James Herrmann’s Aquilops bust
June 21, 2019
You may recall that sculptor James Herrmann did a life-size bronze of Aquilops (shown above) back in 2017. I love it, and I’d get one in a heartbeat if I had the disposable income or the space in which to display it. Since I have neither, I got in touch with James and asked if he’d be interested in doing a casting of just the bust. Happily for me, he was game, and today this sturdy wooden crate arrived in the mail:
Inside, insanely well-packed in lots of cushy foam:
That’s a t-shirt James threw in with my order. But you’re probably more interested in this, which was also in the crate:
Unpacked and plunked on the crate lid on the lawn since it was the best I could come up with on short notice:
Some nicer photos by James of the same sculpture in prettier surroundings:
The bust is mounted on a gorgeous piece of polished green marble, with thick felt on the bottom so it won’t scratch up the furniture. The max length of the base is 9.5 inches and when standing on a desk or table, the whole piece is almost exactly 12 inches tall. I haven’t weighed it but it’s heavy enough that you could knock someone out with it, no problem.
I’d say it looks nice, but that’s both redundant, in this photo-heavy post, and a gross understatement. It looks absurdly nice, like it wandered into my space from some other, classier joint. I have some serious desk-cleaning to do so it won’t look like I stole this.
Instead of doing a big run of these, James is having them cast one at a time, on demand. The cost is $500 plus shipping; mine came to $573.33 shipped. If you want one, or want to browse James’s catalogue, or commission something yourself, you can find him at http://www.herrmannstudio.com/.
Thanks, James, for your interest in ‘my’ critter, for your skill in bringing it to life, and for making this bust available. I love it.
Aquilops skull, take 3
December 12, 2018
Nothing really new here, not like a new skull recon or anything. The original version I did for Farke et al. (2014) had the jaw articulated and closed. Then in 2017 I posted a version with the lower jaw disarticulated. Obviously what was needed was one with the lower jaw articulated and open. Now it exists, here. I mean, since I posted the separate parts last year people have had everything they needed to make their own, but it’s nice to have one already built, so here you go.
My good friend, frequent collaborator, and fellow adventurer Brian Engh has won the John J. Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize for 2D paleoart (there are also categories for 3D paleoart and scientific illustration). He’s in august company; previous Lanzendorf winners include luminaries like John Gurche, Michael Skrepnick, Mark Hallett, Todd Marshall, and Julius Csotonyi (among many others–see the complete list of previous winners here). Naturally I’m happy as heck for Brian, and immensely proud of him, not only for the award, but also for what he’s doing now. Usually when we say “pay it forward” we mean metaphorically, but Brian is literally going to pay it forward. He’s created his own paleoart contest, the SummonENGH 2018, and he will award half of his October Patreon take to the winner.
He lays out the rules on his blog and in this video:
There’s a Facebook group, here, and a hashtag: #TheSummonEngh2018 (Facebook, Twitter).
Why do I think this is cool? It’s no exaggeration to say that I am a paleontologist today because I was exposed to mind-bending paleoart from a young age. Brian cares about paleoart–he cares about making better paleoart, himself, and he cares about making paleoart better, for everyone. And now he’s putting his money where his mouth his and doing something to hopefully bring more visibility to the paleoart community, and help move the field forward. That’s admirable, and I’m happy to support the cause.
Also, when we visited the Aquilops display at Dinosaur Journey this summer, we were lucky enough to capture this single frame showing a 100% real paleo-energy discharge. I definitely felt something at the time, but I didn’t know the full extent of what had happened until Brian sorted through our photos after the trip. Apparently this was all fated to happen–some kind of transdimensional chronoparticle emission linking past and future–and who am I to argue with fate?
Now, go summon monsters!
I was back in Utah the week before last, looking for monsters with Brian Engh and Jessie Atterholt. It was a successful hunt – more about that another time.
We made a run to Fruita, Colorado, to visit Dinosaur Journey. I was just there in May, picking up Haplocanthosaurus caudals for CT scanning (and other fun things). We picked up another specimen this time, for a different project – more on that in another post, too.
Not this one, but like this one. An apatosaurine middle caudal vertebra, MWC 5742, in left lateral view.
There’s a nice ceratopsian exhibit up at Dinosaur Journey right now, with cast skulls from many of the new ceratopsians that have been described in the past couple of decades. My near-favorites were Zuniceratops and Diabloceratops, both of which are small enough that they must have been adorable in life (think pony-sized and big-horse-sized, respectively).
