Tetzoocon 2022 - Day 2

Go here if you have not read part 1 yet. If you want to listen to Me and C.M. Kosemen talk about our experience at the con, you can also check out our two-part podcast on the event:

These podcasts are also available on most RSS-based platforms. Anyway, let's just jump right into things:

The morning of day two was all dedicated towards our favorite flying reptiles, the bir... I mean pterosaurs. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to listen to Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone's presentation on why you should (or shouldn't) CT-scan a pterosaur. By the title alone I bet it was interesting. I did come in time for Natalia Jagielska's talk about how to describe your own pterosaur. This was much more than her just retelling how her description of Dearc went. Instead it was an actual how-to guide on what to do and what the steps are from the moment of a fossil's discovery all the way up to publishing its description in a scientific journal. Especially notable is the frustration many go through with the process of peer-review (which, in its current form, I hear many paleontologists say nowadays, has become somewhat antiquated), as well as the fact that not everyone may have the financial means to publish their findings. As you can see here, Natalia also made excellent use of memes in her presentation.

After that was the pterosaur roundtable discussion where Jagielska, Martin-Silverstone, Witton, Conway and Naish all sat together and collectively dunked on "the two Daves", also known as David Martill and David Unwin, who have gained a bit of infamy thanks to their dubious claims in recent years around pterosaur biology. Especially telling was Martin-Silverstone's account of how one of the Daves simply tried to evade the discussion when told that fossilized melanosomes were found inside pterosaur pycnofibers, which is pretty conclusive evidence that these fibres were fuzzy epidermal structures on the outside of the body. At the end of the session I actually had a question for the presenters, but there was unfortunately no time for me. I did the next-best thing and asked Darren Naish on his blog afterwards and he gave me a pretty helpful reply. Through Memo I have also heard that John Conway also disagrees with Paul's idea on pterosaur locomotion, at least when it comes to azhdarchids. 

After that was Steve White's presentation on his new Mesozoic Art, the quasi-part-three of his Dinosaur Art book series, but now under a new publisher. White told about all the trouble he went through to get these books published and I think the main take-home message I got from his talk is that nowadays, unless you are a big name or dealing with children's media, it is best for paleoart- or paleontology-themed books to be self-published, something I will have to keep in mind (*wink*wink*).

After lunch and a signing event by everyone at the con who contributed to Mesozoic Art (it was a lot), came another rountable discussion, about something completely different. C.M. Kosemen, Gert van Djik, Jennifer Colbourne, Joschua Knüppe, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Dougal Dixon all sat together to talk about designing alien life. Especially Dixon I felt shined during this event thanks to his sheer enthusiasm. He quipped some funny but also thoughtful comments, like:

 "The humanoid alien, the human being with a funny head speaking English, is actually a good representation of evolution. It has evolved to live in the environment of a television studio against the selective pressures of production budget."

And also told us more about his novel Greenworld, which still has not gotten an English release! Especially fascinating was his statement that he thinks that real alien life will probably look nothing like what he or the other presenters designed and might resemble more something from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, which I actually somewhat agree with. Then he surprised everyone when he whipped out his... model of a Greenworld character riding on an alien insectoid creature. It does not go mentioned enough that Dixon is also a pretty great 3D-artist who does an excellent job at turning his speculative creatures into models. The next surprise then came for the whole audtitorium when Spencer Drake, the grandson of the Frank Drake, happened to sit in the audience and asked the presenters their opinion on OG Drake's claim that, due to the constraints of evolving intelligence, most spacefaring aliens will happen to look vaguely humanoid enough that, if you encountered them at night wearing a trenchcoat, you'd probably mistake them for a human. Even though I also disagree with this assessment (I am firmly of the opinion that, when we finally do find extraterrestrial life, even intelligent forms, it could be so different that we might not recognize it as alive at first. I am actually somewhat frustrated with my own alien designs being still too similar to things one might find on Earth, but it is of course difficult to imagine things beyond any of your own frames of reference), I still thought some of the responses to Spencer were a bit too blunt and harsh. Especially Knüppe just saying that he hated it (without elaboration), to the point where he made a parody of the concept where a species evolved a humanoid body shape but happens to have the intelligence of a cockroach (an admittedly fun take, but to take some wind out of his sails, H.G. Wells already did that subversion over 120 years ago).

