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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
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.