Mesozoic Art: Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals in Art

Product Information

On that note, Mesozoic Art is available directly from Bloomsbury here (this is the best option if you’re in the UK) and from digital retailers as normal. It’s also available from standard retailers; ask for it at your local bookstore. Geister, J. 1998. Lebensspuren made by marine reptiles and their prey in the Middle Jurassic (Callovian) of Liesberg, Switzerland. Facies 39, 105-124.

Viera, L. I. & Torres, J. A. 1995. Presencai de Baryonyx walkeri (Saurischia, Theropoda) en el Weald de La Rioja (Espana). Nota previa. Munibe 47, 57-61.

About the contributors

Charig, A. J. & Milner, A. C. 1997. Baryonyx walkeri, a fish-eating dinosaur from the Wealden of Surrey. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum 53, 11-70. But when it comes to social behaviour, reproductive behaviour and so on, we have but brief snippets. A few fossils provide possible evidence for intraspecific combat in such groups as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, and limited evidence for social behaviour and maybe even group-living also exists for some (e.g., O’Keefe & Chiappe 2011).

Robinson, J. A. 1975. The locomotion of plesiosaurs. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen 149, 286-332. A French language book – La Mer au Temps des Dinosaures, by Nathalie Bardet, Alexandra Houssaye, Stéphane Jouve and Peggy Vincent – appeared while I was writing Ancient Sea Reptiles. I haven’t yet seen a copy and an unaware of how comprehensive it is. So as what it is mainly intended to be - a collection of excellent paleoart, ready for your coffee table or to fascinate your child - this book is five stars, excellent. The other spinosaurids. What of other spinosaurids, and what of the larger picture? In general, we found support for the idea that Spinosauridae contains the two clades Baryonychinae and Spinosaurinae. Like a few other authors, however, we didn’t always get this result, since baryonychines were sometimes recovered as a paraphyletic grade to spinosaurines. Other authors have reported this result in the past ( Evers et al. 2015, Sales & Schultze 2017). Among other interesting things, we recovered Vallibonavenatrix from Spain – described as a spinosaurine – as either a baryonychine or as outside the baryonychine + spinosaurine clade, while Camarillasaurus from Spain was found to be a spinosaurine ( Barker et al. 2021). The Brazilian Irritator jumped around within Spinosaurinae, suggesting that data is needed on its postcranial skeleton (we coded only for the holotype skull) before we can better pin it down.Korte, C., Hesselbo, S. P., Ullmann, C. V., Dietl, G., Ruhl, M., Schweigert, G. & Thibault, N. 2015. Jurassic climate mode governed by ocean gateway. Nature Communications 6 (10015). Jagielska, N., O’Sullivan, M., Funston, G. F., Butler, I. B., Challands, T. J., Clark, N. D. L., Fraser, N. C., Penny, A., Ross, D. A., Wilkinson, M. & Brusatte, S. L. 2022. A skeleton from the Middle Jurassic of Scotland illuminates an earlier origin of large pterosaurs. Current Biology 32, 1-8. Mateus, O., Araújo, R., Natário, C. & Castanhinha, R. 2011. A new specimen of the theropod dinosaur Baryonyx from the early Cretaceous of Portugal and taxonomic validity of Suchosaurus. Zootaxa 2827, 54-68.

Naish, D. & Barrett, P. M. 2016. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. The Natural History Museum, London.Sales, M. A. F. & Schultz, C. L. 2017. Spinosaur taxonomy and evolution of craniodental features: evidence from Brazil. PLoS ONE 12, e0187070 Finally, many people are fascinated by the inferred, imagined or reconstructed behaviour of fossil animals and want to hear more about it. The problem is that we never know anywhere near as much as we’d like. For ancient sea reptiles we know a fair bit about dietary preferences and inferred hunting behaviour, and we’ve also done a lot of work on locomotory behaviour (e.g., Godfrey 1984, Lingham-Soliar 2000, Motani 2002, 2005, Carpenter et al. 2010, Liu et al. 2015, Muscutt et al. 2017); this explains the unusual image at top right of the montage above: see this article on plesiosaur locomotion to have it explained. Grooves and other marks on preserved seafloor sediment suggests that some of these animals ploughed or dug in the mud (Geister 1998), and of course the idea that giant predatory species hunted along shores and grabbed terrestrial animals from the water’s edge is irresistible. The fact that this strategy is present in several groups of living aquatic predators make it likely – yes, likely – that this strategy was used by at least some species.

Charig, A. J. & Milner, A. C. 1986. Baryonyx, a remarkable new theropod dinosaur. Nature 324, 359-361.

Reviews

Finally, thanks as ever to my co-organisers and assistants – John, Jenny, Hel, Georgia, the staff at King’s College – and in particular to Chris Manias for access to the venue. Huge thanks to all the speakers, presenters, those with stalls, and of course to all the attendees. Another substantial success, and here’s to the TENTH event next year!