I was surrounded again by all I needed: father, mother, brother, sisters, grandmother and uncles. And this was a very insidious process when looked at more closely, in the sense that almost all yesterdays Donaldson Published by Six Yesterdays All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form, digital or printed, without the written My sister, I believe with everything in me, that God has an exciting future for you. Now, all yesterdays are not painful; some are simply delightful and bring us great joy, but there are some episodes in our lives that we don't want So Doug is a good ' yesterday ' who genuinely wants to make the world a fairer place.
Of all my subjects, I think Doug is the thinker who is most simultaneously a 'tomorrow' and a ' yesterday '. On the one hand, he is one of the world's They all got on their spaceships and had forgotten me behind, leaving me alone with the space of it all.
I was separate from it all , from life, from joy, from me. I wish this didn't happen. I wish I asked you to stay home, Say everything to her, and to our dear kind friends, the Bennochs. I ought to have written to them, but I get as much scolded for writing as talking. Ever yours, M. No date. How good and kind you are to me, dearest Mr.
All this reading, on top of my extracurricular activities, editing the college literary issues of The Buff and They who consider yesterday a thing long gone and buried, a thing done with and cast aside like the ancient wagon tongue.
Skip to content. As a criticalexploration of palaeontological art, All Yesterdays asks questions about what is probable, what is possible, and what iscommonly ignored. Kosemen, All Yesterdays isscientifically rigorous and artistically imaginative in its approach to fossils of the past - and those of the future.
All Yesterdays' Parties gathers for the first time almost all of the published writings contemporary with the band's existence-from sources as mainstream as the New York Times to vanished voices of the counterculture like Oz, Fusion, and Crawdaddy! With photographs, posters, and other visual evocations of the period throughout, All Yesterdays' Parties is an invaluable resource, a trove of lore for anyone interested in the VU, their roots, and legacy.
Em is locked in a bare, cold cell with no comforts. Finn is in the cell next door. The Doctor is keeping them there until they tell him what he wants to know.
Trouble is, what he wants to know hasn't happened yet. Em and Finn have a shared past, but no future unless they can find a way out.
The present is torture — being kept apart, overhearing each other's anguish as the Doctor relentlessly seeks answers.
There's no way back from here, to what they used to be, the world they used to know. Then Em finds a note in her cell which changes everything. It's from her future self and contains some simple but very clear instructions. We accepted gratefully. On the way, we spent a few days with an old colleague, the economic ecologist Dr Michael Norton-Griffiths and his wife, Annie, in their house at Langata, near Nairobi, which proved to be a paradise of bougainvillea and lush green gardens, marred only by the evident necessity for the Kenyan equivalent of the burglar alarm the armed askari, hired to patrol the garden at night by every householder who can afford the luxury.
I didn't know where to start in quest of my lost Mbagathi. I knew only that it was somewhere near greater Nairobi. That the city had expanded since was only too obvious. For all I could tell, my childhood garden might languish under a car park or an international hotel. At a neighbour's carol-singing party I cultivated the greyest and most wrinkled guests, seeking an old brain in which the name of Mrs Walter, the philanthropic owner of our garden, or that of Grazebrooks, her house, might have lodged.
Though intrigued at my quest, none could help. There was a steep red-soil track down the hill and I made a ritual pilgrimage. At the foot of the hill, not yd from where we were living, was a small footbridge and I stood and sentimentally watched the villagers returning home from work over the Mbagathi River.
I don't, and probably never shall know, if this was 'my' bridge, but it probably was my river, for rivers outlive human works. I never discovered my garden and I doubt if it survives.
Human memory is frail, our traditions as erratic as Chinese whispers and largely false; written records crumble and, in any case, writing is only millenniums old. If we want to follow our roots back through the millions of years, we need more persistent race memories. Two exist, fossils and DNA hardware and software.
