Pterosaur art you've never seen before! (sort of)

Later this week I’m travelling to the Netherlands to give a talk on pterosaurs at the Museon, The Hague. I’ll be part of a series of public talks on Mesozoic reptile lifestyles celebrating the opening of the Museon's new Dino Jaws exhibition, and it should be a blast. I’ve revisited some of my older pterosaur paintings to add more detail and depth when featuring them in my talk, and thought I’d share the results here. Some of these images aren’t that old really, but, thanks to beefing up my painting rig before Christmas, I find some of my work from even a few months ago can look a lot nicer with just a few hours work. As usual, prints are available of all images shown below.

Arambourgiania: remaining huge in artwork since 2013. See this page for the original.

First up is a tweaked version of my 2013 Arambourgiania, a giraffe, and a standard wife-unit scale bar. There’s not much to say here – I just wanted to put more detail into the pterosaur so it looks better in a close-up panning presentation animation. At some point, hopefully soon, a version of this image featuring two azhdarchids will be published.

An azhdarchid in high-altitude, long distance flight. Original here.

Second, the flying azhdarchid which made a debut at TetZooCon last year. I felt the initial image was a bit flat, so this has more depth added to the background. The depicted animal is a ‘generic’ azhdarchid, although obviously similar to the smaller Quetzalcoatlus species. It’s shown flying rather high – many thousands of feet in the air – on a long-distance flight. Mike Habib and I have droned on about the awesome flight capability of giant azhdarchids for years, and we expect the range and flight speed of smaller azhdarchids – with, say, 5 m wingspans – to be relatively impressive too. They may not have been capable of booming around the planet with the same gusto as their giant cousins, but continent hopping was certainly not beyond them.

The anurognathid Anurognathus ammoni, brought to you by evolutionary processes which wanted Muppets to rule the skies. 

The third reworking shows a species at the other end of the pterosaur size spectrum, the diminutive Anurognathus ammoni. Some readers may recognise this painting from my book. Anurognathids haven’t been covered in much detail at this blog, but that will likely change soon when Mike Habib and I publish a new study on their functional morphology in the near future. This painting alludes to something which we attempt to quantify in that study – prey size. Anurognathids are frequently depicted as hawking relatively large insects like dragonflies, but – based on prey proportions in modern avian insect hawkers, and the delicate build of anurognathid skulls – much smaller insects were probably pursued instead. Catching aerial insects is already difficult enough, so why chase relatively rare, enormous and feisty prey when abundant small midges can be scooped out of the sky with relatively little effort? Because anurognathids aren't big beasts - wingspans of less than 0.5 m are common - their likely prey was probably best measured in millimetres, as shown by the Target Midge in this picture. Other features to note in this painting include the tufted wing tips and completely fuzzy face, both of which are known from fossils and, for the time being at least, unique to anurognathids. The ‘cryptic’ colouration and nocturnality are nods to recent work on these pterosaurs suggesting these pterosaurs were shy, well-hidden creatures which were primarily active at dawn and dusk. More on these neat pterosaurs as time – and manuscript progress – permits.

To finish – because I can’t not post this – here’s a poster for the superhero movie the world deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Image by Jon Davies (@SovanJedi on Twitter – you may recall his equally excellent lampooning of in-your-face dinosaur art from last year).

That logo needs a T-shirt. Image manipulation by Jon Davies.

The Walking with Dinosaurs 3D trailer lands

Good news, everyone: the PR machine behind Walking with Dinosaurs 3D has provided our first detailed look at the film with its first trailer. I'm rather excited about this because it's my first real look at the film since contributing character orthographics for several (six, specifically) of its animals in early 2011, a process that involved working with a fleet of palaeontological and palaeoartist supernauts: David Krentz, Scott Hartman, Tom Holtz, Scott Sampson, Luis Chiappe, Victoria Arbour and others. Since that time, the guys at Animal Logic have been crunching the ones and zeroes required to breath life into the characters and their world, with the results posted above. There's always an air of uncertainty surrounding palaeontological film projects but, happily, this first trailer suggests WwD3D is taking good shape, and the Facebook and Twitter buzz from the contributors mentioned above suggests they're pretty happy with what they've seen, as am I. Be sure to set the trailer stream to its highest, 1080p HD quality to take in all the details.

