My new book: Dinosaur gag cartoons

My new book!

                                                          Available on the Amazon.com

Moj nedavni "dino safari"

The hunt for the tracks was very succesful!

An anky right manus print.

A huge sauropod footprint.

A huge sauropod track.

A mid-sized theropod trackway.

A Deltapodus?

  The outcrop

The ripple marks (100 mya)

Sophie the stegosaur

I am back from London. Of course, one of the first things I wanted to see was the new stegosaur mount at the NHM. Here is one of the photographs my daughter Masa took.

Middle: my old greetings card (a bit updated). 

Below: my old cartoon on coping with the ozone layer hole.

Another photo of Sophie: the tail section

Sophie: head and neck

More on Pula ankylosaurs

I have discovered the second site containing ankylosaur tracks (dinoturbation) near Pula about a year after the first one, which is about a kilometre away. It is interesting, but this time I thought I was looking at the single theropod footprint. Yet, it didn't seem right. It didn't look like a typical theropod footprint. Nearby was the second impression, only convex (infilling). The pace angle was too wide for a theropod. I have also noticed there were in fact 5 toe impressions. The print was obviously left by a quadrupedal animal: a large ankylosaur. Later, I have discovered more foot impressions of the same animal, or the animal of the same size.

The red outline of the best preserved impressions in the ankylosaur trackway.

Another foot impression ( right hind foot - pes) of the large Sauropelta-like dinosaur on the same outcrop. This one is not part of the trackway above (red outline is my interpretation).

Click to enlarge.

The new ankylosaur tracks discovery

When I took this photograph back in 2009 it didn't tell me much. It just looked like it might have been some unidentified dinosaur trackway. Or not. My first suspect was a sauropod, of course. This morning I was browsing through my files looking for some photographs for the text I intended publishing and something caught my eye in this image. Some of the "footprints" actually looked like if they had toes. The toes were arranged pretty much in the order like in the ankylosaur feet (Sauropelta-like): I quickly added up the simple math and it dawned to me that this little dinoturbation is in fact the part of the large ankylosaur dinoturbation for which I thought had ended a few meters away.
In my red outline you can see my interpretation of some of the tracks. Yes, these ankylosaurs were gregarious and they congregated in three size-classes. There were also some medium-sized (maybe dromaeosaur-like) and some huge theropods around.

LM = left manus; LP = left pes; RP = right pes (click image to enlarge)

Some of my old illustrations

In the first days of Internet the web space was precious and I had to be very careful not to exceed the very limited file size, which nowadays seems ridiculously small. Thus the images were very grainy and small. I have scanned them with a clumsy device: a hand held scanner.
Here are some of the first images from my early sites  (1995-1997)

Past and present

I have been drawing and painting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals for more than 3 decades.
This is a portrait of Pachyrhinosaurus I have done in gouache and watercolour pencils in 1990.

Here is the recently discovered and described ankylosaur Ziapelta quick drawing, rendered a bit in Photoshop. In today's demanding market the speed is essential.

 

Some memories

Me and one of my paintings at the time of my great exhibition at the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb in 1994. I just can't believe it was 20 years ago!

Archaeopteryx gliding. One of my first digital illustrations. It was a commission for ABC science site.

A GIF from my old site:

My old Nanotyrannus drawing

I don't know when exactly did I make these drawings of Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurid Nanotyrannus lancensis (Bakker, Currie & Williams, 1988), but it was probably sometime in the late 80's or early 90's of the previous century. I think that I used the photographs of the fossil published in Discovery magazine as reference. According to my knowledge at the time, I drew theropods with lizard-like lips.

 

Tyrannosaurus rex feeding habits

 In case you've mised this here is the recent post from my gag cartoons site Oberon Cartoons
 T.rex and his paleo diet

Here is my new paleo cartoon, not to be confused for a paleo diet. It's dealing strictly with Tyrannosaurus rex feeding habits. If you want the paleo diet recipes, please, go elsewhere.

My old view at the good old T.rex

Here is my quarter of a century old Tyrannosaurus rex painting. If you look at it carefully, you'll notice the "fleshy" lizard-like lips on the beloved theropod. Given an even a closer look at the painting, you'll notice a few water birds in the background. The birds caused sort of a commotion among the visitors, who thought they were educated in the issue, at the opening of the exhibition of my prehistoric animals paintings at the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb in 1994. Most people knew only about the Archaeopteryx as the sole Mesozoic bird at the time, so my intentional provocation with the duck-like birds hit the chord. I know that this sounds like a joke today, but the greatest bird (and dinosaur) discoveries were yet to come.

Also notice the legs are not in a (popular) squatting position, but more errect, which does make sense for the animal of that size.

The painting was produced in gouache in 1988 and it has been in the collection of the CNHM in Zagreb since 1991.

A sauropod right pes on a building block

 A sauropod right pes on a building block of the Early Cretaceous limestone at the pier near Pula (Istria, Croatia)

I don't remember if I said it before, but Istria has been literary "littered" with the Mesozoic fossils. The dinosaur tracks can be considered as numerous and omnipresent. Which doesn't mean they are easy to find by laymen. One has to learn distinguishing them from common artifacts. The limestone erosion is prone to forming very rich array of shapes.

So, here I am, walking along the beach and looking for some familiar shapes. I get awarded quite often. Here is a nice sauropod (probably a titanosaur) right hind foot print on a building block. The production process in the quarry left it in a rather good shape. Although, the block looks slightly "flawed" because of the dinosaur impression. The photograph was taken on February 15th 2014. Red outline helps you visualise the print. There is a low displacement rim in front of the track, where it should be. The pes measures about 60 cm in length, representing a decent size track maker sauropod. The largest sauropod hind footprints I've found there measure about 130-140 cm in length. Those were true giants! 

Finding dinosaur tracks on building blocks is not that rare either. I've found many myself. Some of the tracks were found by Dalla Vecchia, as described in his paper.