The fact that our species now has a hard history is largely to the credit of one family, the Leakeys: the late Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, their son Richard and his wife Maeve. It was to Richard and Maeve's holiday house at Lamu that we were going for Christmas. The engagingly filthy town of Lamu, one of the strongholds of Islam bordering the Indian ocean, lies on a sandy island close to the mangrove fringes of the coast.
Open stone drains, grey with suds, line streets too narrow for wheeled traffic, and heavily laden donkeys purposefully trot their unsupervised errands across the town. Skeletal cats sleep in patches of sun, black-veiled women, like crows, walk obsequiously past gentlemen lording it on their front doorsteps, talking the heat and the flies away.
Every four hours the muezzins nowadays they are recorded on cassette tapes concealed in the minarets caterwaul for custom. Nothing disturbs the marabou storks at their one-legged vigil round the abattoir. We left the high plateau of Nairobi for the heat of Lamu in a creaking, wartime Dakota that had first seen service when I was crawling out of the Mbagathi River. The unpaved landing strip is across the water from Lamu, and Richard and Maeve Leakey met us in a small motorboat.
We beached below their house some way from the town and their younger daughter Samira an appropriately pretty Swahili name waded out to help carry our luggage up the sand.
At the veranda we dropped our shoes and rinsed our feet in stone troughs before mounting the steps. There we met Samira's equally delightful sister, Louise, who is studying fossils at Bristol University, and the other guests of this hospitable family. The Leakeys are white Kenyans, not English, and they built their house in the Swahili style this is native Swahili country, unlike most of Kenya where the Swahili language is a lingua franca spread by the Arab slave trade.
It is a large, white, thankfully cool cathedral of a house, with an arched veranda, tiles and rush matting on the floor, no glass in the windows, no hot water in the pipes and no need for either.
The whole upstairs floor reached by irregularly cut outside steps is a single flat area furnished only with rush mats, cushions and mattresses, completely open to the warm night winds and the bats diving past Orion.
Above this airy space, raised high on stilts, is the unique Swahili roof, thatched with reeds on a lofty superstructure of palm logs, intricately lashed together with thongs. Richard Leakey is a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliche, 'a big man in every sense of the word'.
Like other big men, he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any. He lost both legs in a near-fatal air crash in , at the end of his rampantly successful years crusading against poachers. As director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, he transformed the previously demoralised rangers into a crack fighting army with modern weapons to match those of the poachers and, more importantly, with an esprit de corps and a will to hit back at them.
In he persuaded President Moi to light a bonfire of more than 2, seized tusks, a uniquely Leakeyan masterstroke of public relations that did much to destroy the ivory trade and save the elephant. But jealousies were aroused by his international prestige, which helped raise funds for his department money that other officials coveted. Hardest to forgive, he conspicuously proved it possible to run a big department in Kenya efficiently and without corruption.
Leakey had to go, and he did. Coincidentally, his plane had unexplained engine failure and now he swings along on two artificial legs with a spare pair with flippers specially made for swimmings.
He again races his sailing boat with his wife and daughters for crew, he lost no time in regaining his pilot's licence, and his spirit will not be crushed. If Richard Leakey is a hero, he is matched in elephant lore by that legendary and redoubtable couple Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton.
It was a long time since we had met, and the Douglas-Hamiltons invited Lalla and me to Lake Naivasha for the final part of our holiday. He is the son of a dynasty of warlike Scottish lairds and, more recently, ace aviators; she, the daughter of equally swashbuckling Italian-French adventurers in Africa. Iain and Oria met romantically and lived dangerously.
They know wild elephants better than anyone and raised their baby daughters to play fearlessly among them. They fought the ivory trade with words and the poachers with guns. Oria's parents, explorers and elephant hunters in the s, built Sirocco, the 'pink palace', a stunning monument to art-deco stylishness on the shores of Lake Naivasha, where they settled to farm 3, acres. When they died, the place fell into disrepair for 10 years, until a determined Oria, against all economic advice, returned.