Highlights of this first teaser, aside from some excellent zbrush creations from David Krentz and the stunning visuals and animation, include feathered dromaeosaurs, an iridescent gorgosaur and suitably snowy slopes in latest Cretaceous Alaska. I like the efforts to characterise individual animals without resorting to crazy variations in colour and form, such as the hole in the frill of the hero Pachyrhinosaurus. Presumably, this reflects a pathology that never entirely healed, and it's a cool idea. So cool, in fact, that I'm wondering why it's not more common in palaeoart. We can also see that the colour schemes of the animals are striking without being outlandishly garish, and the characters seem capable of emoting without using overblown actions akin to those of other CG dinosaurs, who seem to have gone to an acting school for 1920s silent movies. Moreover - stop press - plenty of shots even show animals not roaring and with their mouths closed. Gosh.

So, there's plenty to be happy about then, and my feeling from reading the comments of others is that I'm not alone in this view. Perhaps the only common niggle being raised is that the tyrannosaur is scaly rather than feathered, which jars with recent discoveries showing some big tyrannosauroids were covered in protofeathers (Xu et al. 2012). Obviously, it would have been extremely cool to render this in WwD3D, but the feathered tyrant Yutyrannus arrived just a little too late in the day for the design team to work feathers onto the Gorgosaurus. As hinted above, the creature designs for the WwD3D animals were being set in late 2010 and early 2011, well over a year before Yutyrannus was unleashed on the world. And we shouldn't be too upset: there is still controversial evidence that another tyrannosaur, Tyrannosaurus, was scaly, and the WwD3D Gorgosaurus still looks awesome.

But enough about dinosaurs: what about the real stars of the show, the pterosaurs? It may not be surprising that I had a hand in design and consultancy for the movie's azhdarchids, and I'm happy to say that I like what I can see thus far. Flap-gliding and full-on flapping flight are both on display, and just short of the one minute mark, we see a gang of azhdarchids surround and aggressively 'terrestrially stalk' the hero animals. If you're sad enough to have freeze-framed high-definition shots of the azhdarchids (which, er... I didn't, but a friend of mine did) you'll notice thick coats of soft pycnofibres, and that the internal anatomy of azhdarchid jaws have, for the first time, been accurately rendered on film. Indeed, the contours of the head are the best I've ever seen in a CG azhdarchid. Note the concave lateral skull facia, the tapering shape of the tomial margins... wonderful stuff. I'm very much looking forward to seeing them on screen later in the year.

So, this is all shaping up very well then, making the December 20th release date something to look forward too. It almost seems that fans of Mesozoic reptiles on film are being spoilt at present, with WwD3D following 2011's terrific (and underrated) Dinosaur Revolution/Dinotasia and the excellent BBC series Planet Dinosaur. Indeed, the BBC's dinosaur coverage is on something of a roll at present. Presumably as part of the PR campaign for the new film, its revamped Walking with Dinosaurs website has been providing good coverage of recent dinosaur topics in a way that is extremely accessible but not dumbed down (for a good example of this, see their coverage of the Torosaurus/Triceratops debate). Several well-known contributors to the palaeo blogosphere have been contributing new content to the site too, so it's definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.

And that will have to do for now: lots of work to catch up with. In the meantime, I leave you, and particularly if you're a 20th Century Fox or BBC executive, with a pitch for a WwD3D spin-off, starring the animals I'm sure will steal the entire movie. It's Box Office Gold, I tell you.

Reference

• Xu, Xing, Kebai Wang, Ke Zhang, Qingyu Ma, Lida Xing, Corwin Sullivan, Dongyu Hu, Shuqing Cheng, and Shuo Wang. 2012. A gigantic feathered dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of China. Nature, 484, 92-95.

Phat Air meets wide gauge

So, here's something you don't see every day: giant azhdarchid pterosaurs and sauropods, living together in peace and harmony. Well, living together, anyway. This azhdarchid looks like a bit of a jerk, what with his swooping down to buzz the local titanosaurs for no obvious reason. They don't seem to like him very much. 

