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Here you can find anatomy guides and science explainers, as well as a curated list of places to go next, from museums to other paleontologists and artists worth following.
Guides & articles
- Anatomy guide A visual glossary of skeletal anatomy
Just starting your journey learning dinosaur anatomy? Intimidated by all of the new words to learn? Start here for an easy primer.
Read → - Interactive tool Size comparison tool
Wonder how big (or small) your favorite extinct animals were? Try this tool to select 1–5 animals, and see them compared to each other and people for scale. More animals are added all the time.
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Museums to visit
18 Where to stand in front of the real thing — museums I've visited or worked with, grouped by region.
North America
- American Museum of Natural History
New York; one of the largest fossil halls in the world, with historically important theropod and sauropod mounts.
- Field Museum
Chicago; home of SUE the T. rex and Máximo the titanosaur.
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Washington, D.C.; the National Fossil Hall — “Deep Time” — anchors one of the most-visited natural history collections in the world.
- Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Denver; strong Cretaceous and Ice-Age holdings, with active field programs across the Rocky Mountain West.
- Natural History Museum of Utah
Salt Lake City; a spectacular modern museum built on Utah's rich Jurassic and Cretaceous record — the Grand Staircase ceratopsians especially.
- North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
Raleigh; free to visit, with a working research wing and the famous “Willo” Thescelosaurus among its dinosaurs.
- Wyoming Dinosaur Center
Thermopolis; a working dig-and-museum where you can visit active Morrison Formation quarries.
- UW–Madison Geology Museum
Madison, Wisconsin; a compact, free university museum with mounted skeletons and a strong teaching collection.
- Houston Museum of Natural Science
Houston; the Morian Hall of Paleontology stages its mounts as dynamic predator-and-prey scenes.
- University of Wyoming Geological Museum
Laramie; the University of Wyoming's museum, with a classic mounted Apatosaurus and a deep Wyoming fossil heritage.
- Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Los Angeles; a growing Dinosaur Hall, plus the La Brea Tar Pits under the same umbrella.
- Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology
Claremont, California; the only nationally accredited museum on a high-school campus, built around trace fossils and student fieldwork.
Asia
- National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo
Tokyo, in Ueno Park; Japan's national natural history museum, spanning dinosaurs to the deep history of the archipelago.
- Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Beijing
Beijing; the research institute behind China's feathered-dinosaur discoveries, with the Paleozoological Museum of China as its public face.
Europe
- Natural History Museum, London
London; a landmark collection, with the diplodocid cast 'Dippy' as its long-running emblem.
- Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin
Berlin; home of the towering Giraffatitan mount — the tallest mounted dinosaur skeleton — and the original Berlin Archaeopteryx.
- Senckenberg Natural History Museum, Frankfurt
Frankfurt; a grand nineteenth-century museum with a large mounted-dinosaur hall and a renowned collection of Eocene fossils from the Messel Pit.
Australia
- Queensland Museum, Brisbane
Brisbane; a window on Gondwanan life, from Australia's Cretaceous dinosaurs to its Ice-Age megafauna.
Other skeletal reconstructions & paleoartists
8 A small field. These are people whose work is worth your time.
- Dan Folkes
Detailed skeletal reconstructions across a broad range of vertebrates — a fellow reconstructor worth following.
- Skye McDavid
Skeletal reconstructions and paleoart with a research-driven attention to the underlying specimens.
- Gabriel Ugueto
A prolific scientific illustrator known for meticulously researched, vividly patterned life reconstructions spanning the whole tree of life.
- John Conway
A paleoartist and co-author of “All Yesterdays,” known for atmospheric reconstructions that rethink how extinct animals looked and lived.
- Beth Zaiken
A paleoartist and muralist specializing in Ice-Age environments and large-scale reconstructed landscapes for museums.
- Mark Witton
A palaeontologist and paleoartist, and a leading authority on pterosaurs — author of “Pterosaurs” and “The Palaeoartist's Handbook.”
- Jay Balamurugan
A paleoartist producing carefully researched life reconstructions across vertebrate diversity.
- Matt Dempsey
A musculoskeletal biologist and paleontologist who builds his skeletal, muscle, and life reconstructions in 3D.
Paleoart blogs & reading
5 Long-running sites and writers covering the science and the art.
- SV-POW
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week — Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel's long-running, gleefully nerdy open-science blog on sauropods and their remarkable vertebrae.
- David Hone's Archosaur Musings
Palaeontologist David Hone writing accessibly and prolifically on dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and how the science actually gets done.
- Mickey Mortimer's Theropod Database Blog
The companion blog to Mickey Mortimer's exhaustive Theropod Database — deep, technical dives into theropod phylogeny and taxonomy.
- Andrea Cau's Theropoda
Andrea Cau's long-running theropod research blog. Written in Italian, but with a prominent translation option on each post — well worth it for the rigorous phylogenetic analyses.
- Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology (TetZoo)
Tetrapod Zoology — Darren Naish's long-running, influential blog on the biology, diversity, and history of tetrapods, living and extinct.
References & tools
2 Databases, primary literature, and the odd useful utility.
- PhyloPic
A free, Creative Commons–licensed library of silhouettes of living and extinct organisms, for use in figures, talks, and teaching — several of mine are in there.
- The Paleobiology Database
A public, community-built archive of fossil occurrences compiled from the published literature — where to check when and where a taxon is actually known from, with the references to back it up.