Catching up: Books, plushies, and a welcome to Gizmodo readers

It’s been a very busy year, and as a result it’s awhile since I updated the blog, There are several smaller items I want to cover before I get to meatier topics, including a book I contributed to, an adorable Velociraptor plushie, and the #SciArt Twitter Storm.

First up, a welcome to visitors from Gizmodo, who wrote a fun article on the “Twitter Storm” put together by Glendon Mellow, Kalliopi Monoyios, and Katie McKissick over at the Scientific American Symbiartic blog. For those that missed it, a number of artists that work on the frontier of science and art posted a large amount (one might call it a storm) of their work on Twitter under the #SciArt hashtag. Of course the fun thing about Twitter is that even if you missed it you can still browse through the posts here. If you like science and art and want to brighten up your day it’s worth taking a look.

Next up, I want to talk about the lovely paleo plushies made by Rebecca Groom. She does some amazing work, and maintains scientific accuracy in a challenging medium. Rebecca was generous enough to send me one of her hand-crafted poseable “soft-sculpt” Velociraptor as thanks for my (trivial) role of providing an anatomical basis for some of her work, and it’s so cool I had to share. Also, any of you looking for great birthday/holiday gifts for the special dinogeek in your life really ought to check Rebecca’s work out (you can find her Etsy store here). To the right you can see where mine currently perches, watching over me as I work on new skeletal reconstructions (or grade papers, or write up research or…you get the idea).

Continuing the theme of “free stuff people sent me”, I also wanted to mention Dinosaurs of the British Isles, by Dean Lomax and Nobumichi Tamura. I got a copy (I contributed several skeletal drawings, along with Greg Paul and Jaime Headden). I’ve flipped through all of it, and I have to say that if you are interested in British dinosaurs it’s the most complete treatment of the subject I’ve seen to date, including quite a lot of photographs of specimens that were not widely available previously. Unfortunately Amazon only carries secondary resellers for U.S. customers, but interested parties can also grab it from Siri Scientific Press.

That largely clears my backlog of items I meant to cover last year. Hopefully I can find time to get into some issues regarding spinosaurids (both Spinosaurus and Baryonyx), dinosaur motion, and other goodies I’ve had planned but not enough time to write up yet.

See you soon!