We can be confident that giant azhdarchids and gigantic sauropods once coexisted. Both are known from Maastrichtian age rocks in North and South America, and two celebrity Mesozoic species, the famous titanosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis and giant azhdarchid Quetzalocatlus northropi are denizens of the  Javelina Formation of Texas. Newly discovered vertebrae of Alamosaurus have boosted its maximum size estimates considerably, demonstrating it attained similar proportions to the gigantic titanosaurs of South America, Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus (Fowler and Sullivan 2011). But while we can be certain that these giant animals occupied the same landscape, there's a lot of slop in trying to reconstruct them. Accordingly, I should stress that the animals depicted here are fairly generalised because, hand on heart, we don't know much about their appearance at all. Even basic attributes like their overall size are difficult to pin down. I thought Fowler and Sullivan (2011) were sensible for not including some shonky estimates of length or mass in their recent work on the new giant Alamosaurus material. Being simply content to say it was 'as big as Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus' and 'among the largest sauropods in the world' works for me. Mike Habib and I took the same approach for the giant pterosaur Arambourgiania in our 2010 paper on giant pterosaur flight (Witton and Habib 2010). Arambourgiania is a probably the least known giant pterosaur among laymen, and is only represented by a few scrappy bones from Maastrichtian deposits of Jordan. The most impressive and discussed of these is its incomplete, 660 mm long neck holotype vertebra. But how does that link into the rest of its anatomy? Despite the propensity and popularity of reconstructions of giant pterosaurs, the truth is that we actually have very little idea of their dimensions and scaling regimes. Even the widely reported 10 m span for Quetzalcoatlus northropi is based on (unpublished) extrapolation from an animal half its size. Accordingly, it's difficult to say for certain how large Arambourgiania was, other than that it clearly had a very long neck (2.9 m is my most recent estimate for the combined length of Arambourgiania cervicals III-VII) and was probably among the largest pterosaurs we know of. That's not as cool as saying we know it spanned 11-13 m or whatever, but it's probably more honest.

Size is, of course, only one aspect to consider. Specific proportions and anatomies are pretty much impossible to reconstruct for many giant species, so I figure there's no point pretending that we really know what they look like. In 99% of cases, we're better off not kidding ourselves by saying "I'm painting [precise giant species]", but instead just acknowledging that we're rendering fairly generalised giant variants of their probable anatomy until we can refine them with new fossil data. 

Righto, blogging time is over. Back to work.

References

• Fowler, D. W., and Sullivan, R. M. 2011. The first giant titanosaurian sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of North America. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 56, 685-690.
• Witton, M. P., and Habib, M. B. 2010. On the size and flight diversity of giant pterosaurs, the use of birds as pterosaur analogues and comments on pterosaur flightlessness. PLoS One, 5, e13982.

The 'no feathers' Jurassic Park tweet: statement of intent, or simply ruffling feathers?

No surprise about what this post will cover: the announcement by Jurassic Park IV director Colin Trevorrow that his new JP instalment will not feature feathered dinosaurs (unlike the new image, above, which features a fully feathered Dromaeosaurus raiding a giant azhdarchid nest). Like many folks in the palaeoblogsphere, my reaction to this hasn't been particularly positive. It seems like an overlooked opportunity to bring the dinosaur-bird themes of the first movie full circle, jars with overwhelming evidence that some JP dinosaur stars were feathered, and misses a terrific chance to affirm modern concepts of dinosaur palaeobiology with a wide audience. The JP franchise would also probably benefit more from featuring feathery species than it will from maintaining its flimsy creature design continuity (see Laelaps for more on this) as the series clearly needs some fresh ideas and content. It hasn't really delivered much else than people being chased by dinosaurs since the one hour mark of the first film, and a certain amount of repetition has set in ("Oh, look, they're running away from a large predatory dinosaur. Oh, look, they're running away from smaller predatory dinosaurs. Oh, look, one dinosaur is fighting another dinosaur. Oh, look, it's a sweeping shot of peaceful dinosaurs", etc.). The introduction of feathers could provide some nuances to the JP story and provide a new edge for its overly familiar creatures. Beyond this, as someone with an interest in science education, I find broader concepts to be upset about as well here. Feathering dinosaurs in JP IV would demonstrate the incremental processes through which science works, highlighting the way in which the dromaeosaurs of the series became progressively more feathered as the dinosaur bird link was cemented by mounting evidence*. There's obvious utility with this movie being a basis for teaching concepts of evolution, too. And yes yes yes, I know this movie isn't being made to educate people, but I genuinely think featuring feathered designs would be of advantage to many.

