Been a while! For Halloween here's a sketch I've wanted to do for a long while. The crossover that never was: Alien and Outland.

Outland is a film starring Sean Connery that came out a couple of years after Alien, and shares a VERY similar aesthetic, to the extent that many fans consider them to be in the same universe (like with Blade Runner). Officially they aren't...but it would be cool if they were...

Pachystropheus rhaeticus is an intriguing little critter found in Late Triassic shallow sea deposits of England, France and Germany. It was a reptile probably 1-2 metres long, but although it’s not uncommon at localities where it occurs, no skull elements have yet been found. Here I’ve reconstructed it as a choristodere, being predated by a hybodont shark which has just taken a bite out of another fish, based on an actual coprolite. Pachystropheus could alternatively be a thalattosaur which would have a more pointed head but, again, since no skull bones have been found yet it’s hard to accurately classify it. 

Breaking in a new pad with some line-only character design inspired by the work of Geof Darrow, think this will be called “Mic Drop”...

I didn't initially get round to illustrating the recently-described Scottish pterosaur, Dearc sgiathanach, so what better day for a watercolour sketch of this impressively large Jurassic rhamphorhynchid than St Andrew's Day!

Still Here" (acrylic on paper)

For Halloween, an ancient emerges from his barrow into the moonlight, and finds that another artefact of his people written in the stones has survived thousands of years.

Based on cup-and-ring style prehistoric rock art found across Northern England, and a long barrow near Bath which has an ammonite next to its entrance.

So I've spent the past week obsessing over the Vredefort Dome in South Africa; a remnant of the world's largest confirmed impact structure.

It was created by a ~10 mile wide asteroid ~2 billion years ago. The rocks uplifted at the centre of the crater (which was almost 200 miles across) are therefore extremely old and resilient to weathering, today represented by an arc of hills to the south west of Johannesburg.

Here is what the dome may have looked like during the Triassic Period. Essentially similar to today, but a bit taller. The south western portion and centre of the dome may have already been eroded away by then, since today those parts are overlain by the Permian aged Ecca Group (part of the Karoo Supergroup).

Small canvas painting from the prompt “Empty”.

...and hot on the heels of more (geologically) recent fauna, my first reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus for a long, long time. It's one of those dinosaurs that is depicted so often and generates so many arguments over the minutia of its appearance that it can be intimidating to attempt, and I've not got everything right here, but for a quick piece I reckon it came out okay.

Watercolour and pigment liner on multimedia paper.

"Hands Off!" On the Pleistocene plains of Europe, a couple of archaic humans are interrupted mid-scavenge by two large hyenas, and brandish a sharpened stone to defend themselves. Acrylic washes on multimedia paper.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time! A slightly more textured recreation of the dining room painting seen in The Simpsons’ house. I’ve seen lots of renditions of the boat painting in the living room, but always preferred this one. Acrylics and pigment liner on board.

You just got breached, son...

Ink and watercolour.

Mother megaraptoran after a long day.

I love how enigmatic and fearsome-looking (based on what little we know) this group of theropods are, with their massive hand claws and slender skulls. I thought it would be fun to depict those distinctive claws doing something more wholesome, namely carrying their young. This is of course entirely speculative; very few modern birds do this as they aren't generally strong enough, and when they do it's often birds that live on water, but it has popped up in palaeoart here and there.

Couple of palaeoart watercolours - the Cretaceous hesperornithine bird Enaliornis and a non-descript Mesozoic mammal at the feet of its reptilian overlords (for now)...

“Conscript”

Watercolour and ink.

For International Women's Day, here are four dinosaurs described/discovered by women: Deinocheirus, Gallimimus, Elmisaurus and Prenocephale. All four were found on the Polish-Mongolian expeditions of the 60s and 70s, notable for being among the first fossil expeditions to have a strong female presence. Among the teams were Halszka Osmólska, Teresa Maryańska and Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, who would become renowned for their work on the dinosaurs and other palaeofauna of Mongolia.

It's Saint David's Day, and since I've not drawn anything in a while here's a Welsh dinosaur, Pendraig milneri, in the style of the Welsh flag. As far as we know dinosaurs didn't have huge arrow-shaped tongues...so I improvised :P

“Space Frogs” aka The Slann

I only learned this week that one of the oldest and most advanced species in Warhammer 40k are...frogs. The Slann were brought into the game back in the 80s, but only a handful of models were made. In AoS they continue to be a part of the Lizardmen/Seraphon faction, but in 40K the original models are an obscurity used as proxies and auxiliaries. I based these guys off the old models fairly closely.