For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

This beauty is by Bryan Riolo, aka Algoroth on DeviantART, who also let me use his giant space Cthulhu for my Collect Call of Cthulhu over on Echo Station 5-7. Update: and here, belatedly, is a link to the piece on DA, with Bryan’s thoughts on it. I love the sense of scale here, with paralititans striding through the surf, the chiaroscuro, and the sheer amount of stuff going on. It reminds me of William Stout’s murals, and lots

Mark Witton, pterosaur-wrangler, Cthulhu-conjurer, globe-trotting paleo playboy and all-around scientific badass, drew this (and blogged about it): I liked it, but I thought it could use some color, so I hacked a crude version in GIMP and sent it to Mark with a, “Hey, please put this on a t-shirt so I can throw money at you” plea. Lo and behold, he did just that. You can get your own from Mark’s Zazzle store.

Because “here’s that Brian Engh sketch of a sauropod literally stomping the guts out of a theropod you ordered” was a bit ungainly for a post title.

We’ve blogged a lot of Bob Nicholls‘ art (here, here, and here) and we’ll probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We don’t have much choice: he keeps drawing awesome things and giving us permission to post them. Like this defiantly shaggy Apatosaurus , which was probably the star of the Morrison version of Duck Dynasty . Writes Bob: Well, I think it’s awesome.

I was at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in March to look at their Apatosaurus material, so I got to see the newly-mounted baby apatosaur in the “Clash of the Titans” exhibit (more photos of that exhibit in this post). How much of this is real (i.e., cast from real bones, rather than sculpted)? Most of the vertebral centra, a few of the neural arches, some of the limb girdle bones, and most of the long bones of the limbs.

We’re just back from SVPCA 2013 in Edinburgh. The first part of the meeting was held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but on Friday we moved to the National Museums Scotland. Which is awesome. And free to the public.

Remember at the start of the year, Matt and I had a contest to design a cover for a random book in half an hour? I came up with this: Well, today I saw that my wife is reading Abraham Vergese’s novel Cutting for Stone (which, for what it’s worth, she says is very good). Here’s the cover: You can’t tell me that ‘s a coincidence.

In a paper for which we’re currently handling the revisions, I and Matt cite several pieces of artwork, including Knight’s classic Brontosaurus and Burian’s snorkelling Brachiosaurus . All we have for the references are: Knight CR (1897) Restoration of Brontosaurus . Burian Z (1941) Snorkelling Brachiosaurus . But a reviewer asked us: I don’t really have any idea what the right way is to cite artwork — does

Last Sunday I got to hang out with Brian Engh and some of his friends in LA. You may remember Brian from this, this, this, this, and, most notoriously, this. We got to drawing dinosaurs, naturally. Now, for me to try to draw dinosaurs next to Brian is more than a little intimidating. I really felt the need to bring my A-game. So this is what I came up with.