*Before anyone mentions it, I know the JP franchise didn't leap on the feather bandwagon quick enough, but it's one of the few major areas of common knowledge of dinosaurs, and provides a good focal point for educating laymen or children about these topics.


There's a truckload of things we could talk about concerning the lack of feathers in JP IV, but I don't want to focus on that here. Instead, I want to highlight one point that troubles me with all this discussion and outrage. This whole episode was started by Colin Trevorrow tweeting only two words: "no feathers" (well, three, if you include the '#JP4' bit). As others have noted, that doesn't really tell us much about the plot, the species under discussion or anything else. This has got me wondering how much of the film has actually been set into place yet. To my knowledge, Trevorrow has only been at the helm of JP IV for a couple of weeks, and the movie is still in pre-production. No casting details have been announced, no shooting schedule, no sneak-peaks of the plot. So are Universal Studios, the JP franchise wranglers, playing their cards close to their chest, or is much about the movie may still up in the air? If the latter is true (and it may not be: I'm not claiming any insider knowledge, just that I pay attention to movie news), I'm wondering if the glib 'no feathers' tweet was simply put out there to test the waters. See what the reaction was from JP fanboys and other demographics to see if they should keep their dinosaurs canonical or give them a much needed update. The movie isn't destined for release until June 2014 - perhaps that's enough time to design and implement feathery integuments to their dinosaurs? Note that I don't know much about VFX in movies, so I could be talking out of my bottom on this. That said, movie release dates change all the time, so the projected release may not mean much at this early stage.

If the feathers comment is a cheeky PR exercise for this franchise, it's in good company. Universal Studios have made repeated attempts to reignite interest in the JP franchise over the last few years. We had the core of the franchise, the first movie, back in cinemas in 2011 to coincide with the JP Blu-ray launch. The same film is returning to the big screen again this year, this time in 3D. We saw the first licensed Jurassic Park video game for 8 years in 2011. Concept art for the aborted JP IV dinosaur-man movie was revealed late last year. That in itself seems pretty unusual to me. There must be piles of discarded movie concept art in Hollywood which never sees public eyes, and creature design imagery is typically owned by movie studios. Heck of a coincidence if that just happened to slip onto the internet as rumours of a new JP film are circulating. Even if the latter was coincidental, we've had a lot of JP events in a short space of time, and only one of them coincides with a sensible franchise anniversary (this year's 3D Jurassic Park release, for the 20th anniversary of the original movie). Seems to me that Universal really, really want to remind us that Jurassic Park exists, perhaps because well over a decade has passed since the last chapter of the story. Generating discussion about whether the next instalment should feature feathered dinosaurs is an excellent way to get some free PR for the upcoming movie as well as, possibly, testing reaction to realistically feathered dinosaur species.

Of course, this may all be the wailing, cynical conspiracy theory of a madman. Time will tell, I suppose. In the mean time, I'd best get back to other things.

"There's something in the mist!"

One of the most effective movies I've seen in recent years is the  2007 science fiction siege thriller, The Mist, which isn't to be confused with the considerably more forgettable eighties pirate horror outing, The Fog (which has one of the most long-winded and least suspenseful trailers ever). Like all good stories, the plot of The Mist is dead simple, with a mysterious, creature-filled fog mist descending on a small Maine town and trapping a small population of people within a supermarket, who proceed to bicker about the best response to their crisis, descend to the level of primitive savages, and throw cans of peas at each other. It also has one of the most killer endings of a movie I've ever seen. I won't ruin it for you here, but it's a terrific antidote for the sickly-sweet, rosy endings slapped onto films at the last minute to please test screens. 1986 Little Shop of Horrors, A.I., and the original cut of Blade Runner: I'm looking at you. And all your pansy-ending friends.