Then came John Conway's presentation on his new book A History of Painting (With Dinosaurs), which basically sprung up from the question of what would have happened if Renaissance artists and other famous painters, from Dali to Monet and Warhol, had painted dinosaurs. What followed were Vermeer oviraptors and cubist ankylosaurs. Notably, Conway presented the book and each painting as a trial-and-error experience, the whole endeavour basically being an experiment in what styles work and do not work for dinosaur illustrations (and it of course also asks the question what dinosaur art should even be like and if it even needs a specific use to “work”). After All Yesterdays and hyper-realistic paleoart by the likes of Julius Csotonyi and Andrey Atuchin, I believe Conway here crystallized what might very well become the next big paleoart-movement, which I think had already been brewing in the background for a couple of years: A shift away from trying to be photo-realistic and more towards stylisation and experimentation with what methods and styles are useful, both for artistic as well as scientific purposes. And I can already see various areas to expand on where other arists could experiment. Conway restricted himself only to European/western art history from the Renaissance onward, but of course people all throughout the world have developed vastly different and intriguing art-styles since prehistory. How would dinosaurs look through the painting methods of East Asia? How would the Ancient Egyptians have depicted dinosaurs in their tomb reliefs?

Finally came Mark Witton and Ellinor Michel's presentation on The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Park, a great book I have already written about. Witton and Michel talked about what drove them to write this book, as well as some anecdotes. Very fascinating was Michel's story of how, due to being restricted by her wheelchair, she was forced to stare at the park's alleged Megaloceros fawn for an extended amount of time while Witton and others were closely investigating the main statues, which led to her noticing that it did not at all look like a deer. After further investigation it turned out that this was not meant to be Megaloceros, but actually the last surviving member of a family of four Xiphodon that were originally on the Tertiary Island. As the authors note, such a massive mistake in the park's long history of restructuring makes one wonder what else might be missing from the park's original iteration. Having read the book beforehand, I already knew about the missing Xiphodon, but it was a nice detail to know how exactly Michel and Witton made that discovery.

At last then came the Tetzoocon Quiz. I got only nine out of thirty points, though according to Naish the average is four, so good for me I guess. I definitely appreciated the question about what plot did not happen in the tv show Primeval. I am always happy when people remember that one, but the question made me realize how bizarre this show must have been for people not into it.

And that concludes the first ever Tetzoocon I was able to attend. Laughs were had, merchandise was bought, friends were made. I got to photograph Dougal Dixon being proud of his dinosaur tie (and also bought from him the new 40th anniversary edition of After Man). I hope I made some people tune into the CMTK Podcast and also read Har Deshur. On the day after there was also a guided tour by Naish through the Crystal Palace Park, but I was unable to attend that because then we already had to fly back. However, I did go to the park by myself the day before the convention, and that story shall soon also be told.

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Related Posts:

• The weirdest things people have thought about pterosaurs
  
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope - Part 7
• Behind the scenes of the Sauriermuseum, with Victoria the Hesperosaurus 
• An Afternoon with Kosemen 
• What is Har Deshur? 
• Antique Paleoart: Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World 
• Hawkinspunk Spinosaurus 
• Tetzoocon 2022 - Day 1
  

Tetzoocon 2022 - Day 1

Well guys, I have done it. I have managed to attend Tetzoocon for the first time! As you know, I am not from the UK, so this was part of a wider London vacation, during which I also visited the Natural History Museum and the Crystal Palace Geological Court, as well as a bunch of non-zoology related stuff (like the pretty awesome War of the Worlds Immersive Experience), but those stories I will tell in future posts. Before I begin telling you about the first day of Tetzoocon in this post, here are a few climatological and anthropological observations I made during my first visit to the UK in over a decade:

• You know how in Breaking Bad any scene that is meant to take place in Mexico is tinted with a yellow filter? I felt like the same happened in real life as soon as I stepped out of the plane, but with the colour grey. I have never seen such greyest of greys as I did in London.
• During a bus tour at night to see the Christmas street lights I noticed that the skyline gives the grey night sky quite an alien glow. In front of this backdrop, this gave the London architecture quite a sinister appearance. 
• The British have technologically advanced enough to have already invented the traffic light. However, nobody in this remote part of the world has apparently had the idea yet that these lights are on occassion supposed to turn green for pedestrians, creating a peculiar culture of ritualized jaywalking. Perhaps the constantly grey environment has led an aversion to the colour green. 
• Fish and chips taste the best when the restaurant-owner is a Turkish man.
• This is the only country I know where law enforcement and other state employees dress like they purposefully do not want to be taken seriously.
  
