Check the expiration date on that skeletal drawing?

It’s been two weeks and change since I launched a ground-up rewrite of the website, and the reviews have been almost entirely positive, and occasionally effusive. I’m delighted that the time I invested into the overhaul seems to have been well worth it, and particularly that others agree that mobile navigation is now much better than it used to be.

Since then I’ve been trying to add some of the rigorous skeletals I skipped because they took too much time to update before the launch, and made a few polish updates under the hood. But I did get one request I wanted to address, involving the loss of the last-modified dates I used to include on each image. When I did the redesign, I wanted to add my website alongside the copyright claim, so when users post images in forums or on social media people can see where to find the originals. To prevent the watermark from getting out of control, I sacrificed the “last modified” date.

I didn’t think this was too big of a loss, as those dates were largely intended for my own use, so I could keep track of which version is the most recent. But it turns out several of you also made use of them, presumably also to track when I made updates. I don’t want the new website to be a downgrade in any way, so I spent the last week and a half making a database of all of the last edited dates for the skeletals I’ve posted. And since I had to track down the metadata for each image in their respective folders, I went ahead and added the date they were first created as well.

So as of…just now…every primary skeletal image should have its birth year, and the year it was most recently modified in the data blocks below it. Additional images have the dates at the end of their respective captions. When deciding on origin dates, I only included images that are directly connected in some way to the current version - for example in the pre-SD.COM era I drew Coelophysis and Tyrannosaurus skeletals (the latter based on Sue, FMNH PR 2081) that were ultimately abandoned before starting over with more modern techniques. So the created dates for those taxa reflect their starting-over points.

Given that, the oldest skeletal drawing on the site is Psittacosaurus, which was featured on the original incarnation of SD.Com, and again features in updated form on the overhauled version. I have a funny story about that skeletal: I drew it in my first-ever apartment, in Casper, Wyoming in 1996 - I had been given a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans, and in my youthful inexperience I didn’t realize that consuming them would be like eating coffee. They were tasty, so I ate the whole bag. Not accustomed to caffeine at that point, I found myself unable to sleep for about 20 hours, and drew the psittacosaur skeletal out of boredom as I waited for the effects of the caffeine to wear off. Of course that skeletal has been modified several times since, but those have built upon the original (first scanned into the digital world around 1998), so I consider it “the same skeletal.”

So there you have it - the modified dates have returned, and as a bonus, you get created-on dates as well. If you have a favorite skeletal drawing, you can see how long I’ve been maintaining it. And now that I’ve entered all of these, it will be easy to update them with new skeletals, or newly revised ones. Since the dates aren’t embedded in the images you will need to check the download dates on your files to compare them to the website versions, but hopefully that’s not much more difficult than opening the files to read a number.

Thanks to Luigi, RJ Palmer and Prasokour for letting me use their posts here, and to everyone who took the time to provide feedback.

That is, after all, how the dates returned. Now I can turn my attention to adding content, and hopefully in a couple more weeks, launching a new feature for the website. Cheers!