1· Escaping the Odds (Leicester New Walk Museum) The first Liopleurodon attacked the Muraenosaurus from below and behind. In this ambush the Liopleurodon, a pliosaur, tore away half of a forelimb. But the smell of blood in the water attracts a second nearby Liopleurodon, and the following confrontation will allow the Muraenosaurus, a plesiosaur, to escape!. PRINTS
2· Leviathan (Museum of Jurassic Marine Life) The greatest predators in the Jurassic oceans were pliosaurs, some of which grew over 12m in length. Here an enormous Pliosaurus lunges forward to capture and swallow a Cryptoclidus whole. Above this attack are four large fish, called Pachycormus, and below swim ammonites, Pectinates, and a shoal of belemnites, Belemnoteuthis.PRINTS
3· Dancing Pliosaurs At dusk, two pliosaurs dance while a third takes advantage of a pterosaur cleaning station. The pliosaurs and pterosaurs are no particular species; I just thought it was a nice idea that I hope to paint one day soon (in future I might try to make my sketches more species specific). And I realise the low sun may attract criticism because of the sunset cliché, but I figure every place on Earth (except the poles) has a sunrise and a sunset every 24 hours so they are very frequent events.
4· Jurassic Red Tide (Private commission) A paleoartwork with an abstract expressionist twist! Here a Liopeurodon ferox is swimming amongst a bloom of red algae near a coastal coral reef. This was rendered using photographs, digital painting, and an acrylic painted scale model of Liopleurodon.PRINTS
This is a really incredible, soft-bodied fossil that just arrived the other day from the quarries near Hakel, Lebanon. They hadn’t seen anything quite like it from the quarry. We contacted several fossil cephalopod experts to help us ID it or see if it was potentially a new species. It was ID’d as the hook-bearing arm crown of Acanthoteuthis syriaca, a squid-like cephalopod with hooks on it’s arms. It certainly does not look like something I would want to tangle with in the water.
