Yes, more Daspletosaurus stuff

I’m still looking for support for my Daspletosaurus project, so if you want to get involved (and, yes, contribute) then do please follow this link and help out. Obviously I’d like to think it’s a very cool project with big potential for theropod behaviour and it fits nicely into the work I’ve done to date and am continuing to develop, and of course, blog about. Thanks to a generous offer of accommodation, the total now required is a very modest $3000 and I’m nearly halfway already.

A number of other options are out there if you want to provide funds – Julius Csotonyi has kindly offered up profits from sales on his site for the next couple of weeks, Brett Booth is selling off dinosaur-based sketches on Twitter (every Saturday afternoon, Batman and Superman coming soon I’m told) and David Orr has a shop going for the project logo available on T-shirts and other things.

Latest to join in with a generous contribution is Luis Rey with this entry that he has done especially for this project. Taking the putative cannibalism back to its origins, Luis has gone for some classic tyrannosaur cranio-facial biting between two fluffy Daspletosaurus adults. I understand he’s still revising and updating the image, but this is the preliminary version (you can see his notes and the original sketch here). Luis is going to produce a limited and signed canvas print of the final version and give it away to one lucky person.

So how do you get hold of this beauty? Simple! Just pop along to the Microryza site and sponsor the project to the tone of at least $10. At the end of the project funding period, we’ll randomly select one person and they will get it. