This week saw the release of my latest book, Great Dinosaur Mistakes. This is my third children’s picture book co-written with Jonathan Emmett and published by Fox & Ink Books (formerly UCLan Books). It is also my second book illustrated by Stieven Van der Poorten. The front cover of Great Dinosaur Mistakes (2026) Great Dinosaur Mistakes explores some of the...
It is with great sadness that I take this personal look back at my friendship with fellow plesiosaur palaeontologist Richard Forrest. I think I first met Richard when I started to attend talks at the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society in 2003. However, my strongest early memory of Richard is from March 2004 at a ‘Sea Monsters’ open day organised...
In summer 2023 a plesiosaur skeleton was offered at auction by Sotheby’s that may have looked familiar. This notable specimen is the ‘Blockley Plesiosaur’, originally offered at auction by Sotheby’s in 2010. This is a potentially significant specimen so I’m flagging it up to briefly discuss the provenance, history, and taxonomic identity of this curious skeleton. The Blockley Plesiosaur 2,...
I need to catch up on several more years of new plesiosaur models. The notable new company on the block is PNSO, the Peking Nature-Science Organisation, although having pushed out an impressively prolific catalogue of prehistoric animal models, to date they have produced only one commercially available plesiosaur figure, a Kronosaurus in 2021. That figure was reviewed by Bokisaurus on...
Today is the official publication day for my new children’s picture book The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers. As previously announced on this blog, the book was co-written with Jonathan Emmett, illustrated by Stieven Van der Poorten, and published by UCLan Publishing. We are all so happy with how it has turned out. The front cover of The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers, with the two main characters,...
Allow me to deviate from plesiosaurs for a moment to focus on a different kind of Mesozoic vertebrate – dinosaurs! I’m delighted to announce that my second children’s book, The Tyrannosaur’s Feathers, will be published later this year, and I’m also excited to reveal the front cover. It’s a ‘kind-of’ sequel to The Plesiosaur’s Neck (2021) and a continuation of my...
Newman and Tarlo (1967) In 1967, Barney Newman and Lambert Beverley Tarlo authored a three-page short article in the popular magazine ‘Animals’, a short-lived periodical published weekly by Purnell from 1963 to, at least, 1967… I’m not sure when it eventually fizzled out. Their article entitled “A Giant Marine Reptile From Bedfordshire” provides an account of plesiosaur swimming...
A month has passed since my new book, The Plesiosaur’s Neck, was published. So, it’s a good time to reflect on some of the events and reactions that followed its release. Firstly, it was exciting to see the book in the wild, particularly at the Heffers branch of Blackell’s in Oxford, where Adam Larkum was invited to decorate the windows...
The Plesiosaur’s Neck is here! Today is the official release date for my new children’s book about Poppy Plesiosaur’s unusually long neck. My advance author copies have arrived and it looks absolutely stunning, co-author Jonathan Emmett and I are both delighted with it. The colours pop and the cover gleams! The team at UCLan Publishing have done a wonderful job....
It is with much excitement that I am able to reveal the front cover of The Plesiosaur’s Neck, a new children’s picture book written by Jonathan Emmett and myself. The book, illustrated by the excellent Adam Larkum, is being published by UCLan Publishing. Now available for pre-order from Amazon.co.uk, Hive.co.uk, Waterstones.com “There’s one thing about her that’s hard to ignore, THAT...
Pick a random piece of plesiosaur paleoart and chances are the animal will be depicted with an arched back. A hump, almost. But did plesiosaurs really have the hump? This arched posture can be traced back in the scientific literature to Andrews’ 1910-13 seminal works on the marine reptiles from the Oxford Clay. He reconstructed the skeletons of Cryptoclidus, Muraenosaurus,...
The University of British Columbia have erected a spectacular 13-metre-long Elasmosaurus skeleton in their Pacific Museum of Earth. The resin reconstruction was suspended in the Wheaton Precious Metals Atrium of the University’s Earth Sciences Building earlier this month (15th-16th September 2018). Installation of the skeleton was led by Mike deRoos of Cetacea Contracting, a Salt Spring Island company that specialises...
In 2012 I co-presented a poster at the SVP annual meeting on a new plesiosaur from Lyme Regis, UK (see my article about it here). The long awaited follow up paper was finally published this summer in the latest volume of Palaeontographica A (Smith and Araújo 2017) and the beast now has a name, Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi, meaning ‘Wiedenroth’s Wonder Dragon’....
It is hard to believe that the last time I wrote about plesiosaur toys here was in March 2011, over six years ago (https://plesiosauria.com/news/index.php/new-plesiosaur-replicas-for-2011/). Since then, many more new plesiosaur figures have hit the shelves, well, online stores – you’ll do well to find any of these toys in actual brick and mortar stores. The least I can do at...
One of the many areas of controversy in plesiosaur palaeobiology is the topic of how they swam. The question goes back almost 200 years to the 1820s when the first complete plesiosaurs were described from the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme Regis, UK. Plesiosaur swimming is a particularly difficult topic to study for a number of reasons. Plesiosaurs are extinct so...