Sketch Assortment I’ve made of the fauna of the Campanian-aged (approx. 83–74.5 mya) Anacleto Formation of Patagonia, which is famous for the Auca Mahuevo nesting site where hundreds of titanosaurs came to lay their eggs in shallow pits which they dug with their hind feet and left for the hatchlings to fend for themselves.

Page 1, from top to bottom: Aucasaurus, Gasparinisaura, Abelisaurus, Neuquensaurus, Aerosteon and a giant, indeterminate Megaraptoran

Page 2, from top to bottom: Antarctosaurus, Barrosaurus, Chadititan, Laplatasaurus, Narambuenatitan, Pitekunsaurus, and Gasparinisuchus

Here’s a few color pencil sketches I’ve made of some cool Cretaceous dinosaurs, from bottom to top: Utahraptor ostrommaysi, Iguanodon bernissartensis, two Deinonychus individuals compared in size to my human oc Samantha, and Centrosaurus apertus!

A Tyrannosaurus rex clamps its jaws upon the flanks of an escaping Triceratops prorsus in order to subdue it at the edge of a small river, 66 million years ago in the Lance Formation of what is now Wyoming.

Here’s an illustration I’ve made of two male Xenovenator espinosae, a newly-described Troodontid from the Cenomanian Cerro de Pueblo Formation of Mexico which had a skull roof that was surprisingly similar to that of the Pachycephalosaurids and would have engaged in similar interspecific behavior as a result, headbutting each other in order to win a harem of females in the background…

A Ferencerstops shqiperorum ambles across a dried-up riverbed and into the cover of the bigger ferns as two Hatzegopteryx thambema arrive to snatch up smaller animals scurrying around in their path, 70 million years ago on Hateg Island in what is now the Densuș-Ciula Formation of Romania.

And we have also found news of Ammonites surviving the K-PG extinction and into the first 600,00 years or so of the Danian or earliest age of the Paleocene, too, in the form of fossils from the Cerithium Limestone Member at Stevns-Klint, Denmark!

Scientifically accurate Diplodocus Speedpaint

Original Species: Ceratovenator ferox

Ceratovenator ferox is a species of brow-horned, fire-breathing Carcharodontosaurid theropod dinosaur which inhabits the island continent of Aetherosia in the world of Sekaia. At 10-13 m (33-43 ft) long, 3.5-4 m (11-14 ft) tall at the hips, and 6 tons in weight, it is known as the “Bull-Drake” in-universe and as the top predator of the area, it preys upon the tall-crested Lambeosaurine Lophosaurus magnificens, the herbivorous, kangaroo-like theropod Megapodosaurus gracilis, and juveniles and subadults of the tall-necked titanosaur Acrotitan. Ceratovenator is capable of using its bovid-like horns to ram into prey animals before subduing them with either its jaws or fiery breath as well as to battle others of its own kind over territory or mating rights.

Ever since Aetherosia was raised from the ocean by the island-turtle Aetheros at the start of the third-age, This carcharodontosaur was once widespread throughout the island-continent and was worshipped by its ancient peoples for its fire-breathing abilities as well as for being the most fearsome spirit-creature of the land. But some human groups started hunting the animal for its horns and teeth, which were said to have special medicinal properties, and during the Arpan-Thuban War this trend spiked even further as the Lophosaurs and Megapodosaurs which it preyed upon where driven to extinction, causing it to start preying upon humans and their livestock and get persecuted by human communities for being a threat to their livelihoods as a result, and some of these theropods were also captured and used in gladiator-style fights in arenas in the cities of Arpanian or Thubanian-occupied colonies. Eventually the Hills of Fire became a stronghold for the last-remaining but increasingly-shrinking Ceratovenator ferox population, and by the time Keiko and her friends had arrived, only Julius was left to eventually guide the trio down the dangerous path to where the Great Canyon is…

Sketch of Baryonyx walkeri (“Walker’s Heavy Claw”) for the new year of 2026!

An Allosaurus fragilis for 2026

This is the very first dinosaur I’ve ever drawn for the new year! I wanted to start off 2026 with one of my favourite Mesozoic creatures, Allosaurus happens to be my second-favorite dinosaur besides Deinonychus because it was the top dog of a land of giant sauropods and the famous Stegpsaurus and has a dragon-like appearance thanks to its distinctive head-crests, s-shaped neck, and clawed, raptorial forelimbs. And with so much dinosaur-focused paleo-media these days such as Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet, Dead Sound’s Dinosauria, Netflix’s Life on Our Planet, Universal’s Jurassic World franchise, a certain IMAX short film and the 2025 revival of Walking with Dinosaurs focusing almost exclusively on T.rex and other late Cretaceous taxa, I think any new 2020s educational media content focusing on a truly scientifically-accurate depiction of Allosaurus (like the Big Al or Big Al ll specimens) and other Morrison Formation taxa like Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus or Stegosaurus will certainly be very refreshing indeed.

An impression of Tameryraptor markgrafi, the new Carcharodontosaur which described from the photographs, drawings and braincase of Stromer’s destroyed collection, and the first non-avian dinosaur named in 2025, for the very end of this year, which turned out to be a wild one for new dinosaur discoveries with over a dozen species from the Saurischia and the Ornithischia named from sites all over the world, including the discovery of new fossil material for Spicomellus afer and the resurrection of the Nanotyrannus genus with an additional new species named N.lethaeus.

An assortment of some Nemegt Formation Fauna

The Nemegt Formation records the presence of a heavily forested floodplain environment that was mainly made up of mudflats, ponds, rivers, shallow lakes and streams, and was quite similar in scope to the bayous of Louisiana of the okavango delta of Botswana. But it had a cold, semiarid and monsoonal climate, similar to that today’s north-central India or Madrid, with dry and wet seasons and the occasional desert or plain here and there. And Since angiosperms were rapidly diversifying around the world towards the end of the Cretaceous, the typical Mesozoic trees such as araucarias, cycads and ginkgoes were now beginning to share their space with fagales or flowering trees such as birches as well as other modern plants such as cypress, Katsura, ginger and sycamores, and the rivers, ponds, lakes and streams were also teeming with cane grasses, caltrops, reed grasses, duckweed, and lotuses.

The Nemegt’s diverse fauna consisted a wide variety of animals such as mollusks, fish such as relatives of the arapaima or arowana, the 4 mètre long crocodylyform paraligator, numerous turtles such as a close relative of the North American Basilemys and Trionychids or soft shell turtles, a giant azdaechid pterosaur, and above all several species of dinosaurs big and small. Many of them were Coelurosaurs, or the feathered theropods which includes modern birds and their closest fossil relatives, such as Alvarezsaurids like Mononykus, oviraptorids such as Nemegtomaia, Oksoko and Rinchenia, ornithomimids such as Deinocheirus and Gallimimus, and tyrannosaurs such as Tarbosaurus, and the bizarre, enigmatic Therizinosaurus, as well as many ornithischians such as ankylosaurs, hadrosaurs such as Saurooophus, and pachycephalosaurs such as Prenocephale, and a few titanosaurain sauropods, one of which is only known from some huge footprints that must have come from a gigantic track maker with a shoulder height of 4 m.

An ecology scene from the Maastrichtian Nemegt Formation showing Deinocheirus foraging for riverside plants such as reed greases, with Saurolophus angustiorhinus, a small flock of Gurilynia, and two Nemegtosaurus ambling by on the background.

