[ Argentinosaurus, a giant sauropod, illustrated by Chase Stone. ]

"Of all the animals ever to have roamed the planet, the iconic long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods stand unrivaled. No other terrestrial creatures have come close to attaining their colossal sizes. They overshadowed all other dinosaurs, from the duck-billed hadrosaurs and the horned ceratopsians to the armored ankylosaurs and predatory tyrannosaurs. Even the mightiest land mammals—mammoths and rhinoceroslike beasts that were up to twice as heavy as the largest elephants alive today—were featherweights compared with the biggest sauropods. From an evolutionary perspective, this singularity makes sauropods an intriguing anomaly. Evolution is rampant with examples of convergence, in which the same feature evolves more than once independently in different groups of organisms. A classic example of convergence is powered flight—flapping wings evolved in birds, bats, pterosaurs and insects, but the particular bones or other structures making up the wings differ among the groups, attesting to their independent evolutionary origins. Convergence in evolution is very common even when it comes to complicated features: warm-bloodedness, eyes that can move and focus, bipedal locomotion, the loss of limbs, the use of tools, and live birth all evolved multiple times in different animal groups. Convergence is widespread in the plant kingdom as well: carnivorous plants evolved at least a dozen times, roots evolved more than once, and even arborescence—plants taking the form of trees—evolved more than once. With convergence so common in nature, sauropods' uniqueness in size is special in itself. No other land animal has approached even a third of the largest sauropods' weight. What makes sauropods stand out from the crowd, both literally and figuratively?"

Read more: "How Sauropod Dinosaurs Became the Biggest Land Animals Again and Again" by Michael D. D'Emic.

paleostream flocking 3/29 -- Mobulavermis + Saltasaurus + Simurghia + P. lemoinei and bachmanni

Mamenchisaurus

Do you like necks? Because I have a great one for you!

Results from the #paleostream

Pseudodontornis, Octamerella, Garumbatitan and Trilophosuchus

Fuck it: Feathered Trunked Sauropod.

1 AM painting, cowboys and dinosaurs

An adult and a juvenile Mamenchisaurus tread the mudflats of western China some 140 to 155 million years ago. Mark Hallett. 1986.

From Terra: The Member's Magazine of The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volume 24, No. 6. July/August 1986.

Internet Archive

Diplodocus for Mother’s Day: Two juvenile Diplodocus hallorum give their hungry mother a special gift: a small tree from a nearby forest where the other Diplodocus are browsing on the leaves of much larger trees.

Forest of Gold

Moving through a golden ginkgo forest, a grown male Lusotitan browses in peace during the cooler hours of the evening. Around his feet, a small group of ornithopods pick up the leaves that fall with the change of the seasons.

For this week’s Fossil Friday, another gouache piece from almost a year ago. I’ll be real, I’m not entirely happy with this one. The execution came out a little too... Impressionist to me, too rushed because I was clearly getting frustrated with it. Like a very poor Van Gogh knock-off. Not my best. Or maybe it’s my own high standards for what my paleoart should look like affecting me again. Idk. 

I just wanted to paint something a little different instead of the same old green forest background. Ginkgo trees (or the order Ginkgoales) have existed for as long as some 290 million years! Fossils very similar to its last living species, the Ginkgo biloba, go as far back as the Middle Jurassic, so dinosaurs such as this Lusotitan might have encountered it. Imagine what they must’ve thought, wading through these trees as they yellowed out.

And, if you’re as old as I am, if you look closely around the feet of the Lusotitan you will see three little nods to a pretty obscure game, you might have heard about it, called Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis.

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Just a random assortment of sketches.

silly little sauropods 

can you expand on the giraffes not having long necks please?

Mammals are developmentally regulated to only have about 7 neck vertebrae - some mammals break that but it takes a lot of evolution to do so, because the developmental lock is strong

giraffes wanted to reach up high for food, but couldn't break that

so instead of adding more neck vertebrae - the true definition of a long neck -

they made their neck vertebrae bigger

here is a giraffe neck. You can see the seven, very large neck vertebrae

here is a truly long necked animal, a swan. you can see the vertebrae are many, many, MANY more than seven

here you can see a large number of vertebrae in the neck of a nother truly long necked animal, Mamenchisaurus (also, notice the similarities between the Mamenchisaurus neck vertebrae and the swan neck vertebrae!)

Sooooo yeah. Giraffes don't have long necks. This is also why the movement of their necks is so inflexible - they literally have fewer bones to move about

A Titanomachya going for a stroll during some light rain.

SAURÓPODES!!!!!! (vacas ancestrais)