Paleoart (repost)

I did mention in my previous post that I had been doing the paleo art - a popular unofficial term for the kind of illustration, sculpture and animation in which the extinct animals are reconstructed and/or restored. I must have drawn my first prehistoric animals when I was 5. Unfortunately, I haven't kept any of those early works.
My first inspiration most certainly came from the Karl Zeman's film "Cesta do praveku" (Journey to the Beginning of Time) (1954). Of course, the whole movie was inspired by the work of the great Czech illustrator and paleoartist ZDENĚK BURIAN (1905 - 1981) who was also involved in the film production.

I think the next inspiration was the fantastic Rudolph F. Zallinger’s The Age of Reptiles mural which is displayed at the full length of the east wall of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Great Hall.
Many years later, I have visited the Museum and saw the mural while staying at my friend and also a paleoartist Brian Franczak's home in Connecticut. It is funny that my old (1987) illustration of Torosaurus chasing a varanid Palaeosaniwa, who had stolen one of it's eggs, has been displayed at the Yale Peabody Museum for about a decade now.
Trivia: "The Age of Reptiles mural at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University was completed by Rudolph F. Zallinger, a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, in 1947 after 4 1/2 years study, preparation and painting."(quote from the Yale site)
It is interesting that I have painted my gouache Torosaurus painting exactly 40 years later.

  

Edmontosaurus with a fleshy rooster-like comb (repost)

Besides being a cartoonist I am also a paleoartist. I have been a paleoartist for decades. You can see some of my restorations at the Natural History Museum's in London site:
Natural History Museum London Picture Library
or at my old neglected Tripod site:
Beri's Dinosaur World (BDW)
I am happy to note that although many of the life restorations of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are decades old (the oldest dating from 1983), they still can pass as reasonably accurate ones or even don't have any major flaws regardless of the recent advances in paleontology and numerous new discoveries.
To cut the long story short, recently a new wonderful and very surprising Edmontosaurus fossil with some soft body parts impressions has been discovered and described. According to this find, not only the various dinosaurs had the bony combs, crests, horns and sails, but they might have been decorated with the fleshy ornaments as well. The Edmontosaurus had a fleshy rooster's comb.
National Geographic Society site has the story. Julius Csotonyi has produced a nice life restoration for the paper and the magazine.

However, looking at the published paper, I have noticed that the fleshy comb might have been larger and of a bit different shape than Julius has painted it. Here is my interpretation:

The new sensational Cretaceous bird (repost)

Although, I know that many birds and dinosaur-birds lived alongside dinosaurs some 125 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous, I always get surprised by the new discoveries. How come the ancient birds looked so advanced and modern as early as  that?
The newly described Chinese fossil bird Hongshanornis longicresta wouldn't make you turn your head if it flew by you. It seemed so common. Only a closer look, a very close look, would reveal that it had tiny teeth in the front of its beak and claws on it's wings.
A couple of years ago I was engaged in a project of producing and mounting a theropod  sculpture on the famous and rich Barremian track site on the Main Brijun island in Croatia. The tracks are roughly of the same age as the Chinese Jehol bird fossil. There are theropod tracks of various sizes at the site. The largest footprints measure about 60-65 cm in length. I have also noticed a large crock footprint, iguanodontoid tracks and possibly a pterosaur footprint there.

The sculpture at the Main Brijun Barremian tracksite by the the team of artists: sculptors Stjepan Gracan and Bozica Dea Matasic; painting and mounting by painter Zlatko Kauzlaric Atac; cconsulting and preliminary drawings by Berislav Krzic. It took almost 3 years for the sculpture to be produced and mounted at the track site in 2012: 

More photographs of the M. Brijun theropod sculpture 

My preliminary drawing of Eocarcharia (meaning "dawn shark") a  carcharodontosaurid theropod
dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous as a possible track maker and a reference for the sculptor (2006).

A couple of theropod footprints at the  Veli (Main) Brijun Barremian site (125 mya) (photo credit: Berislav Krzic):

Here is my restoration of the ancient bird Hongshanornis longicresta:

 You can read more about the bird's find here:
National Geographic
... or if you are interested more, here is the free scientific paper:
 A new specimen of the Early Cretaceous bird Hongshanornis longicresta: insights into the aerodynamics and diet of a basal ornithuromorph

Forbidden planet's Monster from the ID part 1 (repost)

  I have reposted my paleontology related stuff published previously on my Oberon cartoons blog:

I keep watching Forbidden planet movie (1956) from time to time. It was so good, so ahead of its time in so many ways: from the music score to the design. One of my favourite scenes is when the captain and the doctor were speculating about the shape of the monster, deducting from cast of its footprint. It is quite similar to the real task when paleontologists are trying to figure out the characteristics and features of extinct animals who left only their petrified tracks in the rock. I search for the ancient tracks on the Adriatic coast and it is a lot of research and fun.

It is also amusing that some species of dinosaurs had claws, not unlike the one from the movie, but on their three-fingered hands. Check out the cast of the finger claw of the allosaurid theropod  Saurophaganax here :
 Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

My drawings of the fossil bones of some theropod hands. Above is Megaraptor left hand (manus) and below is Allosaurus left hand:

A dinosaur oriented blog

After a couple of weeks of posting on my first (experimental in a way) blog "Oberon Cartoons", dedicated to my interests, inspiration and my cartoons, I came to a conclusion that the blog was too diverse and that I have too much material to show.  Thus, I thought it would be only appropriate to start another blog which would deal mostly with the paleontology stuff. So here is the blog "A Mesozoic Mosaic".

You may wonder about my banner design.The dinosaurs and a few other Mesozoic reptiles (a pterosaur, a crock and a varanid lizard) are featured on the right side of the banner, while facing them from the left side are an African elephant Loxodonta africana male, a horse and a woman of average height. The featured prehistoric animals are all members of the Early Cretaceous Istrian ichnofauna I have been researching more than 3 years. Their looks are fictional, but probably not far from true. The size of some of the track makers is enormous even for dinosaur standards. The iguanodontoid tracks are currently the largest in the World.
The "BDW" logo is for "Beri's Dinosaur World". That was the name of my old and now extinct Geocities site I started in 1997. Geocities sank several years ago carrying with it thousands of interesting and vital sites into oblivion. I kept the logo and I am still using it for one old and neglected BDW site.