My absolute favorite, of course, was this little thing:
I can tell you exactly how Aquilops came to be on display there. Julia McHugh printed a copy of the holotype, because it’s freely available to the world. And she used Brian’s Aquilops head recon in the signage (correctly, with attribution), because it’s also freely available to the world. In fact, I’ve seen Aquilops on display at several museums now for just those reasons. So, folks, if you want your critters to be seen, make them open. Hiring a paleoartist to do some awesome artwork that can be released under a CC-BY license (because you paid them, not because you asked them to give their art away for “exposure”) is a huge help.
We had to geek out a little about unexpectedly finding ‘our’ dinosaur on display:
But of course it is not our dinosaur anymore – that’s the whole point. Aquilops belongs to the world.
For more on our trip, see Jessie’s posts here, here, and here.
So, here’s a cool thing that happened at Norwescon. On Saturday afternoon, there was an autograph signing session. Probably to the surprise of no-one, a lot more people were interested in having things signed by the other two guests of honor, Galen Dara and Ken Liu, than by me. But happily I was situated between them so I coasted a bit on the interest they drew. There was quite a bit of downtime in the two-hour session, so I had the chance to chat with both Galen and Ken. That was actually a highlight of the con for me – I was hoping for a chance to get to know my fellow guests of honor a bit, instead of just passing them in the hallways as we all went off to our separate scheduled activities.
Whenever Galen Dara wasn’t signing autographs, she was drawing. Makes sense, right? You probably don’t get to be as professionally successful as she is if making art isn’t compulsive. And it was just my luck that the proximate cool thing around to draw was the skull of Aquilops – I was signing prints of my skull recon, and I had along the reconstructed cast skull that I use for education and outreach. So I had the fairly trippy experience of watching an award-winning artist at the top of her game draw ‘my’ critter.
As you can see from Galen’s Instagram, she draws and paints a lot of skulls, and she spends a lot of time exploring the geometric underpinnings of skulls. She warned me at the outset that her Aquilops skull would be more impressionistic than photo-realistic – her interpretation of Aquilops as organic art. I think it looks pretty great; I have to trace stuff to get the proportions that close on the first go. And as I recently mentioned in another post, it’s always mesmerizing for me to see how a visual artist can conjure form, weight, and texture one pencil-stroke at a time.
Many thanks to Galen for permission to post these pics, and for her interest in my favorite non-sauropod.
Old drawings (of heads)
June 25, 2017
I was organizing my files in DropBox and I found a folder of old drawings I’d almost forgotten about. I drew this back in the late 90s. It was used on a t-shirt by the OU Zoology Department. I got the general idea of making a head out of animals, and the specific idea of using a butterfly wing for the ear, from Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s cover for the novel Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. The snake I stole from ancient Egypt. I think everything else is in there just because I thought it was cool. Note that inverts, fish, herps, birds, and mammals are all represented, with a good balance of aquatic, terrestrial, and volant forms. It looks awfully hippie-dippie from 20 years out, but heck, what doesn’t?
“Solitude” by Mathew Wedel. CC BY-NC 4.0.
Well, this, I suppose.
I drew this about the same time. I was reading The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and lots of stuff about ancient monastic traditions and thinking that if the world is an illusion that must be penetrated, then the evidence of one’s senses can only mislead. Also, Vicki was working for the state medical examiner in Oklahoma City and they used wooden dowels to represent the paths of bullets when reconstructing the skulls of those killed by gunfire. So here’s the skull of a monk, with all of the lethal pathways of distraction and temptation clearly marked as such. At last he can contemplate the eternal mysteries in perfect solitude.
Obviously I didn’t get on board the world-is-an-illusion, sensation-is-bad train – skewed pretty hard in the opposite direction, in fact. Possibly because years earlier the Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs had shown me that pursuing ‘pure’ intellectual and spiritual inquiry would ultimately lead one to a pathetic existence as a disembodied head living in a cave (high culture, meet low culture). Anyway, whatever interest I might have had in that philosophy I exorcised through this drawing. Stripped of any art-making-a-point baggage, I still think it’s pretty bitchin’. I should make t-shirts.
Actually, I probably will make t-shirts of this one if there’s any interest. Hence the CC BY-NC license I put on it, as opposed to the normal CC BY for almost everything else on this site. Look at me, boldly experimenting with new licenses.
