Paleontology

 The above painting is by famed stop-motion animator Willis O'Brian for the 60s remake of Conan Doyle's The Lost World. As shown, it would have been a far different movie than the rather infamous version that got made. There is a pair of Triceratops , some Brontosauruses , one attacked by an Allosaurus , a Protoceratop s, a Stegosaurus , even a Dimetrodon ! All would have been stop-motion, no giant lizards. Below that, O'Brian and Irwin look over some designs for a stop-motion dinosaur movie that did get made , The Animal World.  Willis O'Brian, the famous stop-motion animator behind King Kong , the aborted Creation , Mighty Joe Young , and many others, very nearly made Irwin Allen's 1960s remake of Conan Doyle's The Lost World , one of the greatest dino-mation films of all time. The above production painting gives a hint to want it might have like.  Unfortunately, it was, of course, scrapped in favor of lizards and gators with fins and plates stuck on their bac

 The following is an article by John C, McLoughlin, published in Science Digest , a popular science magazine for the general public in October 1982. I was looking for this issue, which I owned as a child, for this blog. it and two other issues, got torn up too much, and I had to throw them away. I have managed to find this one with Argentavis Magnificens , which was a recent discovery back then. It assumes that Argentavis was a giant condor, a type of teratorn related to Teratornis , the giant condor of North America, whose remains have famously been found among the La Brea tarpit fauna. Argentavis may not have been an actual teratorn, however, and could have been more of an active hunter than scavenger, and may have hunted like a colossal eagle. The article shows it bearing off prey, possibly a thoatherium calf.  There is also a common mistake for the time, the assumption that diatryma , now known as gastornis, was a predator, when we now have confirmed evidence that it was in fac

Extinct animals of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, and nearby islands. Clockwise from right: Reunion White Dodo, Mauritian Common Dodo, Mauritian broad-billed parrot, Mauritian Blue Pigeon, Magaladaptis (Madagascar Giant Lemur), Reunion Solataire (a dodo cousin), Reunion Parrot, Seycelles Giant Tortoise, Mauritian Red Rail, Madagascar Coua, Reunion Crested Starling, Madagascar Elephant Bird, Madagascar Pygmy Hippo The above painting is from the Time Life Nature Library volume on Africa. All of the animals are now extinct, and only three of them are actually from Madagascar, the rest from nearby islands. These happen to be the most striking and the largest, however: the elephant bird, the pygmy hippo, and the giant lemur Magaladaptis .  The island of Madagascar once harbored a unique megafauna all its own. It was not originally part of Africa, but split off from the Indian subcontinent, which at the time had to have sported a great assortment of pro-simians from before true monkeys evol

These are some sketches of the South American marsupial sabertooth, thylacosmilus carnifex by Jay Matternes. Since I've been posting artwork of marsupial carnivores lately (perhaps I should have a blog devoted to just those), I've searched out some others that I also remember growing up with. This one is from the volume of Time Life Nature Library on South America. I remember this and the other Time Life books I used to get out of the public library, but which I never owned until now. You gotta love ebay! I just got this and one on Africa, having remembered the artwork in these two volumes of extinct animals.  These sketches of the animal and how it might have moved were unfortunately not included in the recent tome showcasing Matternes art, but only focused on his most famous mural-like paintings.  The sketch of the musculature, showing the smaller, related animal seems to be a small species of Borhyena , possibly Prothylacinus , an ancestral form of the borhyeanids, that loo

  Back in college, I once wrote a story about the first human clone, a boy named "Nolan Williams" after Logan's Run author William F. Nolan. That story, like most of mine, was never published. I'd recently read a book on the possibility of discrimination and persecution of real human clones, were they ever to exist. The false, and grotesque portrayal of a cloned boy in the movie Godsend , is an example of the negative attitudes toward cloning that could very likely lead to the persecution of human clones themselves.  The portrayal of the cloned child in the final two JP films is virtually the opposite of that in Godsend . Meaning its' way more realistic. She's an average kid, save merely for the manner of her conception. For that, we see her as a hunted child. However, in this case, they don't really mean her harm, merely consider valuable property. Actual cloned kids might suffer far worse.  In the previous film, there is a brief scene where the villain i

 Someone of Facebook shared with photo with me on Facebook, on the Save the Thylacine group's timeline. The man's name was Steve Rushton. What he said regarding it was this: Here's another type of Quall, a Queensland animal was known as the "Northern Wonder" As big as a medium sized dog, sadly this one was shot in Kenilworth Qld in the early 1920s What is this then? A quoll the size of a medium size dog? Is it just an extra large tiger quoll? or a possible candidate for the fabled Queensland tiger, thought by some to be a surviving thylacoleo.  I get the idea that perhaps here is a marsupial analogue to the now-infamous DeLoys ape photo. You can't really get the actual size of it, but it looks large compared to the crate, and what looks like a regular-size paint can. The DeLoys photo, purportedly showing an "American ape", was actually an average-sized spider monkey with its tail concealed.  So waht's up here?