicky et al.)

Today, according to my 12yo, is Spangled Coquette Awareness Day! The males of this South American hummingbird have a spectacular crest. This article says “sedentary” which confused me for a hummingbird but I read further to realize that simply means it’s not migratory… not a couch potato.

An excellent three-post take on one of the many facets of the recent Spinosaurus/Myhrvold/Epstein controversy. Science journalists, this story really needs covering! #scicomm #science #ethics #epstein

I've never paid much attention to the European wild boar included in the artiodactyl display but today it occurred to me that its pose _might_ be based on that of the famous Italian statue shown here, first written about in the 1550s, stolen and taken to Oxford, and cast many times in bronze...

I've written at length about the Blue whale model, the very first of its kind and built to accompany the Irish skeleton from 1891 now known as Hope. So I'll avoid talking about it again... there's tons to say. It was constructed by Percy and Stuart Stammwitz in 1937 and 38...

Everyone loves Lagenorhynchus... err, I mean Cephalorhynchus cruciger, the brilliant Hourglass dolphin of the far south. I've always enjoyed looking at the NHM model of it, but today I noticed... you can see its teeth!! I never noticed this before.

Today I noticed - I think for the first time - that some of the scars on the Risso's dolphin (a species I've seen in life, once at close range) are very specifically meant to be squid arm scars... brilliant detail!

One of THE best things in the whole museum is the collection of life-sized whales, made in the NHM workshops during the 1930s. They're phenomenally good...

I had a few errands to run at London's Natural History Museum this morning. There is so much amazing stuff there I always notice and appreciate something new, so here's a thread on things I saw...

"We describe the only known example of a three-dimensionally mineralized heart, thick-walled stomach, and bilobed liver from arthrodire placoderms, stem gnathostomes from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia" www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Corythosaurus - digital bust #scicomart

In my mind, the Aplomado Falcon is the prettiest falcon out there. I was fortunate to see my first ones in Brazil nearly a decade ago, and have photographed them a few times since.

Hello again from the Natural History Museum at night

Good morning from one of the world's greatest museums. We're here before opening.

Like everyone else, I was pleasantly surprised by the news of spinosaurus mirabilis being officially named and described. And reading how we have material from multiple distinct specimens is amazing. I was not gonna slouch on the flood of new paleoart depicting it.

Finally we have Spinosaurus mirabilis Sereno et al. 2026 here

Myhrvold has denied a friendly relationship and any wrongdoing. But it's pretty tone-deaf that coverage of this paper isn't addressing his involvement, especially when he's prominent in the authorship (3rd of 28). Lots of questions need answering about this, and our media have failed to ask them.

I mean, yes, fun dinosaur stuff is fun dinosaur stuff. But Myhrvold is mentioned in the recent batch of Epstein files over 1000 times (far more than Horner). Some of the correspondence between the two is very chummy and concerning. See: www.seattletimes.com/business/loc....

In which I provide a few thoughts on the new Spinosaurus species, S. mirabilis. www.newscientist.com/article/2516... I also stressed the deep connections between one of the study authors - Nathan Myhrvold - and Geoffrey Epstein to New Scientist. They didn't mention it, neither has anyone else.

Takahē were thought to be extinct until 1948. When I first learned about them as a kid visiting New Zealand in 1981, there were only 100 birds and I desperately wanted to see one. Now there are 500 birds. Yesterday I first saw them—seven in one day. Thank you, NZ, for brilliant conversation work.

Finished the final piece for the shark book - the electric ray Eotorpedo zapping a sand tiger in the Early Eocene. That concludes 80 pieces generated for the book. Got me a sore right hand that smacks of RSI so going to relax then get back to doing some commissions and a bit of art just for fun.

Scientists have captured footage of a sleeper shark farther south than ever before, suggesting this Antarctic ocean is not shark-free

Today's feel-good story: a tegu rescued from the snow by a kind person in Providence, RI, has been saved by ET Reptiles & New England Wildlife Center. Usually, pet reptiles die in these circumstances, but frostbite treatment worked. @rickclaypool.bsky.social even visited the tegu + took this photo.

“Dragging a ladder through long rows of bookshelves can be exhausting. It’s much more efficient to have a co-worker who’s able to reach the top shelves on their own or at least give you a boost climbing up.” #miragaia #stegosaur #dinosaur #paleoart #library #librarian #books

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.” You can’t trust chatbots.

Nile croc head, currently on display at Vancouver aquarium

Mammothssss