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Mosasaurs and More for Ancient Sea Reptiles
🕑 Added 2022-06-13 16:35:29 +0000 UTCHello noble and wonderful patrons. Apologies for my silence: as you might have seen, the last several weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind... the major TV project I've been working on - the Apple TV+/BBC Studios series Prehistoric Planet - has finally come to fruition and seen its televised debut. I was involved in a great deal of the promotion and... what a ride. It was intense. I cannot talk about Prehistoric Planet here, but if you follow me on Twitter (@TetZoo) you'll have seen me talk about it a fair bit there.
Other things have been going on as well. Steve White and I finished editing Mesozoic Artover recent weeks. It's due to be published in October 2023 and there will be at least one launch event. The book can be pre-ordered already (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/mesozoic-art-9781399401364/). Getting it done was a ridiculous amount of work, and getting it finished meant a frightening amount of last-minute panic, the timing of which couldn't have been worse what with Prehistoric Planet and other events.
Ancient Sea Reptiles - to be published by the NHM in January 2023 - is also coming to completion as I write. Again, the timing couldn't have been worse, and getting it over the finish line has been really challenging. At the time of writing, I have a few captions still to do and some illustrations to get finished, but I'm getting there. The mosasaur cladogram shown above is one of several new cladograms I've included. I forget what I've said before but it meant doing new reconstructions of specific mosasaurs.
Other things have been happening too. Together with Chris Barker, Neil Gostling, Jeremy Lockwood and others, I published a new PeerJpaper on a new giant spinosaurid from the Isle of Wight's Vectis Formation. A TetZoo article on that find is here... https://tetzoo.com/blog/2022/6/8/giant-spinosaurid-dinosaur-from-the-isle-of-wight
Other Wealden dinosaur papers are in production, not least of which is the Eotyrannus monograph. I aim to have that finished soon... but how long have I been saying that for?
And that'll do for now. Thanks as always for your support - it means so much and does assist me in getting stuff done! Until next time...
Comments
My fervent hope is that the team that put together "Prehistoric Planet" makes at least two more series, one in the Jurassic and another in the Triassic (maybe before the mid-Triassic extinction event). And I hope David Attenborough lives to do them all...
Very excited for both of these books (Mesozoic Art and Ancient Marine Reptiles)! Prehistoric Planet was amazing. I really hope that a physical or even digital purchase option will become available in future so that I can own it in some capacity. Speaking of which, are there plans to publish a book companion to Prehistoric Planet, like there have been for other BBC series, such as Planet Earth 2? Or a book detailing the science that went behind its portrayal of ancient animals would be amazing. Anyway, congratulations on Prehistoric Planet, it was an incredible experience to watch!
