Brontomerus in National Geographic
September 20, 2011
Brontomerus by Mauricio Antόn, copyright National Geographic
The October 2011 issue of National Geographic is out, and in the ‘Now’ section near the front there is a one-page feature on Brontomerus (in the US version anyway). The whole thing is can be viewed online here. It’s page 30 in the hardcopy, but NG seems pretty cavalier about printing page numbers.
The art is by Mauricio Antόn and we’re super happy with it; as before we had the opportunity to go back and forth a lot and arrive at a finished piece that shows essentially everything we wanted. The author of the piece, Catherine Zuckerman, was also very patient in distilling down the reams of information Mike and I sent her about the story. Many thanks to both Mauricio and Catherine for their interest and hard work!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
September 21, 2011 at 7:01 am
neat :) Congratulations!
September 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
Matt
I don’t know if you caught Dinosaur Revolution or not, but in the third episode I gave you and Brontomerus a shout-out. A Cedarasaurus kicks a Utahraptor like a football. The sequence was already in production when Brontomerus was officially announced, so we had to stick with Cedars…too bad.
September 21, 2011 at 12:39 pm
In fact, there are a number of homages to SV-POW in Dinosaur Revolution: we wanted to get the point out that sauropods weren’t just huge bulky slabs of protein: they could fight back!
September 21, 2011 at 5:29 pm
Awesome! TIme to go and download the much-maligned new documentary. (Although, you know, we have this, the new BBC documentary and Inside Nature’s Giants all airing at once. Truly, we live in a golden age.)
September 21, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Thanks all for the kind words. I haven’t seen Dinosaur Revolution yet, but the thought of Cedarosaurus kicking a Utahraptor warms the cockles of my heart.
September 22, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Very cool illustrations!
September 23, 2011 at 1:23 am
Our enthusiasm for el fútbol must not blind us to the merits of stepping or sitting on predators. This leads me to wonder about adaptations in predators that make sense only for crush resistance.
September 23, 2011 at 4:07 am
Hypothesis: stegosaurs were bastards and used their leaf-shaped teeth to munch on soft, tasty baby sauropods. Adult sauropods retaliated by sitting on the stegosaurs, forcing them to evolve spikes. Titanosaurs eventually evolved osteoderms on their rear ends, and that was the end for stegosaurs.
File this under John Conway’s elegant and useful category of “things not directly contradicted by the fossil record.”
September 23, 2011 at 9:55 am
[…] our baby’s appearance in National Geographic this week, she’s now been in four mainstream […]
November 14, 2011 at 2:55 am
[…] delighted to have the opportunity to exhibit some more Brontomerus artwork. Once more, as with National Geographic and indeed the original life restoration in the paper, Matt and I had the opportunity to work with […]
November 21, 2011 at 6:45 am
[…] blade of the ilium is for: to anchor thigh muscles (discussed here, and also nicely illustrated here). Unless the animal had some kind of wasting disease, there was no bone sticking out beyond the […]
February 22, 2012 at 2:47 am
[…] is by the wicked talented Mauricio Antón, who is best known for his paleomammals work but who also restored Brontomerus for National Geographic last year. And some comparative data used in the paper was supplied by […]
June 3, 2015 at 6:07 pm
[…] that have appeared in the last few posts. But that work petered out as I started working more on other specimens and on the problems of the sauropod neck. More recently, Paul and Phil hunkered down and got the […]