• The public transport system could use some work.
• Everyone was very nice.

Day 1 of Tetzoocon began early in the morning with everyone arriving and the presenters setting up the stalls. One of the first people I got to talk with by coincidence was Gert van Dijk, who is a pretty nice dude. He asked me how I solved the problem of a convincing tripod walk-cycle with my Hellasic Dyles, to which I sheepishly had to answer that my aliens are tripods more out of Martian genre obligation rather than biomechanical sense. He certainly got me there. I also got to meet my friend C.M. Kosemen for the first time in person, which was pretty great. He even brought some memento-cards for our podcast. Memo and his wife were a bit late to the event so Me and my girlfriend helped them set up his stall before going into the first presentation. 

The event was of course opened by Darren Naish himself, no surprise there, who quipped some jokes and explained some things to newcomers.

The first proper presentation was then given by naturalist Jack Ashby, who gave a talk about his book Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals. It began with some fun facts about platypodes, some of which were certainly new to me, such as the venom produced by the animal's ankle spur being able to cause pain for months. Many of these amazing facts about the platypus Ashby then used to ask the question of why, when we talk about Australian animals, we use such traits as a reason to describe them as weird or primitive, while animals more familiar to western audiences with equally unique traits get called amazing or magnificent. From here Ashby went into the colonial history of othering Australian animals and how this not only has a lasting effect today but also how inaccurately viewing Australia as an evolutionary backwater has had a tremendously negative effect on trying to preserve the continent's fauna. Overall, a great presentation. As I myself have written about the othering of certain animals, Ashby said a lot of things that resonated with me and he definitely convinced me to buy his book.

Hana Ayoob's planned talk unfortunately had to be cancelled, so next up was Dean Lomax talking about Locked in Time, a book on paleoethology which I had already read and can thus highly recommend. Lomax went into the history of what inspired his book and presented some of his favorite examples of fossilized behaviour. Pretty standard, but Lomax's energy and enthusiasm made it a very enjoyable talk.

After that was already book signing and lunch pause, where I helped Memo out at his stall and got to talk to more people. There was an interesting guy who bought three whole original drawings made for All Yesterdays, among which was Memo's version of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's Homo diluvii testis. Working for the museum where most of Scheuchzer's original collection is stored (though the original salamander fossil is unfortunately still in Haarlem), I told the man some facts about that story, which led to him wanting to record my voice because apparently I was the first German-speaking person ever who could tell him the correct pronunciation of Scheuchzer's name. Pretty bizarre experience. Edit: As it turns out, the person in question was zoologist Paul Stewart.

Then came the big talk where Kosemen, Naish and Conway reminisced on the anniversary of All Yesterdays. Most of it was Naish retelling the story of how the book came to be, with some added details by Kosemen and Conway. I felt like I had heard most of it already and wished they had gone more into detail about the different reactions to the book and the movement it started, as well as what direction they thought paleoart might be heading into in the future. But hey, I will probably ask Memo that directly in the podcast.

Sitting at the talk were also these chaps from a little known website called Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. Maybe you have heard of them.

The next presentation, of which I unfortunately forgot to take pictures, was Jennifer Colbourne talking about tool use in animals and if certain non-bird theropods could use tools as well. The different classifications of tool-use were interesting to learn about and there is nothing disagreeable with her assessment that, if troodontids did use tools, it would have been only a very basic, biologically pre-programmed practice. I did disagree however with her statement that there is no way fish could use tools.

Then came Cassius Morrison with his presentation about Ecological niche partitioning among non-coelurosaur theropods. The things he talked about were very interesting, among which being the idea of using megalosauroids, whose diets are pretty well-known, as a sort of rosetta-stone for various Mesozoic ecosystems, as well as the realization that megalosauroids may have already had strongly water-adjacent diets even before the evolution of spinosaurids. This might mean that giant carnivores like Torvosaurus should be imagined more as ecologically bear-like rather than as apex-predators. The problem was just that the way Morrison presented all this felt very long-winded and dragging. I think he could have summarized many things more concisely and I believe he also went noticeably overtime.

