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.
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.
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 exciting collaboration with Jonathan Emmett, published again by UCLan Publishing.
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.
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 with an array of creatures from the book.
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.
A review of the evidence for living plesiosaurs
One of the topics I’m most frequently asked about as a plesiosaur palaeontologist is my opinion on the Loch Ness Monster and other monsters purported to be present day plesiosaurs. In this review I’ll cast a critical eye over the evidence for living plesiosaurs.
There are many different plesiosaur toys, replicas, statues, and other commercially available models. Here is my collection. It isn’t quite exhaustive, but it’s getting there. Many of these are now out of production and have become rare collector items. Others are in production and available to buy today, and new figures are released every year, so the collecting never stops.
