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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…