By Mustard, for Saurian

POV: you’re a mongolian aquatic plant circa 70 mya

Earliest example of a rapid-fire tongue found in ‘weird and wonderful’ extinct amphibians

Fossils of bizarre, armored amphibians known as albanerpetontids provide the oldest evidence of a slingshot-style tongue, a new Science study shows.

Despite having lizardlike claws, scales and tails, albanerpetontids – mercifully called “albies” for short – were amphibians, not reptiles. Their lineage was distinct from today’s frogs, salamanders and caecilians and dates back at least 165 million years, dying out only about 2 million years ago.

Now, a set of 99-million-year-old fossils redefines these tiny animals as sit-and-wait predators that snatched prey with a projectile firing of their tongue – and not underground burrowers, as once thought. The fossils, one previously misidentified as an early chameleon, are the first albies discovered in modern-day Myanmar and the only known examples in amber.

They also represent a new genus and species: Yaksha perettii, named after treasure-guarding spirits known as yakshas in Hindu literature and Adolf Peretti, the discoverer of two of the fossils…

Read more: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/earliest-rapid-fire-tongue-found-in-amphibians

That was until a few years ago when we got a better idea of what it looked like

It's a duck. A big, giant duck.

So there’s a challenge being run by Wyatt Andrews on twitter and instagram called #DinosThroughThe Decades, the aim being to compile a timeline of our scientific understanding of one prehistoric species as represented through palaeoart! I decided to do Stegoceras validum, since I feel like it’s gone through a lot of changes that aren’t appreciated as they should be! And so, here’s my breakdown of each drawing in this timeline:

1903

The year in which Stegoceras was described, as Stegoceras validus, by Lawrence Lambe. The identity of the fossil was pretty much completely up in the air at the time, since all we had of it at that point was the dome of the skull:

One of the conclusions that Lambe reached, and the one I’ve gone with here, is that the dome was the base of a large single horn on the snout of a ceratopsian dinosaur. There is sadly no actual palaeoart depicting Stegoceras like this, so I based my reconstruction heavily on Charles Knight’s beautiful ceratopsian illustrations from the 1890s and 1900s.

1918

By 1918, Lambe was now suggesting that Stegoceras was not a ceratopsian, but a member of the group stegosauria, which included ankylosaurs and stegosaurs and is now known as thyreophora. He even erected a new clade for Stegoceras, psalisauridae, which did not last long.

This was probably the toughest one for me to work out since the brief is basically “a thick-headed 1910s-style generic thyreophoran”, and I ended up working mostly from Knight’s Stegosaurus and improvising the armour. That said, it’s a wonderfully weird concept and it’s one of my favourite end products!

1924

We finally know what the rest of Stegoceras looks like! Charles Gilmore described a complete skull and partial skeleton of Stegoceras, and very helpfully for me it included a skeletal diagram!

But yes, the small birdlike elephant in the room: Gilmore’s description reassigned our beautiful bumpy-head boy to the now-considered-dubious tooth taxon “Troodon”. This ended up with the kinda confusing situation of having what is now known as pachychephalosauridae being grouped under the name “troodontidae”, which now refers to a clade of dromaeosaurs. Even after the clade name was changed, new pachycephalosaurs were still being described as species of “Troodon” all the way into the 1950s!

1980s

The way that palaeontology viewed dinosaurs was beginning to alter during the 70s and 80s, and dinosaurs were starting to run faster and lift their tails up off the ground. The last few decades had been good for pachycephalosauridae too, with new fossils showing a much greater scope of the group’s diversity in North America and Asia, and “Troodon” finally being ejected from the group as recently as 1987 by Phil Currie.

My main inspiration for this one was these awkward dinosaur book illustrations from around this era that just seem kinda off. Either it’s something about how cylindrical and formless the limbs are, or the stiffness in the pose, but I find them charmingly odd. They look very much like plastic dinosaur toys.

1990s

The Dinosaur Revolution is in full swing at this point, and dinosaurs are tending to look leaner, meaner, and kinda in need of a decent meal. The 90s and the 2000s really form a bit of a single era in dinosaur palaeoart, with dinosaurs in wiry muscle and skin and not much else, often adorned with spikes and osteoderms and the occasional single spiny dewlap. It was a weird time and of all of them this one was the hardest to draw faithfully and correctly without feeling like I was making a parody.

2020s

And finally, my comfort zone! The impact of the book All Yesterdays on the trajectory of modern palaeoart is truly hard to understate, since it basically pushed weird, experimental palaeoart into the mainstream palaeo consciousness. Moving on from the almost literally bare bones dinosaurs of the 2000s, we’ve started rounding out or dinosaurs a bit, and inferring speculative structures and behaviours from what we observe in the fossil record and in the world around us!

The details of integument including quills but also the foot scales and skin on the legs are inferred from the absolutely stunning Psitaccosaurus specimen from a few years ago, since it’s really the closest species we have to pachycephalosaurs that preserves those details.

I think a big part of the culture shift around palaeoart in the last few years is the acknowledgement that we as palaeoartists can never reconstruct a species 100% accurately, and that there is room for interpretation and speculation. If you’re guaranteed to be wrong anyway, you might as well experiment and try out new things, so long as it doesn’t contradict the things that are knowable!

Allosaurus maximus, known to some as Saurophaganax maximus. A huge allosaur from Late Jurassic North America, and basically the T. rex of its time, in both name and niche.

It apparently had a big feathered mane (hence the species name "jubatus") and unusual bird-of-paradise feathers sprouting out of its shoulders.

The HUGE issue that none of the news address is: this fossil is illegal. The researchers stole this fossil from Brazil. The main head paleontologist (David Martill) is literally banned from Brazil for violating the country's archeological transportation laws MANY times, stating that he "doesn't believe that fossils should be property of their original country, that they should be international".

David Martill, Eberhard Frey, Héctor Rivera Sylva and Robert Smyth (respectively) are NOT good paleontologists. They are colonialistic thieves that deserve to be in jail.

Ubirajara jubatus needs to be in Brazil. Not in a museum in fucking Germany.

- name means “different lizard” thanks to its many unique adaptations

- reached lengths of up to 39 feet long

- oddly small teeth and very wide gape

- narrow wedge head that could handle stress and fabulous head crests

- long magnificent arms and three fingers with claws that functioned like meat hooks

- processed prey similar to falcons and kestrels

- Top dog of the Morrison Formation and king of the Jurassic floodplains

- successful enough that there’s three known species and potentially more

- such widespread success has allowed many fossils to have formed and thus easily makes allosaurus one of the most well studied dinosaurs

- we have many fossils of allosaurus that show that them surviving injuries

Megalosaurus:

- name means “great lizard” because the only thing remarkable about it was that it was a large reptile

- was an average size of 30 feet

- fat dorky rectangle head with no beautiful crests or features that indicate specialized feeding strategies

- the jugal bone is pneumatised, but other than that there’s not many interesting features in the skull

- large flesh cutting teeth like most theropods

- short arms and the average three fingers

- the genus only had one species

- hardly any fossils of it

- for a long time scientists used it as a wastebasket taxon because it was just the typical large theropod

- was the apex predator of the forest and thus excelled at hiding in the shadows like a creep and not running in the open like the chad allo

- femur was mistaken for a scrotum

Hey everyone! There’s a lot to be sad, angry, anxious, and overwhelmed about. For myself, I have tried to look at the positive and be grateful for the things I have rather than things I have lost.