#non-dinosaurs

[sargassos]

Dinovember, day 28! Not dinosaurs, but a pair of pantosaurus cruising through the Sundance Seaway, cronchin’ on fish as they go 🐟

This is it. This is my favorite page from the whole series. I love marine reptiles ❤️

EDIT, 1/11/22: This entire Dinovember series has been compiled and is now available for purchase on Gumroad! The pages can be printed, or thrown into a digital program! Check it out HERE!

[awannabepaleoartist]

I drew some psuedosuchians because they’re super weird-looking and cool.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

My best posts of 2017

(According to that Best of Tumblr thingy that everyone’s using)

December ♥ 509

Aw, it doesn’t show the whole photoset? I am disappoint.

November ♥ 276

Jumpy boy wins November! Actually I posted almost nothing in November for some reason. I think it was exams?

October ♥ 364

He stick he legy out real far. I still can’t believe that I didn’t think of that when I posted it. The tags on this one were fun though.

September ♥ 457

Awwww, it’s the bad-at-biology Therizinosaurus! He’s trying his best

August ♥ 533

Yay, it’s Stenonychosaurus! I’m pretty sure all the notes here are from the taxonomy discourse.

July ♥ 700

Ah, my late Kulinday contribution. I still like this one.

June ♥ 685

Hey, it’s the Therizinosaurus again! Having trouble with art this time. Don’t worry buddy, you’ll figure it out eventually.

May ♥ 2612

I’m seeing something of a pattern here of the posts with the most notes either being cute, memes, or discourse. I still like this series though.

April ♥ 164

Ah, the line art Velociraptors that I said I was going to colour and then never did. I’m pretty sure this was my first fairly big post! 

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been nine months since this blog started. That’s ... sort of crazy. Thank you to everybody who’s supported me, helped me out, and enjoyed the stuff that I post. I hope 2018 is a great year for all of you!

[cjcroen1393]

I tried my hand at this meme.

The last one is based on personal experience--people get very, VERY hostile whenever you tell them that birds are dinosaurs, and I really don’t understand why. Like, geez, people, what did Archaeopteryx ever do to you guys?

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

So non avian dinosaurs get the lions share of discussion for the Mesozoic, but what else was going on? What kind of fish were in the rivers? Artists just draw what look like modern fish but what really was there? We're there giant catfish? Something completely crazy? What stocked the ocean? Marine reptiles had to be just a fraction of what was swimming there (besides ammonites).

Well it really depends on which of the Mesozoic’s periods you are, however a lot of fish in this era looked a lot like modern fish, but there were crazy things out there that’s for sure!

(wikimedia)

Meet Leedsichthys, which lived in the middle Jurassic alongside Liopleurodon and its kin. Oh and it’s also the largest bony fish that ever lived, or at least that we know about so far!

There were also a genus of giant fresh-water sawfish called Onchopristis in the cretaceous, presumably one of the enigmatic Spinosaurus’ possible prey items. There were also Coelacanthids all the way back to the Triassc…

And these guys:

(also from wikimedia)

Xiphactinus, scary buggers if I ever saw one. They’re from the cretaceous as well. The size of a large Great White.

Of course we could be here all day looking up weird mesozoic fish (I went for a few off the top of my head I recalled from stuff like the WWD specials), but you get the gist of it: Many of them looked like modern fish, lots of them were huge, and most of the ‘living fossils’ we’ve got today were alive back then too.

~Ryuu

[thistleburr]

Two very different animals: Deinonychus, a quick, agile, feathered dromaeosaur from the Cretaceous, and Prestosuchus chiniquensis, which isn't a dinosaur at all.

Prestosuchus interested me mostly because of its upright posture, which I didn't actually end up including in this sketch because I got too interested in the vertebrae... oops. I love the way both of these skeletons are mounted at this museum, but the Deinonychus in particular has a beautiful pose.

Drawn at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.