The farm, though no longer 3, acres, now thrives again, at immense cost in hard work. Not content with this load, Oria has founded a family planning clinic for thousands of working women from the surrounding area. She takes paying guests mostly small groups or honeymooners seeking and finding their own Garden of Eden in Olerai, an idyllic smaller house, whitewashed, covered with flowers and set amid yellow fever trees, separated from Sirocco by the magnificent jacaranda avenue.
Iain flies his tiny plane home every weekend from Nairobi, where he runs his newly formed charity, Save the Elephants. The family were all at Sirocco for Christmas and we were to join them for New Year. Our arrival was unforgettable: music was thumping through open doors Vangelis's score for I later chose it for Desert Island Discs , and the assembled company of 20 guests was about to sit down to a characteristic lunch of lake crayfish risotto. We looked out over the terrace at the small paddock where, 25 years before, uninvited and unexpected, Iain had landed his plane to the terrified incredulity of Oria's parents and their guests at a similarly grand luncheon party.
At dawn the morning after this sensational entrance into her life, Oria had, without hesitation, taken off with Iain for the shores of Lake Manyara, where the young man had begun his now famous study of wild elephants, and they have been together ever since.
Their story is told in their two books, the idyllic Among the Elephants and the more sombre Battle for the Elephants. Wild elephants must make wonderful nursery companions for young humans. On the veranda, staring towards Mount Longonot, is the skull of Boadicea, giant matriarch of Manyara, mother or grandmother of so many of Iain's study animals, victim of the poaching holocaust, her skull devotedly strapped into the back seat of Iain's plane and flown to its final rest, overlooking a peaceful garden.
Every night during our stay at Naivasha, Iain led out a party with torches to spot the hippos rumbling and grunting up from the lake to graze the garden and, on one occasion before we arrived, fall into the swimming pool.
Our time at Naivasha was paradise. The only false note in its music was an ugly rumour that a leopard had been snared on a neighbouring farm and was painfully dragging the snare somewhere in the area.
Grown quiet with anger, Iain took down his gun, called for the best Masai tracker on Oria's farm, and we set off in an ancient Land Rover. The plan was to find the leopard by tracking and by questioning witnesses, lure it into a trap, nurse it back to health and release it again on the farm. Knowing no Swahili, I could gauge the progress of Iain's cross-examinations only by facial expressions, tones of voice, and his occasional summaries for my benefit.
We eventually found a young man who had seen the leopard, though he denied it at first. Iain whispered to me that such initial denials baffling to my naive straightforwardness were ritual and normal.
Eventually, without for a moment acknowledging that he had changed his story, the youth would lead us to the scene. This does not stop them being worthy, and even beautiful, pieces of art. The human experience is rich. We should love what we do; we are passionate, we enjoy thinking about and depicting scenes from the world, from the past, from our lives and from our minds.
Art can be driven by science, but it can be divorced from it entirely. We hope you enjoy the remarkable selection of images we include here. And well done and thank you to everyone that contributed.
Above and Right, Obsolete but meaningful: These dinosaur paintings by Charles Knight are now scientifically outdated, yet they remain impostant as artistically beautiful and inspiring portrayals of prehistoric life. Among the best-preserved fossils in the world,1 Sciurumimus sports a similar, squirrel-like tail. These animals bore very thick, dome-like skulls, which may have been used for defense, combat for social dominance, or both.
This male Prenocephale looks especially flamboyant with its colorful skull dome, facial patches and its thick coat of filamentous integument.
While feathered theropods, the bird-like, meat eating di- nosaurs, have been more-or-less common in palaeoart for the last decade, Alessio Arena is one of the few artists who have been restoring the plant-eating ornithischian dino- saurs with an equally extensive covering of filaments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 29 : Italian artist Alessio Ciaffi highlights the grim reality of disease with this poignant drawing of a female Deinonychus infected with facial tumors.
It seems rational to assume that dinosaurs would also suf- fer from tumors in various locations. Prehistoric mammals and amphibians are only slightly less-commonly represent- ed in artwork, and invertebrates, barring some spectacular forms such as gigantic sea scorpions, usually come the last when it comes to artistic popularity.