This, obviously, is a lot more recent. I was collating all of my scanned drawings and I realized that I’d gone to the trouble of drawing the cranium and lower jaw of Aquilops separately, but I’d never posted the version from before I composited them back into articulation. It is very unlike me to do work and then hide it, so here it is.
It wasn’t until I the post mostly written that I realized that all three drawings are of heads, none of them are saurischians (although the first includes a saurischian, but not the cool kind), and two are stinkin’ mammals (and not the cool kind). I stand ready for your slings and arrows.
For previous posts on my drawings, see:
There has been an Aquilopsing – have you felt it?
April 22, 2017
Cryptic Aquilops, by Brian Engh. Available as a poster print – see below.
One of the many nice things about getting to help name new taxa is that once you let them out into the world, other people can unleash their considerable talents on ‘your’ critters. Which means that every now and then, something cool pops up that you have a deep personal connection to. Things have been fairly quiet on the Aquilops front for a while, and all of a sudden I have news.
I’m still waiting for a plush Aquilops – c’mon, Homo sapiens, how has this not happened already? – but if you’d like a life-size Aquilops in bronze, sculptor James Herrmann has you covered. James got in touch with me last fall when the project was just in the planning stages. His timing was excellent – I’d just seen the presentation on camouflage in Psittacosaurus at SVPCA, and the paper by Vinther et al. was out a week or two later. I sent James some papers and photos of dead animals, he sent back photos of the work in progress, and now his Aquilops is done.
About the sculpture, James writes:
I am offering the sculpture for sale as a limited edition of 25. The sculpture is life sized, it is approximately 60 lbs and is 33″L x 14”H x 11”W. The price I am asking for it is $4500. I am getting a slab of green soapstone for the base although it does display well without the stone so it will be bolted on from below and not epoxied. […] The gingko leaves and log part of the sculpture were made from molds taken from plants growing locally.
I dig it. If you’re interested in getting one, please visit his website, HerrmannStudio.com.
Aquilops ’14. I was there, man. It was crazy. A Brian Engh joint.
Next item: back in 2014, Brian Engh created the public face of Aquilops with the wonderful graphic art he did for the paper and the press release. Now he’s gone back to the well and reimagined Aquilops, based in part on what we know of its paleoecology – that’s the image at the top of the post. He explains his new view of Aquilops in a thoughtful and wide-ranging video on his paleoart YouTube channel. (If you miss his rap videos set in the Daikaijucene, he also has a YouTube channel for music and monsters. And a blog. And a Patreon page. You get the picture.) You should also check out the two-part interview with Brian at the PLOS Paleo Community blog (part 1, part 2).
Here’s the aforementioned video:
Poster prints of Aquilops Classic and Next Gen can be purchased through Brian’s website, DontMessWithDinosaurs.com.
Finally, a couple of older Aquilops-themed art things that I didn’t cover when they happened. Lead author Andy Farke is also an award-winning homebrewer and he concocted his Eagle Face Oatmeal Stout in honor of our little buddy. He has lots more beer-and-dinosaur crossover goodness on his brewing blog – check it out.
Last fall artist Natalie Metzger did a bunch of drawings of extant animals wearing the skulls of extinct animals for Inktober. In the very first batch was this awesome squirrel looking unexpectedly badass in an Aquilops skull. I don’t know what it means, but I would totally play that D&D campaign. Natalie has a bunch more cool stuff on her blog and Patreon page, and she’ll be at the Rose City Comic Con in Portland this September, so go say hi and buy her art.
Really finally, I am not on Twitter – trust me, I don’t need less of a filter between my occasional stupidity and the world – but for all the rest of you, keep an eye on #Aquilops and, if you’re a heartless jerk, #Aquilopsburrito.
Have more Aquilops stuff I haven’t covered but should? The comment field is open.
References
- Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
- Vinther, J., Nicholls, R., Lautenschlager, S., Pittman, M., Kaye, T.G., Rayfield, E., Mayr, G., and Cuthill, I.C. 2016. 3D camouflage in an ornithischian dinosaur. Current Biology 26(18): 2456-2462.
A quick stop at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
December 21, 2016
I’m back in Oklahoma for the holidays, and anytime I’m near Norman I pop in to the OMNH to see old friends, both living and fossil. Here’s the Aquilops display in the hall of ancient life, which has been up for a while now. I got some pictures of it when I was here back in March, just never got around to posting them.