At last was Darren Naish's talk on the often overlooked herpetofauna of Britain, which was pretty good. Naish went into the fossil history of reptiles and amphibians of the British Isles, as well as many unfortunate mistakes in assessing the true herpetological diversity of the country, such as when pool frogs were for a long time mistaken as an introduced species, leading to their British population going extinct before it was realized they were natives all along. There is apparently also still a debate over whether treefrogs were ever native to the area or not. The presentation then took a surprising turn when Naish revealed that there were various Victorian societies that purposefully tried to integrate exotic animals into the native British ecosystem, which today has in some cases made it difficult to say which lizards living over there were ever native or introduced. Really fascinating stuff and presented by Naish in a very engaging manner. I also have a suspicion that he came across some of these things while earlier researching the phenomenon of British big cats.

After the presentations came the art gallery where I think everyone had a great time conversing with each other. Dougal Dixon signed my original German copy of After Man, Miranda was infatuated with Gert van Dijk's alien art...

...and I got to meet Mr. Biblaridion of Alien Biospheres fame himself. Fantastic guy, I must say. We talked about the joys of mass extinction in spec-evo, languages and the regrets we have for some of our older content. Afte the event, Memo, Michael and Me went together to a Chinese restaurant and had a nice evening.

But that is not all of course, since the event continued the next day and we will get to that soon.

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Related Posts:

• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope - Part 7
• Behind the scenes of the Sauriermuseum, with Victoria the Hesperosaurus 
• An Afternoon with Kosemen 
• What is Har Deshur? 
  

The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 7 - The End?

Fig. 1: The cover of All Yesterdays, portraying Protoceratops climbing a tree. While it seems strange at first, this behaviour is strongly inspired by what can be seen in modern goats and emphasizes the fact that many animals sometimes engage in unexpected behaviours that one would not be able to deduce from the skeleton alone. 

For the previous part please go here.

All things have an end, except for sausages. Those have two. After passing the swan song of the Alien Prehistoric World Trope that was Wayne Barlowe, we will now come to art which most of us would call contemporary. What has happened in the meantime? Somewhen around the late 2000s/early 10s paleoartists began noticing that there was something majorly off about most common dinosaur depictions. As mentioned in part 5, since the 80s the most popular style of reconstruction had become the Greg Paul way, in which the animals are depicted as (perhaps overly) active, but also so slimmed down that the contours of the entire skeleton become visible through the skin. Living animals rarely do look like that, so artists began to reconstruct their fossils not just as walking skeletals but also decked them out with proper amounts of speculative soft-tissue, often referencing living animals. A major contribution to this were new fossil Lagerstätten giving us more information about dinosaur skin than ever before. Another major shift at this time was the fact that the practice of paleoart had existed for so long that people began studying its history in more detail and, in the process, discovered that certain tropes and even plagiarism had become rampant over the years. Things like background-volcanoes, violence, monstrosity, alien atmospheres, anachronisms, shrink-wrapping et cetera now became obvious clichés that artists wanted to avoid if they wanted to be original.

Fig. 2: Very bird-like Troodon formosus scurrying around a magnolia tree by John Conway. The use of modern flowering plants to create a sense of familiarity and beauty in prehistoric scenes is something we have already encountered in Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles from part 4.

These new developments became codified in the 2012 book All Yesterdays, written by Darren Naish, John Conway and C.M. Kosemen (who by the way follows this blog, so Hi there if you’re reading this). The work features several pieces which depict prehistoric life in speculative and unusual ways, but without ever stepping too far from plausibility. It also features an “All Todays” section in which modern animals, such as rhinos or elephants are reconstructed using the flawed methods of the past (often with tongue-in-cheek descriptions), resulting truly alien abominations. Despite this, the ironically most thought-provoking images in the book are those which depict extinct animals doing ordinary things, such as camouflaging, building nests, sleeping or playing. It really says a lot about the previous state of paleoart when simply depicting dinosaurs doing normal animal things was seen as revolutionary. But alas, exactly this was a major shift, one we are still experiencing. Extinct animals are not thought of anymore as antediluvian monsters deservedly swept away by catastrophes but as animals that lived and died like the ones today. Remembering previous parts, in some ways this is a revival of sentiments similarly expressed in the art of Zdeněk Burian and Wayne Barlowe. Perhaps you could call this a second, more subtle Dino Renaissance, but generally our current paleoart period is referred to as either post-modern (as by Mark Witton) or as the Soft-Tissue-Revolution. The animals of our current paleoart often have bizarre ornamental features and engage in unusual behaviour, but, strangely, they seem a lot less alien than the creatures of older art. Apart from the fact they are not depicted as monsters anymore, this, at least in the case of dinosaurs, may be because many are now depicted with insulating fuzz and feather-shells, emphasizing their close link to modern birds. Dinosaurs are not aliens anymore, but odd proto-birds and, since we all know that birds are very, very weird, it becomes a lot less weird when we show dinosaurs doing weird things. Weird, is it not?