This is a pity, because fossil invertebrates, such as the ancient trilobites shown here, come in a great diversity of interesting forms. Trilobites are a completely extinct group of arthropods that lived in the primordial seas. At a centimeter long, Palaeo- lenus is one of the most common fossil trilobites of the Cambrian period.
It is usually discovered in mass aggrega- tions, which has led the artist to portray it as a camouflaged bottom dweller. In this picture, two Palaeolenus sport pat- terned carapaces that mimic the texture of the seafloor and frond-like antennae that resemble sea plants.
Artist Alessio Ciaffi imagined that two or more individuals could come together to form cryptically-shaped units that help disguise them even more. As a final note, we can see tiny, fish-like animals known as Haikouichthys swimming around the trilobites. These crea- tures are some of the earliest known free-swimming chor- dates, members of the group which later gave rise to fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and ultimately ourselves.
Such roles were occupied by pterosaurs. Eventually, however, birds increased in diversity while only the largest flying pterosaurs remained alive by the end of the Mesozoic era. Paleobiology 35 3 : — Most animals in this group had mouths that were devoid of all teeth, except for two spike-like pro- tuberances on the mouth roof.
Needless to say, this arrangement elicited a lot of hypoth- eses about the oviraptorosaurian diet from the day these animals were discovered. Initially, they were thought to be egg-eaters from the way one skeleton was discovered next to a nest of eggs, almost as if caught in the act.
Here, Alvaro Rozalen is continuing the debate by illustrat- ing Citipati, one of the largest oviraptorosaurs, in the act of crushing a crab which it has caught from a freshwater lake. The animals are using their sharp mouthparts to crack open shellfish instead of eggs. Shellfish, hard fruits, bones have all been suggested as parts of the oviraptoro- saur diet. Perhaps these strange animals ate a bit of every- thing. This could be an artifact of preservation, or it could be a specialized adapta- tion, especially if one considers that related species such as Scansoriopteryx and Epidendrosaurus both have extremely long fingers, which may have been used in probing trees for insect larvae and other food items.
Alvero Rozalen has noticed the similarity between these mystifying anatomical features and the anatomy of a living primate, the Aye-Aye. Daubentonia madagascarensis This famous denizen of Madagascar also has long, grub-probing digits and large eyes adapted for a nocturnal life.
Inspired by the Aye-Aye, Rozalen has rejected traditional recon- structions of Epidexipteryx, which look like tiny birds with fingers and no tails bimbling about on the forest floor.
He has drawn this animal as a nocturnal tree dweller with bright eyes that reflect the moonlight. Adaptations for an arboreal lifestyle can force animals to assume deceptively scary forms with large eyes, long limbs, sharp, insect- crunching teeth and cryptic body shapes. This could have been especially true for bird-like dinosaurs with large brains, such as Troodonts.
Usually hailed as the smartest dinosaurs, these animals may have had complicated behaviors and elaborate social displays. Such advanced cognitive skills would have necessitated a relatively long period of infancy and learning. This stunning portrait shows two hatchling Troodons, smart and bird-like meat-eaters, in their tree burrow nest as they wait for their parents to return from a foraging trip.
Like hatchlings of certain birds today, they have a mottled, cam- ouflaging pattern of feathers. The developing remige, or flight feathers, are clearly visible on the arm of the hatch- ling which is shielding itself from the sun. When they grow, these feathers will get longer, and their arms will resemble wings. The hatchlings are scanning their surroundings with wary, intelligent eyes, on the lookout for potential danger or the return of their parents.
Science : —8. PMID Swiss artist Andrea Gassler has come up with a novel interpretation of these animals. He postulates that the long finger, understood by many artists and researchers as an adaptation to probe for grubs and insects under tree bark, was actually the support for an extensive, wing-like mem- brane. Bats and the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs also have wings derived from similar adaptations.
