Most books by Roy Chapman Andrews are interesting, but inexpensive. In his day he was a popular writer, and even early titles like Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera (!) and Camps and Trails in China are not too hard to find. Not so The New Conquest of Central Asia. As it is the record …
Tag: Paleontology
Update on “Beebesaurus”
… also known as Microraptor gui. I painted it a sort of irridescent black, to conform with what is known about its feathers. Can’t believe how much it looks like Beebe’s bookplate in his pre- WW I (1910) book Our Search for a Wilderness. Microraptor was dug up in China in 2003.
We Need More Feathered Dinos
John McLoughlin was writing about them in the late SEVENTIES. Isn’t it time yet to acknowlege, preferably before the next Jurassic Park, that dinos resemble eagles and turkeys and Roadrunners more than, oh, fence lizards? Especially with all the good artists around… These last would be so good if they weren’t lizard- naked! This guy …
Mahakala(s): Mongolian Free Association
I took a bunch of Mongolian artifacts to the Magdalena Library Saturday as visual aids to a talk by my friend Ian Jenness. He and his wife had taken the Trans- Siberian to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, then dropped down to Ulan Bataar, spent a week or so in Mongolia in ger camps, then continued …
My Favorite Recent Hominin Reconstruction
I suspect “WE”– call us Modern or in Europe Cro- Magnon– thought that our recently extinct fellow “hominins’”, to use the latest correct term– looked odd, as we did to them, even though we did mix genes. Most reconstructions are so steeped in reflexive egalitarianism– wrong word, but I’m looking for a synonym for sappy …
Argentavis magnificens
The BIG bird. Moro correctly guessed — no, knew- what the huge black cutout a few posts ago represented: the the biggest bird that ever flew, and one of the biggest flying creatures– only Azdarchid pterosaurs were larger. As far as I know (Therese? Darren?), its taxonomy seems a bit vague, and its habits disputed. …
“The crows were very large near the old nuclear test sites in eastern Kazakhstan”
What is this? More images when I return.
Linkage
Is the Honeyguide the most gruesome nest parasite alive? The video is not for the faint- hearted, but check out the little blind monster hanging fby its bill from the naturalist’s finger in the still pics. That it will grow into a pretty if nondescript bird that eats wax and guides humans and honey badgers …
Paleo Art comes of age…
Which doesn’t mean gets dull and predictable. On the contrary, the abundance of “new” fossils has given birth to a generation of artistic and scientific iconoclasts whose bold new vision is far more rooted in the past than any older generation’s was. The inimitable polymath and prodigiously productive blogger Darren Naish, a serious anatomist, was …
Dino- birds
A good XKCD on one of our favorite subjects from Peculiar: