Dr Dave Hone

Hey look, there's a Japanese edition of The Future of Dinosaurs!

Now up to three reviews all with five stars. Only a matter of time before the fame and fortune roll in.

Someone has DMed me on Bluesky. If you don't already know, the UK's new bizarre laws to attempt to control some bits of the internet means I can't easily access these anymore. So please email me instead.

Sorry we didn't get to chat more, it was, generally chaos! I had posters up two days so talked myself hoarse and left early on the last night to get home so there were a number of people I never really got to talk to the way I wanted. At least we finally crossed paths physically! :)

So last week I got to go to SVP for the first time in a decade. It was great to catch up with so many old friends and colleagues and talk about old times and new research. I felt like a proper scientist for the first time in ages. Here's me posing next to one of my posters under dreadful lighting.

I've never used ebooks or equivalents. Are these typically sold / made available to purchasers as PDFs? I thought they were generally in some form of proprietary format on a kindle etc. or with a password / tied to a limited number of devices to prevent widespread sharing.

I think it is a Mossie. Has the slightly forward radiator grills on the base of the wings before the engine nacelles. #nerdery (It does look a bit oddly foreshortened through).

Damn. I'd planned to 'acquire' one of them when leaving and completely forgot.

The Fossil Files: Nanotyrannus and vertebrate origins: day 1 at the society of vertebrate paleontology The Fossils Files are on Tour! Susie and Rob are in Birmingham for the massive Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference which has made a rare trip to Europe. We will be meeting and chatting with ...

Rob is recording #FossilFiles episodes at #2025SVP! Listen to his thoughts and some of the superstars of the conference on libsyn or wherever you get your podcasts! @thefossilfiles.bsky.social fossils.libsyn.com/nanotyrannus...

Enjoy! Maybe next time. :D

I've heard stories of it being taken out as it was too shocking. I can easily imagine that was all apocryphal to boost the movie, but I'm amazed it might not have even been filmed.

Meanwhile the print media could hardly be expected to hold the Tories to account, given their almost constant irrumating support for Conservatives. Of Britain’s 15 main national newspapers, only one backed the Labour Party. The rest vocally supported the Tories or their Lib Dem partners in the coalition. Thankfully, we could rely on the BBC to balance things out by flexing its renowned leftie muscles. The corporation’s controller of global news output, Craig Oliver, joined the Downing Street operation as David Cameron’s director of communications. Andrew Neil, editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine, fronted both of the BBC’s two leading political discussion programmes, This Week and Daily Politics. The editor of these programmes, Robbie Gibb, was brother of Conservative MP Nick Gibb, and later became director of communications at Theresa May’s Downing Street. Sure, Nick Robinson, the BBC’s chief political correspondent, had been national president of the Young Conservatives and then president of the Oxford University Conservative Association,but

those sympathies were balanced out by his deputy, James Landale, an old-Etonian close contemporary of David Cameron who was also offered – and declined – the Tory communications job. Meanwhile, a report by the University of Cardiff found from 2007 to 2012 (both in and out of office), Conservative politicians received 50 per cent more airtime on BBC News at Six than Labour politicians did. So if the tsunami of unmitigated failure that started in 2010 has been a revelation to you, nobody should be especially surprised.

The famously left-wing bias of the BBC.

(From The Decade In Tory)

I am so jealous. But that's an amazing view.

That's a really good read.

No, just good timing!

And the first customer review is now in:

We clearly got the right colour palatte at least.

Huzzah and hurrah!

So there it is, all of spinosaurs wrapped up in one neat and completely uncontroversial package. We hope you like it and if you do, please leave a score and review on the major websites. These help massively in the early days of a new book hitting the public, so it'd be much appreciated. Thanks!

And perhaps we should be. Here's some of Mark's illustrations with some select quotes from other palaeontologists you probably trust more than us.

So there's lots on Baryonyx, Suchomimus, Irritator, Ichtyovenator and things from east Asia, South America, Spain and all kinds of other places, as well as the classic material from the UK and North Africa. We really do try to cover everything. And we're pretty proud of it all.

Obviously it's pretty Spinosaurus-centric, given how much attention has focused on this animal, especially in recent years and the controversy over the idea it might have swum and swum well (spoiler, we *really* don't agree with that), but it's not a book of Spinosaurus, but all spinosaurs.

So we should both be well qualified to write about these animals. How they were first found, their anatomy, evolution, ecology, behaviour, relationships, their appearance in pop culture and plenty of other subjects all illustrated with Mark's signature style.

Palaeontology in Public Edited by Dr. Chris Manias, "Palaeontology in Public" features a collection case studies, each published as a chapter, by a remarkable assembly of noteworthy authors in the field. It's as informative ...

@tetzoo.bsky.social, @neilgostling.bsky.social and others in the baryonychines Ceratosuchops and Riparovenator. So this is an area I've long worked on, while Mark recently wrote a chapter on the history of these animals with Will Tattersdill for this book: www.wellreadnaturalist.com/2025/10/pala...

You may know that even before the Spinosaurus 'relaunch' with the discovery of the Neotype, I'd been working on spinosaurs for some time, writing a review of our then collective knowledge of them back in 2010 with @arctomet.bsky.social. And then helping to name two new genera with Chris Barker...

YouTube video by Dave Hone Unboxing the first copies of Spinosaur Tales

If you want to see what it looks like inside, here's a quick video of me unboxing my first copies from last week and should give you an idea of the size, and the illustrations including the full colour section in the middle: www.youtube.com/shorts/fhbXO...

Proper thread time! Today marks the publication of my fourth book, Spinosaur Tales, this one written with and illustrated by @markwitton.bsky.social. It's out now in the UK (hardback, audiobook, ebook) and will be out elsewhere in Jan 2026. It covers all things spinosaurian, including Spinosaurus.

Thanks!

No more controversy, contradictions or changes at all to anything. Ever. How could it be otherwise?