As one can expect, portraying a dinosaur with membra- nous protowings results in a truly bizarre beast, and this pterosaur-mimic reconstruction has to be appreciated as food for thought rather than a genuine hypothesis.
A similar idea has been proposed by the Italian palaeontolo- gist Andrea Cau and illustrated by the palaeoartist Lukas Panzarin in Retrieved This odd morphology was possibly used for consuming durable prey items, possibly shellfish.
Its beak could have probed into carcasses and with its jaws it could have crushed bones to obtain nutritious bone marrow. It is thus highly possible that their mat- ing habits made use of visual signals as well. In fact, sexual selection may have been the driving force in the evolution of exaggerated crests on pterosaurs and dinosaurs.
As in birds and most reptiles, the male is the more colorfully-ornamented member of the couple and he is doing his best to impress the larger, drably-colored female. Seeing that the males of many modern-day animals sport colorful crests, sacs and wattles which would not be preserved in the fossil record, Elbein has also adorned the male pterosaur with bright, inflatable sacs on his face and throat. Does mutual sexual selec- tion explain the evolution of head crests in pterosaurs and dinosaurs?
Lethaia 45, Their transformation from land-living animals to gigantic swimmers is one of the most extraordi- nary stories in the history of mammal evolution. The earli- est whales resembled deer-like animals with short necks and long, thick tails.
Soon after, they diversified into more aquatically-adapted forms, such as the large-headed, al- most crocodile-like Ambulocetus seen here. About the size of a person, Ambulocetus is usually illus- trated as a naked, semiaquatic lurker in swamps or lakes. Bethany Vargeson has broken this tradition, not only in illustrating Ambulocatus as a furry, cute yet still believable animal, but also depicting it like a gigantic sea otter, able to venture into more open waters.
In the past, most sauropods were reconstructed as slow, swamp-dwelling titans which could not even stand up properly on land. Later on, ad- ditional discoveries and new theories of dinosaur evolution revised our image of sauropods. No longer consigned to the swamps, they were seen as fully-terrestrial animals. Ultimately, however, this view also turned into a sort of orthodoxy. Sauropods are now drawn as sleek, unadorned land-dwellers with monotonous regularity.
With this one image of Diamantinasaurus, a sauropod dinosaur that lived at the end of the Cretaceous, California- based palaeoartist Brian Engh has challenged the conven- tional wisdom of how these animals are represented, on multiple fronts.
To begin with, we see the animals in an otherworldly cave, with strange geologic formations and colonies of bioluminescent bacteria that light the ceiling like stars. By picturing the large sauropods inside a cave, Engh successfully draws attention to the fact that in nature, animals often do extraordinary things and venture into unlikely places.
This is a speculative feature never before illustrated in such animals, yet it is not any more or less-likely than a traditional, reptile-headed reconstruction.
What is less commonly known is that there was not one species Smilodon, but three or possibly more, the largest of which was markedly different from others with its heavy struc- ture, long front legs and hyena-like sloping back. Like albinism, it affects many different species of animals, including deer, lions, snakes, owls, salamanders and others. In the past, similar individuals must have appeared among Smilodon populations as well. Palaeoartist Christian Masnaghetti has thus depicted Mira- gaia, the extraordinary armored stegosaurian dinosaur with a long neck, with an associated pack of smaller, opportun- istic herbivorous dinosaurs known as hypsilophodonts.
Looking like a gigantic porcupine with dangerous spines on its flexible tail, Miragaia was certainly a tough adversary for any predator. The hypsilophodonts would not only find the larger beast useful for safety, but would also help them- selves to the small prey it stirs up, or even find sustenance in its parasites or droppings. Besides suggesting a plausible behavior, Masnaghetti has also distinguished this work by illustrating both Miragaia and the opportunistic hypsilophodonts actually distant relatives, with bodily integument.