Fig. 3: Thus again we come back to Deinoynchus, the dinosaur we used as an example all the way back in part 1, illustrated here by C. M. Kosemen (used with permission). Once portrayed as a zombie-lizard-alien (see part 5) it has now become a near-bird, exuding the majesty and respect of a bird of prey while also looking a lot more believable as a real animal.

With this, one might ask if the APW is a dead trope now. In professional paleoart and paleontology, probably, but unfortunately not in fringe and pseudo-science. Many fringelords and hacks do certainly seem to have views of a prehistoric world which resembles that of Victorian Antediluvia, if not weirder. Most infamous of these are obviously the people who believe in an actual deluge and antediluvian world: Young-Earth-Creationists. In their unwinnable struggle against common sense they have come up with all sorts of bizarre and untenable ideas to explain the fossil record and plate tectonics without resorting to geologic timescales and evolution. One of these is the thought that Devonian and Carboniferous animals lived together on a floating forest off the shore of the antediluvian continent and that is why they do not appear in the same sediments as dinosaurs or humans or that the breakup of Pangea happened during just the few days of the deluge. Other ideas are just rehashing already disproven ideas, such as vapor canopies and Cuvierian catastrophism. Only one step above YECs is the recent nonsense by a man named Brian J. Ford. In his book Too Big to Walk he seriously claims, against every anatomical, botanical and geological evidence to the contrary, that during the Mesozoic the entire Earth was covered in a shallow, steaming ocean and that all dinosaurs were amphibious or fully marine, seemingly unaware that the idea of aquatic sauropods and hadrosaurs was already popular in the 1930s before being thoroughly disproven from the 50s onward. Similarly, the physicist Brian Cox suggested that dinosaurs lived on an Earth whose gravity was closer to that of Mars and that is why they could grow to such heights. Also notable are the reconstructions by fringe paleoartist David Peters (who has yet to grant me the honor of insulting me on one of his websites). The majority of his pterosaurs look like alien creatures, mangled corpses, or a combination of the two. We have already discussed the connection of cryptozoology and even ufology with the APW trope in part 2. Obviously, none of these people are trained paleontologists, which is quite obvious in their lack of knowledge about fossils, anatomy, geology or even just history. As mentioned in part 1, several studies have, for over half a century, shown that all these animals would have been perfectly capable of living on land, in our modern atmosphere and under normal earth gravity. Their physiology was just that efficient. The reason why these fringelords still have adherents is unfortunately because the general public is about as uneducated as them. Many people look at animals like Giraffatitan and Quetzalcoatlus and cannot believe that these existed on the same planet as us, not because they did the math but because of some gut feeling. This, combined with the fact that the APW trope still lingers on in pop culture, leads people to think stuff like “surely there must have been three times as much oxygen in the past”, “surely the atmosphere must have been a lot denser back then”, “surely gravity must have been different”, “surely there must have been more available energy for animals back then, like radioactivity”, giving fringelords credibility. The last sentence was an unironic Reddit-comment I once saw under a post about the extinct giant bird Argentavis, an animal which would have been regularly feeding on mammoth carcasses, not uranium like Godzilla. One explanation for such strange gut feelings is probably a simple familiarity bias. Any extinct animal, especially older ones, will automatically seem alien to us just because we did not grow up with it and we have never seen one alive, while our modern animals seem fairly ordinary or even boring, despite the fact that the elephant is a manatee-relative with a tentacle nose and the largest animal of all time is a still living ungulate that feeds on tiny crabs and communicates by singing. Another reason might also be the still pre-conceived notion that prehistoric animals must, by default, have been primitve and inefficient compared to modern fauna and therefore needed external explanations to justify why they were so good at what they were doing. "If an advanced mammal like an elephant cannot grow this large today, then these backwards dinosaurs surely needed help from their environment to get this far", is a sentiment some people probably have. One could compare this to ancient astronaut theories, whose basic and very racist premise is that non-european people were too primitive to have built megalithic structures or develop agriculture so they needed help from aliens to explain their achievements. I also believe that another major factor that leads to ideas like these is that we humans live in a world with a very impoverished megafauna, making it hard for some to understand how past ecosystems worked (hence you also end up with fringe theories like there only being one sauropod species in the entire Morrison Formation because there is only one giraffe in Africa today). The thing is however that our modern fauna is so impoverished not because Earth has become a radically different planet, but because we have, at least in part, driven the majority of megafauna to extinction and destroyed their habitats. It therefore becomes especially brain-frying to read APW-esque ideas from people talking about recently extinct animals such as Argentavis, moas or mammoths. To illustrate this level of cognitive dissonance, imagine two cavemen sitting around a campfire, one saying to the other: “Ya know, Harold, the animal herds have been getting awfully small in recent years. I bet it has something to do with the air. Anyway, you got any more of that bison-stew?”. If viewed from this perspective, the APW-trope becomes potentially dangerous, as it absolves humans from responsibility over any past and possibly future megafaunal extinctions by claiming it all on unproven radical changes of the planet. This would be comparable to how some climate change “skeptics” claim we cannot and should not do anything about climate change because it is all actually caused by changes in the sun’s radiation. We can only hope that fringe ideas like all of the ones mentioned here will lose popularity as science education will improve in the future and post-modern paleoart fully replaces Jurassic Park wannabes. If not, well… let us hope that the intelligent species that will evolve after our inevitable extinction will do a better job at understanding our times.

