As I mentioned in my first post on Aquilops , I drew the skull reconstructions that appear in figure 6 of the paper (Farke et al. 2014). I’m writing this post to explain that process.

Today sees the description of Aquilops americanus (“American eagle face”), a new basal neoceratopsian from the Cloverly Formation of Montana, by Andy Farke, Rich Cifelli, Des Maxwell, and myself, with life restorations by Brian Engh.

Back in 2013, when we were in the last stages of preparing our paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus (Wedel and Taylor 2013b), I noticed that, purely by chance, all ten of the illustrations shared much the same limited colour palette: pale brows and blues (and of course black and white). I’ve always found this strangely appealing.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/379638400753876992 {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10837 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10837” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/09/19/move-over-all-yesterdays-its-time-for-miketaylorawesomedinoart/art/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/art.jpeg” orig-size=“640,400” comments-opened=“1”

In the last post I pointed out some similarities between Davide Bonadonna’s new Spinosaurus painting and Brian Engh’s Spinosaurus *painting from 2010.

UPDATE the next day: Since I published this post, it’s become clear that the similarities in the two images are in fact convergence. Davide Bonadonna got in touch with Mike and me, and he has been very gracious and conciliatory. In fact, he volunteered to let us post the making-of images for his painting, which I will do shortly.

I just read Mark Witton’s piece on the new new titanosaur Rukwatitan (as opposed to the old new titanosaur Dreadnoughtus ). I was going to write something about it, but I realised that Mark has already said everything I would have, but better. So get yourselves over to his piece and enjoy the titanosaurianness of it all!

Check out this beautiful Lego Diplodocus : {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10521 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10521” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/06/18/a-beautiful-lego-diplodocus-skeleton/10954093715_c4c7fe19ec_k-crop/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/10954093715_c4c7fe19ec_k-crop.jpg” orig-size=“480,319” comments-opened=“1”

We feature a lot of Brian Engh’s stuff here–enough that he has his own category. But lately he has really been outdoing himself. The wave of awesome started last year, when Brian started posting videos showing builds and suit tests for monsters–monster suits, monster puppets, monster you-name-its.