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…
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…
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…
The marine reptiles forum, which was unfortunately hacked last year (2013) and has been offline for several months since, is now back up and running. Richard Forrest was able to salvage all the old posts and user information, and has restored the forum at a dedicated new domain: marinereptiles.org. The forum is…
The Golden Trilobite is awarded annually by the Palaeontological Association to "high quality amateur and institutional websites that promote the charitable aims of the Association". I've no idea who nominated my website this year, but my thanks go to whoever raised it to the attention of the the PalAss Council, because it…
I've been rather quiet again recently, however, as coauthor of an article just published in PLOS ONE, I've good reason to come out of my shell today. The new paper describes and names the Weymouth Bay Pliosaur, a spectacular almost complete skull over 2m long. As discussed in the open access paper…
Most museum collections contain hidden treasures, but the Honington plesiosaur in the Warwickshire Museum is one treasure, I'm pleased to say, that is no longer hidden. I first came across the Honington plesiosaur while working in the geological collection of the Warwickshire Museum under the supervision of Jon Radley, the curator of…
An exciting new paper published this week in the journal Science (Vol. 333, p.870-873) provides the first direct evidence for live birth in plesiosaurs, and may have implications for plesiosaur behaviour (O'Keefe and Chiappe 2011). The plesiosaur Polycotylus giving birth to a single large baby. Based on new fossil evidence. Image by…