Ivan Kay

Going a ways back for this one, "Summer's Last Stand," oil on linen, 18"x24", created in 2016.

A grey, brown, and black Archaeopteryx mid-flight.

A recent piece I did for work - Archaeopteryx! Don't get too excited though, this isn't a concept for a VFX animal, moreso just a one-off illustration. It was a really fun exercise in learning how to render out bigger swathes of feathers!

Some fun WIP stuff below ⬇️

#sciart #paleoart

A digital painting of a turkey vulture, sitting in perfect profile on a tree branch. the branch is covered in lichen and moss, and a few sparse but bright green leaves. the image is made up of pinks, yellows, and browns, with some green and blue. all objects are depicted as polygons and lines, rather than curved.

This month's #BirdWhisperer is the turkey vulture! He looks cold, or maybe I'm just projecting lol
(Ref photo by PublicDomainImages)
🦢🐡 #art #birds

Pterosauria tree (black edition) ~ 🦅🌳
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A few of you mentioned that you wanted to see close ups of the design and see all the extra details, so here you go! 😊

#paleoart #sciart

Cartilage from the head of a hammerhead shark. Unidentified species.

Not really bones per se. 🤣

The head cartilage of a hammerhead shark. Not sure what species. 🤘🦈

Inktober Art Challenge Day 28: "Skeletal." Marker and Prismacolor on Strathmore gray paper.

#Inktober #inktober2025 #Skeletal #shark #jaws #marinelife #sciart #fish #fishart #animal #animalart #ArtYear

Digital art of a Smilodon hunting a white tailed deer buck. Both figures are drawn as if they were petroglyphs. The Smilodon is pouncing the deer while the deer's rear legs twist to the opposite side of its body. This twisting leg direction signifies a dead or dying animal in Scythian art which also has influences on this piece.

One life eclipses another; Smilodon takes down a whitetail deer. Inspired by petroglyphs, cave art, and ancient Scythian art. It's weird to think that the whitetail deer survived the ice age and made it to the present but many of its predators did not. #art #smilodon #paleontology #rockart #deer

Rex Time #sciart

I was asked whether I was going to paint any shiny reflections to Mr blue swimmer crab.

You bet.

#sciart 🦀

Ink outline of a hammerhead's cranial cartilage

Marker and Prismacolor illustration of a hammerhead's cranial cartilage

Thought I would show the ink outline versus the finished piece. I love seeing the transformation.

Been meaning to do this illustration for a while. Totally rad. 🤘🦈🤙

#Inktober #Inktober2025 #artchallenge #shark #Skeletal #fish #fishart #animalart #ArtYear #bskyart #blueskyartists #Halloween

Day 28 of #Croctober, we're racing towards the finish line
This is one of my favourite images of Dakosaurus for two reasons
Reason 1: it nicely shows just how enormous this animal got
Reason 2: it also shows how stupidly tiny its arms were
Photo by Sven Sachs ft. Joschua Knüppe

For this #FossilFriday, it's unsurprisingly Spinosaurus as I gear up to the publication of my new book with @markwitton.bsky.social on this most controversial of dinosaurs and the other spinosaurs. It's out in just a couple of weeks (in the UK, Jan 2026 elsewhere).

Unfinished drawing of the profile of an orange and brown mammal with a closed mouth and ears pricking forward. The background is a dark, mottled grey.

I’m trying a new (to me) combination of coloured pencil and oil pastel for this spotted hyena — because I want a heavy, stormy background. I hadn’t been planning to draw a hyena, but this one at the zoo caught at my imagination with his intense energy! #wildlifeart

Early gigantic lamniform marks the onset of mega-body size in modern shark evolution - Communications Biology The earliest appearance of mega-body size in sharks is pushed back by 15 million years with the discovery of new fossils from Northern Australia. Using a comprehensive dataset of living sharks to esti...

The earliest appearance of gigantic lamniform #sharks has now been pushed back by ~15 Ma (upper Aptian, ~115 Ma) with the discovery of enormous cardabiodontid shark remains from northern Australia.🦈🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Silhouette drawing in black ink of a cat sitting on a tuft of grass, facing left, with one forepaw raised, its head tilted back, and its mouth wide open as though emitting a cry. A circle of ink dots frames its head, halo-like.

It's #BlackCatAppreciationDay.
Granted, this one is a silhouette and it could theoretically be a cat of any colour, but...

Ink on watercolour paper, 64 × 89 mm, 2019.

Standard look of my acrylic Sta-wet palette by the time I end up finishing a handful of paint sessions.