In Miragaia, this takes the shape of dense, protective quills, whereas in the smaller hypsilophodonts the same structures have evolved into a dense, bushy covering of fur-like fibers. Here, a gigantic spider purposefully spins a web in be- tween the horns of a Diaboloceratops, a large, horn-faced plant eating dinosaur, to feed on insects buzzing around its head. While this arrangement seems unlikely, a very similar situ- ation was observed with an impala in by the wildlife photographer Frank Solomon.
While this looks like a complete work of fantasy, it might be surprising to know that polycephaly, or the presence of more than one head in a single organism, is a very real phenomenon in nature. Polycephaly is a birth defect that occurs when two embryos fail to separate properly and end up as a single fetus with two heads or two front halves of the body. This condition is almost always fatal, but certain individuals can man- age to survive for long periods under captive care or other favorable conditions.
There are even people with this condi- tion: Abigail and Brittany Hensel of Minnesota, USA, have been sharing a single body since they were born. Polyceph- aly is also known from past eras; there exists a million year-old fossil of a juvennile aquatic reptile named Hyphalo- saurus with two heads. All this being said, it would have been extremely unlikely for any dinosaur or other prehistoric animal to remain alive for long if born with polycephaly.
Predators, exposure or other environmental factors would limit the life of any polycephalous hatchling. Considering all these disadvantages, this these? Zupaysaurus must have been very lucky to have survived into maturity. Famous zoologist Darren Naish contributes to this collection with a parade of unusual forms, all representing one such lineage, the therizinosaurids. Since their discovery, this lineage of long-clawed dinosaurs were as- signed a succession of different identities.
A reconstruction of Alxasaurus, an early therizino- saur species. Discovered in the s with a reason- ably complete skeleton, this animal revealed a lot of anatomical details about the group. It also established therizinosaurs as aberrant theropods and not a dis- tinct lineage as suggested before. It is restored here as a reptilian dinosaur, as the fashion was in the s. We now know that therizinosaurs were covered extensively in feather-like integument.
They lived earlier on in the age of the dinosaurs, whereas therizinosaurs ap- peared later on. The segnosaurian dinosaurs: relics of the prosauropod-or- nithischian transition? Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 4, Known from scrappy remains, these animals were ascribed a lot of unusual characteristics such as a toothless beak, webbed feet and fish-eating habits. They were believed by some researchers to be dig- gers, and their long claws were seen as adaptations to tear open insect nests.
A more modern, but featherless view of therizino- saurs, namely the giant species Therizinosaurus, known only from its seventy-centimeter-long claws. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without going too much into details, suffice it to say that nature is full of acts and practices that one might call depraved.
It would be wrong to assume that similar acts did not take place in the age of dinosaurs. Here, a male pterosaur of the species Caviramus is seen bru- tally raping the corpse of a rival which it has killed in an aerial duel of dominance. Before assuming that the artist, Elia Smaniotto, has a particularly disturbing imagination, however, you must realize that the exact same act has been documented by scientists among ducks, 1 and this work is merely an adaptation of that behavior.
Moeliker Her animals are exceptional for looking first and foremost like birds, creating an unexpected surprise for viewers who are used to outdated reptile or dragon-like representations. In the overleaf picture, a Microraptor is seen feeding on fruit - a definite surprise in palaeoart.
The second Microraptor shows a very angry or scared individual, puffing up its feathers to look bigger to poten- tial aggressors. The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution.
ISBN Here, a decidedly non-Hollywoodian Utahraptor is seen on a beach, with members of its pack in the background.
Instead, her animals are calm, reserved and at peace with their surroundings, much like a lion or tiger today. They look less like reptiles and more like the birds they were related to. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 21 3 : 36A. Raptor Red. Bantam Books. The answer, Schmunk speculates, is that males of many species engage in seemingly pointless acts designed to show off their strength - to potential rivals as well as the members of the opposite sex.
From dueling reindeer to hu- man males working out in gymnasiums, males rely on such exercises of power to establish their social dominance and mark themselves as suitable mating partners. Schmunk continues his line of speculation by imagining the male pushing the fallen tree to a location where a poten- tial mate can easily find it.
