Mesozoic Art: Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals in Art

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And thus day 2 began. Hangover, what’s a hangover? The day consisted of five separate things: the pterosaur event, the Mesozoic Art signing event and its associated talk, the ‘designing aliens’ roundtable, the Crystal Palace talk, and the quiz. Plesiosaurs and the repeated invasion of freshwater habitats: late-surviving relicts or evolutionary novelties?, January 2013

Martin-Silverstone, E., Sykes, D. & Naish, D. 2018. Does postcranial palaeoneurology provide insight into pterosaur behaviour and lifestyle? New data from the azhdarchoid Vectidraco and the ornithocheirids Coloborhynchus and Anhanguera. Palaeontology 2018, 1-14. doi: 10.1111/pala/12390 O’Keefe, F. R. & Chiappe, L. M. 2011. Viviparity and K-selected life history in a Mesozoic marine plesiosaur (Reptilia, Sauropterygia). Science 333, 870-873. Naish, D. & Martill, D. M. 2007. Dinosaurs of Great Britain and the role of the Geological Society of London in their discovery: basal Dinosauria and Saurischia. Journal of the Geological Society, London 164, 493-510. Chicxulub crater, on the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, in a computer-generated image synthesized from gravity and magnetic field data. The buried structure, which measures at least 180 km (112 miles) across, is thought to be the scar remaining from the impact 66 million years ago of an asteroid or comet measuring perhaps 10 km (6 miles) in diameter. The Yucatán coastline bisects the crater almost horizontally through its centre. (more) Charig, A. J. & Milner, A. C. 1986. Baryonyx, a remarkable new theropod dinosaur. Nature 324, 359-361.Concavenator: an incredible allosauroid with a weird sail (or hump)... and proto-feathers?, September 2010 Liu, S., Smith, A. S., Gu, Y., Tan, J., Liu, C. K. &Turk, G. 2015. Computer simulations imply forelimb-dominated underwater flight in plesiosaurs. PLoS Computational Biology 11, e1004 . Ruiz-Omeñaca, J. I., Canudo, J. I., Cruzado-Caballero, P., Infante, P. & Moreno-Azanza, M. 2005. Baryonychine teeth (Theropoda: Spinosauridae) from the Lower Cretaceous of La Cantalera (Josa, NE Spain). Kaupia 14, 59-63. Mesozoic Art presents twenty of the best artists working in this field, representing a broad spectrum of disciplines, from traditional painting to cutting-edge digital technology. Some provide the artwork for new scientific papers that demand high-end palaeoart as part of their presentation to the world at large; they also work for the likes of National Geographic and provide art to museums around the world to illustrate their displays. Other artists are the new rising stars of palaeoart in an ever-growing, ever-diversifying field.

Carpenter, K., Sanders, F., Reed, B., Reed, J. & Larson P. 2010. Plesiosaur swimming as interpreted from skeletal analysis and experimental results. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 113/2, 1-34. Bakker, R. T. 1993. Plesiosaur extinction cycles - events that mark the beginning, middle and end of the Cretaceous. In Caldwell, W. G. E. & Kauffman, E. G. (eds) Evolution of the Western Interior Basin. Geological Association of Canada, Special Paper 39, 641-664.However, there are numerous other relevant groups as well, and I did my best to give them fair coverage too. Many of these were alive during the Triassic, including the long-tailed thalattosaurs, the very peculiar hupehsuchians, the (mostly) shellfish-eating placodonts, the fang-toothed helveticosaurs, the nothosaurs, the pistosaurs, and so on. Shared anatomical traits show that some of these groups are close cousins of plesiosaurs and belong with them in a large group termed Sauropterygia; hupehsuchians appear to be close kin of ichthyosaurs (Motani 1999, Motani et al. 2015). Entirely different groups whose affinities lie elsewhere evolved during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, including the marine pachyophiid snakes. Alberti, M., Fürsich, F. T. & Andersen, N. 2019. First steps in reconstructing Early Jurassic sea water temperatures in the Andean Basin of northern Chile based on stable isotope analyses of oyster and brachiopod shells. Journal of Palaeogeography 8: 33. Fanti, F., Cau, A., Martinelli, A. & Contessi, M. 2014. Integrating palaeoecology and morphology in theropod diversity estimation: a case from the Aptian-Albian of Tunisia. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 410, 39-57.

Introducing ‘Unexpected Isle of Wight Air-Filled Hunter’, a New English Theropod Dinosaur, September 2020 Ashby, J. 2022. Platypus Matters: the Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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A consequence of this fact is that our views on these animals – I’m mostly talking here about Jurassic groups – tend to be highly Eurocentric. Today, we know that animals similar to those of Europe occurred around South America, in the Caribbean, on the western coast of North America, and elsewhere too, so the view that these animals originated in Europe or should be considered strongly associated with Europe could well be very wrong. Mesozoic Era, second of Earth’s three major geologic eras of Phanerozoic time. Its name is derived from the Greek term for “middle life.” The Mesozoic Era began 252.2 million years ago, following the conclusion of the Paleozoic Era, and ended 66 million years ago, at the dawn of the Cenozoic Era. ( See the geologic time scale.) The major divisions of the Mesozoic Era are, from oldest to youngest, the Triassic Period, the Jurassic Period, and the Cretaceous Period. The ancestors of major plant and animal groups that exist today first appeared during the Mesozoic, but this era is best known as the time of the dinosaurs. Naish, D. 2011. Theropod dinosaurs. In Batten, D. J. (ed.) English Wealden Fossils. The Palaeontological Association (London), pp. 526-559.