Fig. 4: What a Russian childrens’ book from 1962 imagined the surface of Venus to look like, a nice, whimsical note to end this series on. It is also oddly topical, given how we have found profound biosignatures in the Venusian atmosphere this year. I am not saying it is dinosaurs, but...

At last, if the APW trope is rendered obsolete by professional paleontology/paleoart and nonsense by pseudoscience, what is there to do with it for you, dear reader? Tropes can be tools and have positive effects if used correctly. With this seven-part history outlined, you should be able to spot the characteristics and pitfalls of the trope and use them appropriately. If you are working on a story or artwork that wants to go with originality or accuracy, you should avert or subvert the APW trope when possible. If you aim for something that is pure nostalgia you should play it straight. You can also do something like Wayne Barlowe in the previous part and transport the APW trope into different settings, be it sci-fi or fantasy, and create something truly fun and unique. Another great example would be Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated series Primal. Be creative, have fun, read books, write books!

With that I end the series which originally started this blog. What does the future hold? Certainly more silliness from old-timey paleontology, but maybe also an endeavour into something more astrobiological. Stay tuned!

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even just 1$ as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Related Posts:

• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 1 - Antediluvia
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 2 - Dinosaurs become movie monsters
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 3 - Technicolor Thecodonts
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 4 - Familiar Beasts?
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 5 - Renaissance Madness
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 6 - Just Plain Barlowe

Literary Sources:

• Conway, John/Kosemen, C.M./Naish, Darren: All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Viewsof Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, UK 2012.
• Cox, Brian: Wonders of Life, London 2013.
• Ford, Brian J.: Too Big to Walk. The New Science of Dinosaurs, London 2018.
• White, Steve: Dinosaur Art. The World's Greatest Paleoart, London 2012.
• Witton, Mark: The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art, Marlborough 2018.

Online Sources/Further Reading:

• How to spot palaeontological crankery by Mark Witton.
• Brian J. Ford's Aquatic Dinosaurs, 2014 Edition and Dinosaurs and the Anti-Shrink-Wrapping Revolutionby Tetrapod Zoology (ver. 3).
• Why the World Has to Ignore David Peters and ReptileEvolution.com by Tetrapod Zoology (ver. 4).
• A Vast Quantity of Evidence Confirms That Non-Bird Dinosaurs Were Not Aquatic by Tetrapod Zoology (Youtube channel).

Image Sources:

• Fig. 1: Conway 2012, cover.
• Fig. 2: White 2012, p. 142-143.
• Fig. 3: C. M. Kosemen illustration
• Fig. 4: Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera

A History of Thick Dinosaurs

Warning: This was written as an April Fools gag and is therefore filled with complete nonsense. 