One of the best things about The Mist is that Frank Darabont, it's director, knew exactly what to do with his monsters, in that he shows as little of them as possible. Instead, most species (and there are many) are glimpsed in silhouette at the far reaches of the fog mist, so we're never really sure what they look like or what they might be capable of. This, and the handling of the bickering survivors in the supermarket, turns a very pulpy plot into an intelligent and tense movie, and I heartily recommend you track it down if you've not seen it.

The handling of the creatures in The Mist got me thinking about how bizarre, and perhaps how terrifying, the silhouettes of barely-glimpsed creatures in the Mesozoic may have looked on misty, drizzly days. It's not hard to think of a number of Mesozoic animals that would look downright weird when glimpsed through thick fog, but the outlandish proportions of giant azhdarchid pterosaurs, with their long necks and limbs, oversize heads and small bodies, make them unlikely animals at the best of times and truly strange when only seen in outline. The lightweight frames and long limbs of these animals would probably make them lithe and quick over land, and it's not hard to imagine these enormous carnivores giving many Mesozoic animals the hebbie-jebbies as they stalked silently across Cretaceous landscapes. And not just little animals, either: prey of human dimensions may also have been alarmed by a stealthy, fog-strewn azhdarchid.

With this in mind, I've been slowly adding to the painting above for the last few weeks in a very piecemeal, 5-minute burst fashion. It's a deliberately basic image with a limited colour palate and detail, which came from both a desire to attempt something a bit different with my art and enhance the dreary atmosphere. The intention was to make the pterosaur in the background looming and menacing, all but invisible in the dismal weather save for its treetop-scraping silhouette. The small azhdarchid in the foreground, who's giving its big relative an understandably wide berth, serves to add scale, as does the rotting log in the foreground. The taxa here are not meant to be any azhdarchids in particular, but this scene could take place in several places around the Late Cretaceous world. As pointed out by Matyas Vremir et al. (2013), several azhdarchid-bearing deposits yield azhdarchid species of vastly contrasting size, suggesting giants and diminutive species frequently lived alongside one another (see summary image, below, of cohabiting azhdarchids of distinct size, from Vremir et al. [2013], featuring Ron Blakey's fantastic latest Cretaceous palaeomap (Colorado Plateau Geosystems, Inc.), and my handiwork. The image features a new skull reconstruction of Quetzalcoatlus sp., which offers a sneaky peak into some of the imagery used in my book). The scant record we have of these cohabiting species indicates that at least some bore distinct jaw and skull proportions, suggesting different dietary preferences and habits which would prevent them stepping on each other's ecological toes.

Some geological units reveal evidence of two or even three sympatric azhdarchid species. Diagram produced by Mark Witton and map used with kind permission of Ron Blakey, Colorado Plateau Geosystems, Inc; from Vremir et al. (2013).

The result, hopefully, is something a little different and interesting, and I definitely see potential for more things like this in the future. That's all for now, though: got to head out to be social. Next week, or perhaps the week after, should see something fairly special in these quarters, so be sure to check back soon.

Reference

• Vremir, M., Kellner, A. W., Naish, D., & Dyke, G. J. (2013). A new azhdarchid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous of the Transylvanian Basin, Romania: implications for azhdarchid diversity and distribution. PloS one, 8, e54268.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy BigQuetz

Back in 2010, when I was employed in building a series of giant pterosaur models for the University of Portsmouth and Royal Society, I painted the above image of several giant azhdarchids in flight for use on our display boards and advertising work (bonus sauropods can be seen playing in the water below the pterosaurs). The azhdarchids are meant to be a fairly close match for our models, and specifically the giant, 10 m wingspan jobby we suspended between Royal Festival hall and the neighbouring buildings:

Our 2010 exhibition, with BigQuetz at the topright. Two smaller giants follow behind it, with the giant Bamofo looking on. Pterosaur worker Michael O'Sullivan can be seen in the bottom left. 

