It Came From Dinovember II: Return of the Dinosaur Drawings

Well, so much for getting a lot of posts in! Dinovember wrapped up well over two months ago, and over a month has passed since I began my review of what I produced for it, but... well, better late than never, right?

Kileskus aristotocus was tyrannosauroiding before T. rex made it cool.
[by the author]

It Came From Dinovember

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the total lack of content here over the past several weeks months. I've been busy transitioning back to college life and I haven't really given Noah's Ravens the attention I'd have liked to. I've got a lot of ideas for some new posts so the plan now is to begin posting regularly with a lot more content!

Now then - last month I participated in what some have called 'Dinovember,' a 30-day celebration of dinosaur art; I produced a drawing a day.* I'd like to share them here (click to embiggen, of course), with a little bit of background on the animals pictured and how I restored them. Click the break below to continue...

* Well, I produced 30 drawings. I got behind several times and had to play catch-up, but did get all 30 done by the end of the month. Haha! My most productive bout of artiness since I was about nine.

A Visit To the McWane Science Center, Part II: Southern Sea Monsters

In the previous post, we took a look at the Alabama Dinosaurs exhibit at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. However, as you may remember from the last post, much of Alabama was underwater during the Cretaceous Period, submerged by a shallow seaway.

Notice how much of Alabama is submerged by a shallow seaway.
[image from Sampson et al, 2010, 'New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for
Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism', under CC Attribution 2.5 Generic licence]

The warm waters of this shallow sea teemed with life, and after more than 75 million years, the fossil record of these marine organisms can be found in Alabama, with a diversity and richness far surpassing the state's known collection of dinosaur fossils from this time. McWane presents a sampling of this prehistoric marine life in the sister exhibit to Alabama Dinosaurs, fetchingly entitled Sea Monsters...

WARNING: Clicking the 'read more' link below without having this open in another tab is highly dangerous. Proceed at your own risk.

A Visit To the McWane Science Center, Part I: Dinosaurs of the Deep South

Sorry for the long absence. Hopefully there will be new content -- including art -- here soon.

Anyway, if you should ever find yourself in Birmingham, Alabama, as my family and I did last week, a day at the McWane Science Center is sure to prove a day well spent. McWane features a museum as well as an IMAX, and most of the exhibits are geared toward kid-friendly interactivity: there is a hall of physical-science based challenges, brain teasers, and the like, an aquarium featuring a shark and ray touch pool, and space for visiting exhibits, which at the time of our trip was hosting an interesting, interactive-heavy exhibit on the history toys and games over 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, as soon as we'd paid our admission, I dragged the family up a flight of stairs to get to what we all* came to see: the dinosaurs.

A nodosaur browses amongst the ferns as an Appalachiosaurus stalks behind it.
[photograph by the author]

*I

Still Alive

No worries - if anyone was worried - Noah's Ravens is still alive. I hope I'll be able to have a large, art-heavy post/series of posts up in the next week or two.

Thanks for your patience.

-M

Roll Up For the Roadshow

On Saturday, I participated in the kickoff of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Myself and one of the other student employees at the Beneski were asked to help run a booth showing fossils collected from western Massachusetts. The booth was organised by a group called the Jurassic Roadshow, who collect fossils and educate people about our geologic past, often at events such as this one; they kindly invited Beneski Museum docents to get involved with the event.

Jurassic Roadshow fossil fish.
[photo by the author]

Day of the Diplodocids

Welcome, true believers, to a Very Special installment of Noah's Ravens. As you have no doubt seen while scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or while idly surfing the web, yesterday marked the appearance of a new (very long) paper reviewing the diplodocid sauropods, 'A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)' by Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B J Benson, published open-access in PeerJ. Although I'm certain you've all had time to read it, pore lovingly over the cladograms, savour each and every word about each and every specimen, and completely lose yourself in the figures depicting small chunks of bone, I thought it might be nice to have a brief(ish) round-up post that covers some of the big ideas of the paper in a condensed(ish), hopefully-easy(ish) read.

It was nice knowing you, Diplodocus longus, but all good things
must come to an end. Read on to find out why. Legs belonging to
The Sauropod Formerly Known As Diplodocus longus at centre.
[photograph by the author]