New and improved galleries!

For those of you wondering why the pace of content has slowed down, it’s because I entered a PhD program in paleontology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall, and I lost what was left of my free time. But that’s not to say that there hasn’t been substantial work going on behind the scenes of SkeletalDrawing.com!

First and foremost, there is a new skeletal gallery featuring some of my non-dinosaur reconstructions. “Non-dinosaurs” is admittedly a pretty broad category, and indeed it features everything from the proto-dinosaur Silesaurus to crocodylomorphs, turtles, mammals, and even the basal tetrapod Ichthyostega.

The reason for this hodge-podge is that most of my career has been spent working on dinosaurs, so these phylogenetic odds and ends have shown up when I was commissioned to do them for specific projects (e.g. the overhaul of the UMNH’s fossil displays). Someday I hope to flesh out those groups enough to break them into separate categories, but for now if you are looking for a skeletal that doesn’t happen to be a dinosaur you’ll have to wade through a morass of animals that aren’t closely related. At least they are posted now!

Along with the new gallery, all of the galleries have undergone substantial improvement in terms of usability. For starters, you can now link to a particular skeletal, whereas before the images did not have unique URLs. So if you want to talk about Stan the T. rex on a forum somewhere you can now link directly to that image (with proper credit, of course!).

This also means that you no longer have to browse through the galleries to learn if a specific animal is there - you can now use the search function that is available in the left-hand column on each page of my website. Previously it would discover if said animal was present, but it couldn’t link you directly to the reconstruction.

The switch to unique image URLs allows another benefit that will be coming soon(TM). I will be adding an alphabetical index under the skeletal galleries dropdown, so those of you who don’t care for the search function can instead browse through an alphabetical list of taxa and click on a link to be taken directly to the image in question. I’m doubtful that I will get this launched this week, since I’ll be busy in Los Angeles at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting, so look for it to go live in early November.

There is other exciting news to come soon, including a look at the juvenile Parasaurolophus recently published by Farke et al., and of course the long-suffering mass estimate post on Spinosaurus. I’ll also be introducing a couple of new article formats designed at speeding up the pace of new articles. Look for it all in the next month!

Update: In a fit of productivity I powered through all the links needed to make the Skeletal Index, so if you prefer to read through a list rather than browse a gallery or use the search bar you can now do so.