BigQuetz in all its 10 m span glory

Our giant model had a couple of goofs that I wish we could have avoided, but was far from the worst rendition of a giant pterosaur I've ever seen. Certainly, there was no doubting its enormous size, which was substantial enough to shade a gathering of people escaping the unusually intense London sun experienced in June/July 2010. Alas, impressive as it was, it's size proved to be problematic for transportation and storage purposes. For engineering reasons, the body and wings of our BigQuetz were constructed as a single, solid unit, which meant that it had to be transported on a long-base low loader and, after its display in London, finding places to store and display it proved very, very difficult.

The BigQuetz body and wing frame, with pterosaur workers for scale (I'm on the left, Dave Martill is on the right)

The upshot is that BigQuetz, after a short stint on display in the Netherlands, had to weather being stored outside the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the open campus of the University of Portsmouth. Dave Martill, our pterosaur model wrangler, tried repeatedly to offload the model to various institutions but, despite finding homes for the rest of our giant models, could not find anyone willing to take on the transportation costs and space requirements of BigQuetz, even if the model was otherwise theirs for the taking. We were all very aware that BigQuetz was vulnerable in being stored in this way and, indeed, the ravages of weather and occasional shunts around were begging to take a toll on its more delicate aspects. But, as is often the case, the biggest problem was protecting it from people. It was only a matter of time before someone found BigQuetz and started fooling about with it, and thus inevitable that it would be found, one day, with significant damage.

Sadly, that very day arrived at the turn of this year, when University of Portsmouth staff found the BiqQuetz head  had been smashed in by unknown individuals (sadly, I don't have any photos to show of this). It seemed that the damage was well beyond repair, and the BigQuetz story was brought to a close when the model was chopped up and disposed of. It's a terrific shame that our model should meet such an inauspicious end, and particularly stings because I personally experienced the many hours of work that were poured into its creation, often by volunteers, and know of the craftsmanship that went into its production, particularly on its aluminium frame. Plus, I find it hard to rationalise its demise being caused by anything other than a stupid stunt pulled by bored delinquents, seeing as its location on campus was not conducive to being accidentally damaged by university staff. Some consolation can be found in the fact that our other models have found homes elsewhere, and are hopefully being looked after, but it still seems a tremendous waste. Hey ho. RIP BigQuetz, we hardly knew ye. Or whatever people say about this sort of thing.

Here goes nothing (redux)

It occurs to me that I don't really have much of an easily updatable, online home at present. My regular internet haunts aren't really suitable for rapid uploading lots of images or interacting with others. My Flickr site is too constrictive on comments and posting, and the Pterosaur.Net blog is a shared site that I don't want to clog with my garbage. Hence, I thought I'd set up a sister blog to my website, where I can post all the images I like, and you can comment all you like, without any hassle*. The objective here is to give myself an outlet for the paintings, ketches, diagrams and other media I've been making for the last few years, but rarely sees the light of day outside of its intended use and occasional posts on Facebook. My plan is to keep this rather straightforward by being word-light and picture-heavy, which should keep the post level up to at least one a week.

*For a few weeks, a version of this has been live at my website, but it communicated poorly with social network sites, so I've moved house to Blogger. Anyone who saw the old version of this post may be feeling a sense of deja vu, but new content will follow soon. Honest.

With that in mind, I'll leave this first opening post here. For the unitiated, the picture above is a full colour version of the opening image to a blog post, and now a full length lecture I recently gave at the University of Portsmouth, about speculative interactions between humans and pterosaurs, called 'Our Lives with Pterosaurs'. Just for fun, I've posted the poster used to advertise the talk below, too. I tried to capture some of the characteristic poster design common to Westerns made in the 50s and 60s, what with the wavy title and quotes from a critic (or Mike Taylor) and all. It's up to the viewer to decide whether the guy riding the azhdarchid is going to burst into 'The Deadwood Stage' from Calamity Jane as he soared away.

Anyway, enough nonsense. Were pterosaurs strong enough to carry humans to work throught the skies? Were they big enough to eat people? Head here, and to the follow up post here, to find out.