One of the oldest and most well-known features of dinosaurs was their extraordinary thickness. This is because it is one of the most easily readable features of their skeleton. The thickness, in scientific terms called Robustus stultus, of a dinosaur can be easily determined by measuring the diameter of the caudopygidium bone of the hip. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the teeth that were the first discovered fragments of Iguanodon, but rather its caudopygidium. This fact was however kept secret by Gideon Mantell for over 30 years, as he believed that: “Nobody would have believed the Lord was capable of creating a magnificent beast of such robust girth and allow it to go extinct. What a waste of beauty.” (Mantell 1853). As he revealed the secret on his deathbed, Richard Owen declared that a reptile can only be considered a dinosaur if it has erect legs, five fused sacral vertebrae and its caudopygidum’s diameter measures at least 30 centimeters, famously defending this choice by saying: “I like big saurians and I may not lie”(Owen 1893). This discovery he also used to counteract the Darwinian notion of evolution being a survival of the fittest and instead proposing that it was a survival of the thickest. With this began the search for the dinosaur possessing the widest  Robustus stultus, culminating in the North American Bone Wars, during which O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope fought tooth and nail to find the dinosaur with the widest caudopygidium bone (giving the war its name). Both claimed to have discovered the thickest dinosaurs, with Cope having named Camarasaurus supremus (the supremus referring to the 1 m thickness of the caudopygidium) and Marsh describing Stegosaurus (thought to have had a brain in each Gluteus maximus alone just to handle all that girth). But they were both deceived, for an even thicker dinosaur was found by Barnum Brown. Said dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, was declared king of the dinosaurs not because of its height, but because it had the largest caudopygidium of any lifeform known at that point. Dinosaurs with an even bigger Robustus stultus have however been discovered since then, all curiously coming from Bad Segeberg.

With such a dynamic history, it should come to no surprise that the topic of dinosaur thickness has also found its way into paleoart. In this post I therefore want to present the ten most classic and accurate examples of dinosaur-thickness.

1.     Gorgosaurus, by Zdeněk Burian

Fig. 1

Here we see the Cretaceous tyrannosaurid Gorgosaurus attacking two Styracosaurus. There exist three different versions of this piece, one from 1948, one from 59 and this one here from 61. Each time Burian made sure to make the hindquarters of the theropod thicker and more defined than before in order to be as accurate to the caudopygidium bone as possible. With each iteration the Styracosaurus at the back also comes closer, presumably to admire the girth of those thunder thighs.

2.     Vulcanodon, by John Sibbick

Fig. 2.

Behold the pinnacle of thickness, which is Vulcanodon. As we can see here, the artist John Sibbick chose to depict this dinosaur according to the German motto “Wer schön sein will muss leiden” (He who wants to be beautiful has to suffer). Just look at that sad face. It reminds me of my header-image of the sprawling Heinrich Harder Diplodocus, which seems to smile through the joint-pain.

3.     Agathaumas by Charles R. Knight

Fig. 3.

Agathaumas is a totally real, valid genus of ceratopsian dinosaur discovered in 1872, here reconstructed by classic artist and bonsai-tree-collector Charles R. Knight. While Knight was at first often reluctant to give dinosaurs their proper girth, he was convinced by concept after subscribing to Owen’s “survival of the thickest” concept. Here we see him depict the then novel concept of dinosaurs not just being massive, but also possessing armored thickness in order to protect their hardly gained Robustus stultus.

4.     Gourmand, by Dougal Dixon

Fig. 4.

Ganeosaurus tardus, also called the Gourmand, is not a real dinosaur, but rather a thought-experiment of what a tyrannosaur might look like if it lived today. According to its creator, the thickness of dinosaurs was gradually increasing towards the end of the Cretaceous, so if they had not died out they may have perfected their Robustus stultus to an unprecedented degree. To make space for and maintain such a high thickness, however, the animal would have had to get rid of useless organs and been constantly eating protein-rich food. This is why the Gourmand has lost its forelimbs and is depicted here engaging in the highly nutritious act of eating ass.

5.     Gorgosaurus, again by Zdeněk Burian

Fig. 5.

Burian, it seems, was irresistible to the caudoypgidium-diameter of Gorgosaurus, which is why he produced more than one piece of the theropod, seen here attacking the ankylosaurid Scolosaurus (in an earlier sketch of this piece it is Edmontonia). What Burian depicted here is the most accepted hypothesis for the dinosaur’s extinction: Its haunch and belly were so girthy (likely to attract mates) that the animal had trouble bending down to feed or drink, just like me after the holidays. This makes Gorgosaurus a prime example of overspecialization. Look at that smug look on that Scolosaurus’ face. It knows that the fatass cannot reach it.

