#maastrichtian

[imtrippingdude]

silly girl... what will she do? hopefully not eat children

[ppaleoartistgallery]

Coahuilaceratops

for those who dont know, i was commissioned to make a press release piece for the recent Coahuilaceratops paper by Barrera-Guevara et al., (2024) and im still quite happy with this piece

[makairodonx]

T.rex quarreling in the rain

67 million years ago as a storm quickly approaches a riverine forest in what is now the Hell Creek a formation of Montana, two Tyrannosaurus rex right over a Triceratops carcass while a lone Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis watches from behind a fallen log.

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Since the Prehistoric Planet S2 teaser dropped I think it's time to repost my ideas for the coming season.

[riviclouds]

here's soap if he was a hatzegopteryx

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I think I covered most of the better ones, though of course I can't do all of them... twelve options and all

[sina-man]

Thoracosaurus neocesariensis that catched a newborn mosasaur. Maastrichtian Crimea.

[arminreindl]

Yesterday a new species of alligatoroid was published, the small yet broad snouted Eurycephalosuchus ("broad-headed crocodile"). I love this little guy already. Discovered in southern China, this animal lived sometime during the Late Cretaceous, likely the early Maastrichtian. It was a member of the Orientalosuchina, a group of early alligator relatives that lived during the Cretaceous and Paleogene in East Asia, primarily China but also Vietnam. Although there is some crushing going on with this skull, its relatively minor. The authors suspect that uncrushing the skull would only add 5mm to its length, so this bizarre snub-nosed appearance is pretty much what this animal would look in life. Whats also fun is that the same excavation yielded a second croc, an indetermined brevirostrine (which basically means it could be a crocodile-relative or an alligator-relative) of much larger size. This begs the question, how big is that? We don't get precise estimates, but its said that the "big" one is similar in size to a Chinese Alligator (which get to about 2 meters) and its also said that Eurycephalosuchus is "the smallest orientalosuchine based on skull length". So that all basically says its pretty damn small. Well I will try to put together an uncrushed recon of the skull and a proper full scale size comparison eventually, but until then. Have this:

[pied-piper-the-survogel]

Fossil Novembirb, the first nine days

Hello World. I never thought I'd be on this site, but here I am. This blog was created for the purpose of participating in a-dinosaur-a-day's Fossil Novembirb. Fossil Novembirb is a yearly art event founded by Meig Dickson, a vertebrate palaeontologist who, as far as I can tell, studies dinosaurs, especially theropods. Don't fight me or em over birds being theropod dinosaurs. Neither ey nor I want to have this conversation, so enjoy the art!

I started off my Fossil Novembirb with Vegavis iaai. What makes this fluffy anseriform special is that we found a fossilised syrinx (avian voice-maker) belonging to one of these, so we can reconstruct their sounds. This Vegavis was coloured based on a bunch of anseriforms that are alive today, like ruddy shelducks and cotton pygmy geese.

For Day 2, I did a bit of spec evo and pulled out a scientific name I told myself I'd assign to a newly-discovered fossil genus. This sketch has a Serina-like text description for Phantasmavis.

Tropicbirds! I chose to draw Clymenoptilon because I was hoping "tropicbird" meant "brightly coloured bird". Even though they aren't that brightly coloured, they're still cool. And Kumimanu (approximately to scale in this drawing) didn't really have the obligation to be black-and-white like most extant penguins (because Inkayacu), so I went... mild-wild with the colours.

No... one's... tall like Gastornis, no one calls like Gastornis! In the bottom right, no one feeds small like Gastornis!

I've seen the "Andy's Prehistoric Adventures" episode featuring these megafowl, realised it was Walking With Dinosaurs with a human inserted, and drawn a mildly speculative colouration for these Gastornis. To the left, two adults have their necks out towards each other and are calling into the sky. Whether this is courtship or a challenge, nobody knows. But a calmer scene happens in the bottom right, where a mother shows her chick red berries on a branch to show them that it is food.

"Don't make me fly up there, you punk!" is one way to interpret the screamerduck Anachronornis' call in the direction of the Primoptynx owl. This scene unfolds in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ecosystem of the Willwood Formation before it was rock.

It's a twilight hummingswift! We know the colour of this iridescent little birb from the Danish Fur Formation. I watched a tutorial on painting iridescence, but I'm not really satisfied with the parent feeding their chick to the left of the flying Eocypselus rowei. It's hard to see, but there's a baby hummingswift being fed a Cimbrophlebia scorpionfly.

London Clay has a lot of plant fossils. Not all of them are listed on Wikipedia, but there's a photo of a pencil-root mangrove seed listed. Featuring a speculatively-coloured Eotrogon, a Dasornis carrying away a mackerel, and a Prophaeton just gliding, and repeat telecasts Gastornis parisiensis and Eocypelus rowei, Eocene London was a birder's dream (believe me, I'm a kinda-birder).