These details, of course, are all speculative. However, nupi- tal gifts feature strongly in the behaviors of many animals, ranging from spiders, Pisaura mirabilis, 1 to shrikes, Lanuis excubitor,. Is any mar- riage proposal, no matter how much from the heart, ever complete without a wedding ring? Behavioral Ecology 12 6 : — Animal Behaviour 69 3 : — In fact, one might be surprised to know that this animal actually lived before dinosaurs and is a distant cousin of us mammals.
It belongs to a lineage called synapsids, which exhibit the first skull and teeth morphologies that would later come to characterize mammals. More familiar mam- malian characteristics such as a erect limbs, a covering of fur, lactation, etc. Italian palaeoartist Fabio Manucci has here illustrated Dimetrodon as a lazy, sleepy predator, lounging in a pond in-between bouts of hunting. Like many predators liv- ing today, the sail-backed protomammal must have taken plenty of hours to rest in order to conserve energy and digest its food.
It might surprise you, however, to learn that the bioluminescence of their crests is the only specula- tive detail about the animals in this picture. The compara- tively gigantic, antler-like growths on the heads of these Nyctosauri are all too real 1 - to the endless puzzlement of palaeontologists and palaeoartists alike. Just what function this crest served is a topic of debate. But factors such as the presence of crests only in certain individuals weigh heavily in favor of it being a feature for mating displays.
It confuses us only in hindsight, and whether it glowed in the dark or not, was actually about as ordinary as deer antlers, or the tails of peacocks. It is a pretty ordinary scene, but it offers a sublime new look at these extraordinary marine reptiles. As a result, many illustrations of these animals resemble overgrown sea lizards with fins instead of legs.
In fact, such depictions still dominate the realm of palaeoart. However, the recent discovery 1 of a mosasaur named Platecarpus shows that at least some mosasaurs had fish-like flukes on their tails. This discovery led to a revision of the way we looked at mosasaurs. The pressure of living in specialized environments such as the open sea seem to drive the development of similar fea- tures in unrelated organisms.
This phenomenon is known as convergent evolution. Much like mosasaurs, sea reptiles known as ichthyosaurs have also evolved similar, fish-like body plans. Among mammals, whales and sirenians the group which includes dugongs and manatees, and pin- nipeds; seals, sea lions and their kin, have independently evolved streamlined, torpedo-like bodies and stabilizing fins.
Even birds have produced similar forms with pen- guins. With this many independent groups evolving such convergent body plans, it was perhaps naive to think that mosasaurs alone remained as finned lizards in their marine environment.
In Farke, Andrew Allen. PMC Esdaile Tool Use in Jinfengopteryx This spectacular artwork addresses one of the most inter- esting debates about dinosaurs: How intelligent were these animals? Intelligence and tool-making were once seen as exclusive gifts to mankind. Other animals were regarded as little more than instinct-driven automata. As time passed, however, signs of self-awareness and complex emotions 1 were observed in animals and this embarrassing stereotype slowly began to be discarded.
Tool-making also proved to be much more common than thought before. Based on this growing body of evidence, palaeoartist H. Esdaile has speculated about tool use in dinosaurs. I wanted to draw a dinosaur using tools the same way, and I figured if any dinosaur was clever enough to figure it out, it would be a troodontid. So here is Jinfengopteryx elegans, a small troodontid from China that lived around million years ago.
The Emotional Lives of Animals. These flying reptiles were among the largest species of their group, with certain species such as Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx growing as tall as giraffes and sporting wingspans up to 12 meters wide.
Their anatomies are also unusual: azhdarchids have comparatively huge heads and very long, stiff necks made up of elongated vertebrae. How could such beasts move, feed and live? The debate has been long and complex, but suffice it to say that the most plausible suggestion so far has been that azhdarchids lived and fed like gigantic, quadrupedal storks. This work is also a homage to the s book, The New Dinosaurs.