6.     Triceratops, by Jean Zallinger

Fig. 6.

Tired of all the talk about thick dinosaurs, American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews wanted to instead explore the origin of human thickness. For this, however, the dolt did not go to Africa, but to Mongolia instead in search for the missing link between human- and baboon-butts. He was to be disappointed, as he instead found many more thick dinosaurs. Instead of admitting his failure to find the missing link, he made a career out of being a dinosaur-expert, pretending to have always been searching for dinosaur bones in Mongolia. He went on to write several dino books aimed at children, one of which, In the Days of the Dinosaurs was illustrated by Jean Zallinger, who had an extraordinary fondness of plus-size ceratopsians it seems.

7.     Tyrannosaurus, by Rudolph Zallinger

Fig. 7.

Rudy here was the husband of the famous Jean Zallinger, though his only notable work is a very obscure mural called The Age of Reptiles. Why it is so unknown is hard to say, as it is notable for most detailedly depicting the accurate amount of thickness of the mighty Tyrannosaurus. Perhaps he was simply ahead of his time.

8.     Parasaurolophus, by John Conway

Fig. 8.

Here we have John Conway once and for all proving that dinosaurs can also be thick in modern paleoart. It was made for the book Thick Yesterdays in which the author attempted to counteract the ongoing trend of slimming down dinosaurs in paleoart. The overall motto was: “Real dinosaurs have curves”. His co-author Nemo Ramjet produced even thicker dinosaurs, which I cannot show here for censorship reasons. Think of the children!

9.     Euoplocephalus, by Gregory S. Paul

Fig. 9.

Much like Knight, Paul was into more slim dinosaurs, but even he could not resist the attraction of a thick ankylosaur. “I regret nothing”, were his last words before he lumped this genus into the same as Nodosaurus and reclassified all of Thyreophora as a subgroup of glyptodonts. 

10.  Iguanodon, by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Fig. 10.

Here we have the original and to this day still most scientifically accurate reconstruction of Iguanodon. Hawkins took great care to accurately model how the fat-rolls would bend and stretch as the animal lied on its belly. This was actually a very dangerous act, as Owen cautioned the artist to not sculpt the fat too accurately, as the prude Victorian society of the time was not yet ready for such a brash display of thickness. Hawkins did not listen and got away with it in the British Crystal Palace. However, when he tried doing the same in the planned Paleozoic Museum of the New Yorker Central Park, the even pruder society of 19th century America would not have it and all his models were demolished with sledge-hammers by famous creationist mobster William Magear Tweed. They were just not ready for the thickness yet. 

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Literary Sources:

• Andrews, Roy Chapman: In the Days of the Dinosaurs, New York 1959.
• Conway, John/Kosemen, C.M./Naish, Darren: All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, UK 2012.
• Dixon, Dougal: The New Dinosaurs. An Alternative Evolution, London 1988.
• Mantell, Gideon: May the Lord forgive me for what I am about to do, London 1853.
• Norman, David: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, London 1985.
• Owen, Richard: On the thickness of fossil reptiles, London 1893.
• Schalansky, Judith: Die Verlorenen Welten des Zdeněk Burian, Berlin 2013 (Naturkunden 8).
• Volpe, Rosemary: The Age of Reptiles. The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger’s Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale, New Haven 2007.
• White, Steve: Dinosaur Art. The World’s Greatest Paleoart, London 2012.

Online Sources:

• The Dinosaurs of Crystal Palace: Among the Most Accurate Renditions of Prehistoric Life Ever Made by Tetrapod Zoology

Image Sources:

• Fig. 1: Schalansky 2013, p. 134-135.
• Fig. 2: Norman 1985, p. 92.
• Fig. 3: Wikimedia
• Fig. 4: Dixon 1988, p. 75.
• Fig. 5: Schalansky 2013, p. 138-139.
• Fig. 6: Andrews 1959, p. 57.
• Fig. 7: Volpe 2007, foldout.
• Fig. 8: Conway 2012, p. 51.
• Fig. 9: White 2012, p. 39.
• Fig. 10: Tetrapod Zoology