Tosha Hollmann

Every academic conference in the US is now fucked-fucked, lol.

It’s finally out!

Our work addressing the origins of reptiles is published in PCJ! peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

We use novel info gleaned from the scan data of dozens of stem reptiles to substantially revise our understanding of early reptile evolution #paleontology #herpetology

A painting that depicts a pair of Attenborosaurus- long-necked marine reptile with flippers and tail flukes that they use to navigate the ocean and hunt fish. The pair is surrounded by ammonites, fish and other marine reptiles.

A great float of Attenborosaurus swiftly navigate their pelagic environment in their hunt for fish.

Attenborosaurus (named after Sir David Attenborough) is an extinct marine reptile that existed during the early Jurassic, it was a primitive pliosaurid, closer related to short-necked plesiosaurs.

Sketch - Hatzegopteryx thambema

Sclerocormus, an extremely strange ichthyosauriform, hunting ammonites

Sketch of Suchodus, a large and nasty metriorhynchid from the Oxford Clay

These look fantastic!! Just a small note, but Qianichthyosaurus and the rest of toretocnemidae are not members of Parvipelvia, rather placing just outside it :)

2 tiny baby mosasaur snoots, Clidastes with a tiny snout in front of the teeth and Tylosaurus with a much more noticeable thimble of bone for a schnozz.

It's #Tylosaurus Tuesday my dudes!

Every now and then we find some baby mosasaurs in Kansas that don't quite make it very long in life. A lucky few of them don't end up as shark puke either. Here are 2 premaxilla snoots, the left one from Clidastes and the right from Tylosaurus with a little prow 🧪

Two ichthyosaurs swin through a shoal of squid

First new painting in a while — Leptonectes tenuirostris (foreground) and Leptonectes solei (background) hunt cephalopods as dusk

Thank you!

Two ichthyosaurs swin through a shoal of squid

First new painting in a while — Leptonectes tenuirostris (foreground) and Leptonectes solei (background) hunt cephalopods as dusk

Scale-like (or fibrous) structures are also documented on the leading edge of some ichthyosaur fins — not commented on much in literature but potentially an interesting avenue for future research

Scales being found only on the flippers here immediately brings to mind cetaceans that roughen and thicken the leading edge of their fins & flippers for hydrodynamic purposes.

Blue whales make among the loudest calls of anything in the ocean... but killer whales cannot hear them at all because their calls are so deep. In my new paper I suggest this is an adaptation to reduce killer whale attacks.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Dearc sgiathanach, sketch referencing the newly-published osteology

A winter scene of a forest, with the chinese hadrosaur Jinzhousaurus on the middle of the composition. On the backround, the forest is illuminated by some mysterious source.

Forest Interior with Jinzhousaurus. Miguel, 1924.

My last piece of the year, inspired by Ludvig Munthe's 1870 painting "Forest Interior".

#paleoart #hadrosaur #sciart

The neural arches, which are on the dorsal surface of the vert, do the most to restrict motion of the vertebral column. So there’s just more in the way when the back flexes up rather than down

Sketch of porpoise upstroke and downstroke for… something (hopefully)

Nessie Point and Counterpoint; Who Owns the ‘Facts’ on the Loch Ness Monster? — Tetrapod Zoology Regular readers of this blog might be aware of my book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths , initially published as an ebook in 2016 ( Naish 2016 ) and appearing in har...

Who owns the 'facts' on the #LochNessMonster and are believers right to be super-aggressive towards the sceptics? New #TetZoo article now has a good number of comments .... tetzoo.com/blog/2024/11... #LochNess #Nessie

No— Platypterygius is a Cretaceous taxon, and this is Jurassic. You can also tell the fossil doesn’t belong to a derived platypterygiid because of the rounded phalanges, and that it isn’t an ophthalmosaur because of the notching on the anterior digit (something ophthalmosaurs lose)

Scott and Skye's poster on skeletal diagrams

Come by B66 in the poster session this afternoon for Best Practices for Fossil Vertebrate Skeletal Diagrams by @skeletaldrawing.bsky.social and myself! #2024SVP

Happy #FossilFriday everyone! Excited to share that very soon, I will be able to share a piece of research that I've been hard at work for years. Not sure if it will release today, but figured I would share a little teaser here...

Thank you!

Mosasaurus hoffmanni

Mosasaurus missouriensis

Hello new Bluesky followers- enjoy some Mosasaurus reconstructions.

I tried to incorporate the clavicles and interclavicles into these reconstructions, as well as a shallower chest due to lizardy swept-back ribs.

A skeletal reconstruction of the giant azhdarchid pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus launching itself into the air. With scale bar, copyright Scott Hartman, 2023.

Trying to think of a skeletal to share that I haven't really discussed elsewhere, so here's my take on the skeleton of everyone's favorite giant flying reptile, Quetzalcoatlus. The 2021 monograph by Padian, et al. made this worth tackling.

Hello lovely folks,

I will try to be more active here now considering how many bad decisions are made in the other place.
Have some recent images from the streams.

Fight or hug???

(Anchiornis and Yi)

Over on Twitter, I've been doing a thing called TetZoocryptomegathread, where I discuss the twists and turns pertaining to given pieces of 'monster' evidence, usually photos. They've been hugely popular. As an experiment, let's see how they fare here. Fingers crossed. Here we go...

Guanlingsaurus, my skeletal restoration of this giant ichthyosaur. A short, toothless snout, high vertebral count, and reduced ossification acrodd the skeleton make this a very unique animal

Sclerocormus, an extremely strange ichthyosauriform, hunting ammonites