Aquilops close up. You can’t see it well in this pic, but on the upper right is a cast of the Aquilops cranium with a prosthesis that shows what the missing bits would have looked like. That prosthesis was sculpted by – who else? – Kyle Davies, the OMNH head preparator and general sculpting/molding/casting sorceror. You’ve seen his work on the baby apatosaur in this post. I have casts of everything shown here – original fossil, fossil-plus-prosthesis, and reconstructed 3D skull – and I should post on them. Something to do in the new year.
The Aquilops display is set just opposite the Antlers Formation exhibit, which has a family of Tenontosaurus being menaced by two Deinonychus, and at the transition between Early and Late Cretaceous. The one mount in the Late Cretaceous area is the big Pentaceratops, which is one of the best things in this or any museum.
Evidence in support of that assertion. Standing directly in front of this monster is a breathtaking experience, which I highly recommend to everyone.
It’s just perfect that you can see the smallest and earliest (at least for now) North American ceratopsian adjacent to one of the largest and latest. Evolution, baby!
I didn’t only look at dinosaurs – the life-size bronze mammoth in the south rotunda is always worth a visit, especially in holiday regalia.
No holiday post about the OMNH would be complete without a shot of “Santaposeidon” (previously seen here). I will never get tired of this!
The chances that I’ll get anything else posted in 2016 hover near zero, so I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year.
New information on the integumentary ornamentation of Aquilops americanus (that I have on my shoulder)
June 14, 2015
My 40th birthday present from Vicki. I commissioned the art from Brian Engh. I bow to no one in my love for his original Aquilops head reconstruction:
Life restoration of Aquilops by Brian Engh. Farke et al. (2014: fig. 6C). CC-BY.
BUT it’s waaay too detailed for a tattoo unless I wanted a full back piece. I sent Brian this sketch to convey what I wanted – to emphasize the strong lines of the piece, punch up the spines and spikes, basically shift it toward a comic book style without devolving into caricature:
Originally I was going to have Aquilops‘ name and year of discovery in the tat. I decided to drop the lettering, for several reasons. One, it won’t hold up as well over the next few decades. Two, if someone is close enough to read it, we’ll probably be talking about the tattoo already. Third, the tattoo is a better conversation starter without a caption. First I get to tell people what Aquilops is, then I get to explain what ‘fourth author‘ means. ;-)
As he did for the original Aquilops head recon, Brian sent a selection of possible color schemes, mostly based on those of extant lizards. I couldn’t decide which I liked best, so I talked it over with my tattoo artist, Tanin McCoe at Birch Avenue Tattoo in Flagstaff, Arizona. I wasn’t just interested in what looks good on paper, but what would work well with my skin tone and still look good 20 years from now. Tanin really liked the earth-tone color scheme with the dark stripe across the eye, so that’s how we went. The tattoo Aquilops is facing left instead of right because it’s on my left shoulder – my right deltoid was already occupied.
They do good work at Birch Avenue – Vicki’s gotten three pieces there, including this skeleton key that was also done by Tanin:
Yes, the key’s bit is a human sphenoid – that was my idea.
Anyway, I’m super-happy with the tattoo, and I’m glad it’s healed enough to show off. Thanks, Brian and Tanin!
The longest cell in Andy Farke
June 12, 2015
The longest cell in Andy Farke is one of the primary afferent (sensory) neurons responsible for sensing vibration or fine touch, which runs from the tip of his big toe to his brainstem. (NB: I have not actually dissected Andy to confirm this, or performed any viral neuron tracing on him, this is assumed based on comparative anatomy.) Here’s a diagram:
This is what happens when (a) I need to create a diagram to illustrate the longest cell in the human body for my students, and (b) my friends put stuff online with a CC-BY license.
Found this while I was checking out Aquilops art online:
It’s a derivative work by Andy IJReid, from this Wikimedia page, based on two PhyloPic silhouettes Andy created (go here for the pathetically tiny lower vertebrate and here for Aquilops).
From there it was pretty straighforward to mash up Andy’s silhouette with the nerve stuff from Wedel (2012: fig. 2).
So if you want the full deets on licensing – which I am obligated to provide whether you want them or not – the image up top is a derivative image by me, based on work by Andy published at PhlyoPic under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported (CC-BY 3.0) license, and based on my own image published in Acta, also under a CC-BY license.
If you’d like to know more about the science behind very long nerves in vertebrates, please see these posts:
- The world’s longest cells? Speculations on the nervous systems of sauropods
- Oblivious sauropods being eaten
Also, keep making stuff and putting it online under a license people can actually use. It’s beneficial for science and education, and hugely entertaining for me.
Reference
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
