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…
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…
It is hard to believe that the last time I wrote about plesiosaur toys here was in March 2011, over six years ago (http://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…
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…