Drawing With Beasts

Aaron Woodruff // Paleontologist, paleoartist, scientific illustrator, content creator, author Commissions open, please DM or email me at [email protected] for information. Instagram │ Twitter │ Bluesky

[drawing-with-beasts]

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Just figured out that I can share my artwork directly from Instagram. since I'll be posting there a lot more moving forward I thought I'd try it out.

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For Dinosaur Day this year I thought I'd post my reconstruction of the late Jurassic troodontid Hesperornithoides. I was commissioned to do this last year, but I've made a few recent tweaks that help it pop a little bit more. I've depicted it about to swallow an unfortunate mammal it has captured called Glirodon grandis, a multituberculate.

This piece challenged me in several ways. The biggest challenge was that I wasn't used to portaying and rendering feathers. I pretty much learned on the go and I think I found some techniques that work. The client certainly seemed pleased!

The little mammal is very speculative as the only fossils that have been preserved are jaws and teeth. When drawing it I was going for something more gerbil-like, but I ended up with something more resembling a squirrel.

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Those of you that have followed me for a while know that I mostly draw mammals, but I've always had a fascination for marine reptiles, especially mosasaurs. So after the new paper dropped yesterday announcing a new species of they well-known genus Tylosaurus, I had to take a crack at a reconstruction!

Tylosaurus rex is the largest species of its genus known with length estimates up to 13.3m (40ft). Its fossils are known from late Cretaceous age deposits from the state of Texas. Notably, it appears to have had proportionately stronger jaw and neck musculature than other Tylosaurus species, implying a general preference for larger prey. A number of specimens previously assigned to the smaller species T. proriger are now understood to be T. rex.

It was fun to try something different and and I ended up learning about lizard muscle anatomy in the process. Mosasaurs were actually my favorite animals to draw back in high school (inspired by the documentary Chased By Sea Monsters) so this took me back to my roots. I may repost this after I figure out how to better produce the scale texture.

This particular reconstruction is of the holotype skull PMNS 8029, figure 1A in Zietlow et al., 2026.

[slopforhogs]

Collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu/Pecari tajacu) with leucism amongst a squadron of regular peccaries

Captured by Ramiro Gonzalez, CC BY-NC 4.0

(x)

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I'm always happy to see peccaries, but seeing a leucistic peccary just made my entire day! Now I want to draw a fossil peccary with the same condition

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For my first post in a LONG time, I celebrate International Jaguar Day with a speedpaint of the largest modern cat in the Americas (and my personal favorite modern animal!)

Though associated with the tropics today, Jaguars were once widespread throughout the forests and woodlands of North America with its fossils being found as far north as Washington and Maryland

[nature-and-biodiversity-blog]

Nictitating Membrane: a transparent or translucent third eyelid present in some animals that can be drawn across the eye for protection and to moisten it while maintaining vision 

[goddamnshinyrock]

every so often I remember that whales molt

I’m not sure why I feel this way, but imo this is the most cursed marine mammal fact I have ever heard

[gallusrostromegalus]

THAT’S RIGHT AND THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME SO I CAN INFLICT THIS ON EVERYONE AT 1AM!

Mammals normally shed their skin in small flakes all the time when their skin cells die off, but because whales are living in the ocean -AKA, Bacteria Stew- flaking off like that would cause microabrasions (really tiny cuts) that would mean the whale is continually fighting off infections.  So, when a whale needs to replace it’s dead skin cells, it preps it’s new skin underneath, then sheds all it’s dead skin cells at once, like a lizard:

but not having hands makes it hard to remove this gross film, so molting brings many whales clsoe to shore where they can roll around on rocky/sandy coastal seabeds to scratch it off.  Here’s a bunch of Beluga coming in for a mass scratch:

And THIS is what a chunk of Sperm Whale Molt looks like, floating in the water before it’s devoured by pelagic microfauna, because you take what calories you can get in the open ocean:

Nature is Amazing!

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Oldest DNA sequences reveal how mammoths evolved

Analysis of ancient DNA sequences recovered from mammoth teeth reveal North American mammoths were descended from two earlier mammoth lineages.

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More fossil alligators!

The prep work for a few new alligator jaws was completed this week. One looks like it could be a match for that skull from a few months ago. The other is just the right half of a lower jaw that is missing the last one-third or one-fourth, but it is HUGE! Probably the biggest I’ve seen from the Montbrook site.

We have six more alligator jackets here waiting to be processed and still a few more back at the lab.

*Insert Florida Gators joke*

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First of all, WOW! My last post may have got the most notes out of anything I’ve put to Tumblr, almost at 500 as I’m typing this. 

To keep the Dire Wolf train rolling, here are a pair of Dire Wolf jaws collected from the Ichetucknee River in Columbia County, FL

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The legendary dire wolf may not have been a wolf at all

North America’s “top dog” traveled a lonely evolutionary path

The Dire Wolf was actually not a wolf. A recent genetic study has shown that it occupies its own lineage. We now have to start calling it Aenocyon dirus instead of Canis dirus. 

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Despite Isolation, Tasmanian Tiger Pups Were More Like Wolves Than Other Marsupials

The thylacine has long been considered a truly remarkable species. The extinct Australian beast was a marsupial, but its skull was distinctly canine in appearance, almost identical to the skulls of red foxes and grey wolves.

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Happy New Year everybody. 

Here’s a Dire Wolf skull to welcome 2021

[allosauroid]

The incredibly well-preserved body of a juvenile woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) has been unearthed in Yakutia!

The body is estimated to be around 20,000 years old, though the rhino itself is thought to have been only 3 or 4 years old when it died. Things like internal organs, teeth and body fat have all been preserved, alongside patches of fur which are described as “thick” and “hazel-colored”.

[ article link ]

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57,000-Year-Old Pup Is The Most Complete Wolf Specimen Ever Found From The Ice Age

A female wolf pup mummy, perfectly preserved as it remained locked in permafrost for 57,000 years, is finally giving up some of its secrets, including how the grey wolf died and ended up alone in the ice so long ago.

Back in 2016 a female Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) pup, named Zhur, was found perfectly preserved in the permafrost after 57,000 years. Detailed morphometric, isotopic, and genetic analyses have now revealed many details of her appearance, evolutionary relationships to other wolves and short life-history and ecology. 

Link to open access paper here

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Crikey! Massive prehistoric croc emerges from South East Queensland

A prehistoric croc measuring more than five meters long—dubbed the 'swamp king' - ruled south eastern Queensland waterways only a few million years ago.

A new taxon of broad-snouted mekosuchine crocodile has been described from Queensland:  Paludirex vincenti, literally “Vincent’s Swamp King”. The croc measured at least 5m long, making it about the same size as a modern Saltwater Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), currently the largest crocodilian in the world.

Link to original open access paper here

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World's earliest python identified from 47 million-year-old fossil remains

Together with his colleague Hussam Zaher of the University in São Paulo, Senckenberg scientist Krister Smith described the world's oldest known fossils of a python. The almost completely preserved snakes with a length around one meter were discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Messel Pit" and are about 47 million years old. The new python species, Messelopython freyi, was named in honor of paleontologist Eberhard "Dino" Frey of the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe. The study was published today in the scientific journal Biology Letters.

[sixth-extinction]

Steller’s sea cow by Alexander Lovegrove, 2011.