I know, it's not exactly an earth-shaking post on anatomy or reconstructing prehistoric life, but as I mop up some of the duties that have taken me away from blogging the last few months I thought I'd share this trailer, which shows off some of what took time away from blogging last year at this time:

I know it's been a while since I posted anything, and luckily I have a backlog of content to share in the coming weeks, but I'm so excited about this project that I felt I had to post this, if for no other reason than as a warning to artists out there that are thinking about restoring sauropods in the near future.

Just a quick note, because today we got one of the cooler new papers on dinosaurs to have been published in quite a while, describing not one but three specimens of Ornithomimus with feathers.

And not only are there three specimens, but they are of different ages, and it turns out the feathers change as Ornithimimus grows up. In particular, the adults seem to have large wings with branching feathers on them, while the juveniles are covered only with the dinofuzz that we have become familiar with in the Chinese dinosaurs we have come to know and love.

This also pulls protowings further down the family tree - prior to this we only had definite wings in those wacky oviraptorids, deinonychosaurs (the various "raptor" dinosaurs), and those critters on the main bird line.

I haven't been posting much lately, so I thought I'd at least put up this skeletal I finished over the weekend...

So it turns out I haven't vanished (and actually have a lot of new content to share) but I've been swamped working on several projects of late. One of them I'd like to share, for those of you who really like dinosaurs but actually have different job aspirations:

I'll be teaching a course for Visualarium, one of the leading educational resources for visual effects artists (and artists in training) that use Pixologic ZBrush. The class is Advanced Creature Anatomy, and rather than being on dinosaurs (although you'll see some of them!) it centers on learning enough comparative anatomy from living and extinct animals to develop your own mental toolkit of concepts you can apply when to design more plausible speculative anatomy for fictional creature design.

I'll do my best to keep it fun, so if ZBrush and 3D art is your thing, I invite you to check it out; we'll be conducting a free webinar this Thursday so people can get a taste of what the course will be like.

How big did Apatosaurus get? Well, that gray silhouette that is being dwarfed in terms of bulk there is Supersaurus vivianae. So yeah, that's one big honk'in sauropod...

Unenlagia comahuensis looking for fish at dawn.