While most animals in the book seem severely outdated or erroneous in the light of our contemporary understanding, the Lank has stood the test of time surprisingly well. There are the long necked sauropods, the terrifying tyrannosaurs, the horn-faced cera- topsians and so on. But there are also numerous groups of little-known dinosaurs that are just as intriguing as their larger, more popular relatives.
Albertonykus belongs to one such group, a clade of dino- saurs known as the alvarezsaurs, characterized by their long legs and extraordinarily thick, short arms which sport- ed only one finger each. Just how these limbs functioned has been a matter of debate. One recent theory suggests that they lived like dinosaurian anteaters, digging out ant or termite nests with their strong arms and eating the in- sects with their toothless beaks.
However this conclusion is not certain and the possibility remains that their arms were used for a completely different purpose.
In this image, palaeoartist Jessica Pilhede approaches the riddle of alvarezsaur lifestyles with a novel approach. She imagines them much like kiwi birds, Apteryx sp. Instead, these organs have been maintained much like the stunted wings of flightless birds, bearing no specific advantage or detriment to their owners. Here, two Allosaurus males are gesturing to each other with, balloon-like air bladders emerging from the top of their heads.
Conway has observed Allosaurus skulls and was intrigued by the presence of holes on the top surface. Taking into account the levels of pneumaticity, the spread of air sacs inside the body, in large theropods, he has inter- preted them as the basis of inflatable display sacs.
There are litar- ally thousands of renditions of this animal, but Conway has made this particular one more interesting and more memo- rable than most. These mud-bathing Giraffatitan look nothing like the stock image of the sideways-viewed, thin necked, shrink wrapped versions we have been used to! Their necks are sleeved with giant, inflatable sacs that help them keep cool and the male has a highly-conspicious orange sac, complete with a much deeper neck.
A ring of thorn-like spines, de- rived from the protofeathers of their earliest ancestors, tops its head like a mighty, surreal crown. John Conway also uses this artwork to showcase his thoughts on a particular debate about dinosaurian rest- ing postures. Recently, debates over how large dinosaurs rested took place between different palaeontologists and palaeoartists, mostly on online forums. One side suggested that dinosaurs could lay down on their sides like large mammals today, while another school suggested that they adopted a crouching posture like birds.
Here, Conway points out the artificial nature of this debate by showing his Giraffatitan in both postures, crouching and lying down. In nature, things rarely exist in black- or-white: usually both answers, or something completely different may be correct.
In this extraordinary artwork, artist John Meszaros tackles one of the most interesting epochs in the evolution of life, This artwork is also distinct in that it depicts the imaginary the Cambrian period.
Taking place long before the age of but completely plausible Ceticaris with a host of commen- the dinosaurs, approximately from to million years sal organisms. Animals that evolved in this period included the Less familiar organisms are also tagging along with Ceti- first ancestors of vertebrates and the great arthropod line- caris for the ride.
All in all, Meszaros has for its time. These unusual organs were first discovered as disarticulated fossils, and each was mistaken to be a separate creature. The jaw-like limbs were thought to be crayfish-like arthropods, the body was thought to be a big, sea-cucumber-like organism and the circular mouth was mistaken for a jellyfish.
Only later did researchers realize the error, and correctly identified Anom- alocaris as a large swimming predator. The discovery of Cambrian-era fossils in China have revealed that even 1 Whittington, H. Wonderful life: the Burgess Shale and the nature of history. New York: W. Here, two of the largest German palaeoartist Joschua Knuppe is one of the most caseids, of a species known as Cotylorhynchus, engage in a accomplished young palaeo-artists of the decade.
His art- clumsy, sumo-like wrestling match for social dominance work, executed with color pencils and gouache over brown while a female watches them with interest. On top of this, he has also shown it walking bipedally across a cold, snow- covered landscape.
The result looks strikingly alien, yet it is no less plausible than the traditional image of Protoceratops as a naked, quadrupedal reptile in a desert. Bristle-like integumentary structures at the tail of the horned dinosaur Psittacosaurus. Naturwissenschaften —
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