This Tynskya art was somewhat late, rather dissatisfactory, and mildly rushed. I had an exam the next day. Don't judge me.

And here's a better Primozygodactylus! I couldn't tell the specific species because it wasn't listed for the Wikipedia image. But here we are: a bird that gives off ashy prinia/sparrow/orange-headed thrush vibes.

This concludes the first nine days! I don't know if I'll be doing the tenth because nobody's giving me straight answers about the palaeobotany of the Green River formation.

Enjoy!

[ungojirasapiente]

a new extinct animal reconstruction, this time its of Patagomaia chainko, the largest mesozoic mammal known. ------ una nueva reconstruccion de un animal extinto, esta vez es Patagomaia chainko, el mamifero mesozoico mas grande conocido.

[originalleftist]

Following up on my recent posts about dinosaurs of the Levant, I am pleased to announce a new azhdarchid pterosaur in Jordan!

Source:

Introducing Inabtanin alarabia, a pterosaur from the Maastrichtian, in the Late Cretaceous. It had a wingspan of 16 feet (this is relatively small for an azhdarchid).

Its genus name means "grape hill dragon", from the colour of the hill where the holotype specimen was found back in 2018 (it takes scientists a while to formally describe a new find sometimes), and the species name refers to the Arabian peninsula.

I will add, in relation to my prior posts, that though found across the border in Jordan, given its size and flight capability, Inabtanin would most likely also have been native to the lands that are now Israel and Palestine.

Here are some pictures from the link:

Per one of the comments, the Pterosaur on the left is the new Inabtanin, while the one on the right is its larger relative Arambourgiania, also an azhdarchid from late Cretaceous Jordan.

[imtrippingdude]

✦The dino stickers are finally complete!!✦

I'd love to know some of your favourites, send me an ✦ask, or reply to this post with prehistoric animals you'd like to see drawn!

✦These are not ready for purchase, but will be once I finish more dino stickers, and finish the rest of the stuff i need to do to set up my shop!

✦HEY, like my art?! If you're interested in my commissions, click here!

[ppaleoartistgallery]

#Paleostream 20/07/2024

here's today's #Paleostream sketches!!! today we drew Morturneria, Atopodentatus, Comptonatus, and Trigonosaurus

[makairodonx]

Mother’s Day, Tyrannosaurus rex edition: A flock of T.rex chicks give their mother a bouquet of flowers for a very special occasion…

[harpagornis]

Indotriconodon flies,baby!

By omegafreelancer

So learning that Indotriconodon magnus – an already impressive animal in being a large sized Mesozoic mammal and an unambiguous eutriconodont from the Maastrichtian – is also a volaticothere I naturally had to commission it in its likely volant form.

Volaticotheria phylogenetic tree by Bajpai et al 2024

Its debuting study also recover Sangarotherium and Eotriconodon as volaticotheres. The former in particular is the only mammal in an Arctic environment dominated by other synapsids (Averianov et al 2020), so it clearly must have been able to fly and migrate when other crown mammals couldn’t.

Things just keep looking up for volaticothere flight, which I already extensively argued for with the marine deposition and lack of dental wear of Ichthyoconodon, the early cosmopolitan distribution of the group, the fact that Volaticotherium‘s hand is largely missing and the fact that gliding mammals are primarily herbivorous (Luo 2017).

Naturally, I also used this image to forward my speculative volaticotheres over at Lemuria.

What a wonderous day.

References

Bajpai, Sunil; Rautela, Abhay; Yadav, Ravi; Wilson Mantilla, Gregory P. (2024-02-29). “The first eutriconodontan mammal from the Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) of India”. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. doi:10.1080/02724634.2024.2312234. ISSN 0272-4634.

Averianov, Alexander; Martin, Thomas; Lopatin, Alexey; Skutschas, Pavel; Schellhorn, Rico; Kolosov, Petr; Vitenko, Dmitry (2018-07-25). “A high-latitude fauna of mid-Mesozoic mammals from Yakutia, Russia”. PLOS ONE. 13 (7): e0199983. Bibcode:2018PLoSO..1399983A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0199983. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 6059412. PMID 30044817.

Luo ZX, Meng QJ, Grossnickle DM, Liu D, Neander AI, Zhang YG, Ji Q (August 2017). “New evidence for mammaliaform ear evolution and feeding adaptation in a Jurassic ecosystem”. Nature. 548 (7667): 326–329. doi:10.1038/nature23483. PMID 28792934. S2CID 4463476.

[nickysfacts]

Turns out the Mosasaurus didn’t get their name or is famous from how good they were at Moseying Along!

😂🦎