Also no limited palette here - I'm aiming for high chroma with lots of subtle colour variations, which is tricky with acrylic. So using more colours speeds up mixing time

#sciart #crabpainting

This to honor the work that John Bindon did in 1996 to illustrate Orodromeus (shown in image 2), a relative of Hypsilophodon, but it is also a perfect way to illustrate how our perception of these dinosaurs has changed over the last 30 years

A recent commission: 1st winter Ross's Gull (watercolour on paper). I would really love to see this species! #gull #birdart #natureart #wildlifeart #watercolour

Photograph by Tyler Keillor

Two new Edmontosaurus skeletons with preserved skin just got published by Paul Sereno and collegues. They had a fleshy scaly crest over their back and hoofed feet!

I was lucky enough to see the specimens last summer. The publication is open access:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dire wolf/wolves by Mark Hallett.

Had no idea the pack hunt drawing at the bottom right was a thing, so this was a pleasant surprise.

a still of two argentinosaurus from the game 'prehistoric kingdom'

a photograph of a bee hummingbird

happy #worldreptileday! i have chosen today to celebrate the success of dinosauria, from the largest dinosaur (argentinosaurus huinculensis) 🦕 to the very smallest (mellisuga helenae) 🪶

Woolly rhinos jousting observed by flock of barnacle geese #sciart

Rhamphorhynchus, Dimorphodon & Darwinopterus ~ 🦅
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These are the finished designs of my ‘big pterosaurs’ for my upcoming Pterosaur Tree design!
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The whole thing is nearly finished…I can’t wait to share it with you!
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What do you guys think?

#paleoart

Terminonaris, a very complete northamerican sister taxon to Sarcosuchus, and the most derived croc-relative to posses scleral rings

Photograph of a Lace Monitor (aka Goanna), a very large lizard in the same family as Komodo Dragons (and it shows). The photo is focused on its face and neck, showing intricate scales of black, brown, orange, and yellow. It is generally darker above and light below, but there are many stark stipes of yellow and black.

Wider photograph of the same Lace Monitor crossing a green lawn strewn with scattered leads. The monitor is poking its long forked tongue out.

Wide shot showing the entire monitor at well over 2 metres (including tail). A Masked Lapwing is swooping down from behind the monitor.

Shortly after the previous photo, the lapwing has circled around and is making a pass from the monitor's front. Its wings and tail are spread wide, its beak open, but it's still maintaining a relatively safe distance because it knows how bitey monitors can be. The monitor has turned its head to protect its eyes because it knows how pointy lapwings can be.

I was at the Australian Botanic Garden at Mt Annan yesterday when this *huge* Lace Monitor crossed one of the lawns. Many birds followed, mobbed, and swooped it, but only the Masked Lapwings came close enough for me to get some action shots.
#birds #reptiles

Cave hyaena #sciart

Black and white portrait of Eddy Hamel smiling.

Black and white historical photograph of an early 20th-century soccer team posing on a field, with players in uniforms and some individuals in overcoats and hats, surrounded by spectators in the background.

21 October 1902 | Eddy Hamel was born in New York. As a teenager, he moved to #Amsterdam. 1st Jewish player in Ajax Amsterdam. He scored 8 goals in 125 league games.

After his arrest in October 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished on 30 April 1943.

viewed from above, sarcosuchus prepares to lunge out of the water at an unwary ornithopod

a mounted sarcosuchus skeleton at the national museum of natural history in paris, france

happy #fossilfriday! bonus: this is sarcosuchus, a neosuchian from early cretaceous africa and south america. nicknamed the ‘super croc’, sarcosuchus is not closely related to crocodilians, instead belonging to the clade pholidosauridae
(art by @literallymiguel.bsky.social)

sarcosuchus attacks a very young and smol suchomimus

while its longirostrine snout is most similar to primarily piscivorous crocodilians like gavialids and the extinct euthecodon, the sheer size of sarcosuchus imperator – estimated at over 9 metres in length – would likely have allowed it to prey on dinosaurs as well
(art by mark witton)

sarcosuchus lunges out of the water at a herd of ouranosaurus, a scene not dissimilar to nile crocodiles attacking wildebeest today

the african s. imperator is the larger and more famous of the two species, and was found in the elrhaz formation of niger, where it coexisted with the spinosaurid suchomimus and the hadrosauriform ouranosaurus, among others
(art by raphtor)

Flat illustration of a Long-billed Curlew and Willet in pursuit of a Sanderling with a mole crab in their beak

Painted stone cast decoy of an Eastern Whip-poor-will in flat shapes and colors of brown, gray, and warm white.

Flat illustration of a Northern Gannet in flight with a healthy portion of seaweed in their beak

Flat illustration of an Eastern Whip-poor-will framed by moon phases. The full moon is replaced by two eggs, as their mating is timed with the moon. More light means more foraging time and more food for their nestlings!

Happy New Year!! Just a few of my favorite works from 2024...