Two scenes in the Cenomanian-aged (100-93 mya) Mid Cretaceous Kem Kem Beds of Morocco: A Carcharodontosaurus saharicus drinking at the edge of a mangrove swamp, and a swimming Spinosaurus aegypticus catching an Onchopristis from the waters of a river

An assortment of sketches I’ve made of the ecology and fauna of the Cenomianian (100-93 mya)-aged Kem Kem Beds fauna of Morocco and Algeria

Paleo-Files: Spinosaurus aegyptiacus

Spinosaurus aegyptiacus is one of the most enigmatic and fascinating dinosaurs ever known to science. At 14 meters or 46 ft long and weighing just over 7 metric tons, it is by far one of the largest and heaviest theropods of all time besides Giganotosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and the contemporary Carcharodontosaurus and well as the type genus and species of the Spinosauridae, a family of crocodile-like theropods which were closely related to the Megalosaurids of the Jurassic and thrived in Africa, parts of Europe and Asia, and South America during the early Cretaceous. Spinosaurus lived around 100-94 million years ago during the Cenomanian Stage in and around the estuaries, mangrove swamps, freshwater rivers and streams, and tidal flats of what is now North Africa, from Egypt in the east to Morocco in the west, and the holotype fossils of the animal were described in 1915 by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer based on a partial skeleton from the Bahariya Formation of Egypt which preserved the lower jaw and much of the distinctly tall dorsal vertebrae which gave the creature its name and was housed in a museum in Munich. But they, along with most of the other fossils Stromer had collected, were destroyed in the spring of 1944 during the Second World War when the city was bombed by the Royal Air Force. Yet since the 1970s the discoveries of new Spinosaurus fossil material from the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco, such as a partial rostrum or snout along with the discoveries of much more complete Spinosaurids such as the European Baryonyx and North African Suchomimus, a near complete skeleton in 2014 which showed that the animal possessed unusually short hindlimbs compared to those of most other theropods, and the uniquely tadpole-like tail in 2020 have allowed paleontologists to paint a much more complete picture of this giant Cretaceous dinosaur’s skeletal anatomy. Some researchers have speculated that its tall neural spines were covered in a thin layer of skin and would have helped the animal to cool off in the balmy Late Cretaceous heat, much like the unrelated Permian synapsid Dimetrodon, while other researchers believe that such a speculative sail did not exist and that the spines were instead covered by a fatty dorsal hump, similar to that on a bison or camel, which would have helped the dinosaur store energy during the dry season. The dorsal sail, along with the paddle-shaped tail, might have also been brightly colored or patterned and used that way by male Spinosaurus to intimidate rivals of their own kind or to attract mates during the breeding season.

Isotope ratio analyses of the teeth of Spinosaurus compared with those of the much more terrestrial Carcharodontosaurus, the discovery of electro-receptors on the animal’s snout which allowed it to detect the vibrations of underwater prey, a paddle-shaped tail which was efficient for underwater propulsion and buoyant bones all indicate that Spinosaurus was a semi-aquatic piscivore that would have mainly preyed upon many of the large arapaima-sized freshwater fish of its watery habitat, such as the coelacanth Axelrodicthys, the gar Oniicthys, the bichir Bawitius, the lungfish Neoceratodus and the 4 meter (13ft) long Sawskate Onchopristis, either by chasing and catching them underwater like a crocodile or by waiting for them to come close to the shoreline and catching them that way like a heron. But since the semi-aquatic status of Spinosaurus and whether or not it fed like a croc or a heron has been heavily contested and debated among paleontologists these days, with some such as Nizar Ibrahim supporting the former theory and David Hone and Paul Sereno supporting the latter, there is no doubt that Spinosaurus was among the most aquatically-inclined of all dinosaurs and was highly adept at swimming across the rivers or waterways of its swampy estuarine habitat, and it and all the other dinosaurs of the Kem Kem disappeared from the fossil record when the whole area was flooded by the Tethys Sea during the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event.

Ever since its pop-cultural debut in 2001 with the release of the third Jurassic Park film, Spinosaurus aegypticus has also become an increasingly frequent fixture of popular media involving dinosaurs, and has been featured in documentaries such as 2011’s Monsters Resurrected and Planet Dinosaur, NHK’s Amazing Dinoworld, and an episode of the 2025 in-name-only revival of BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs where it was depicted in its scientifically-accurate form for the first time in a major Western Paleo-documentary.

Carcharodontosaurus devouring a Deltadromeous somewhere in the middle of what is now the Kem Kem beds of Morocco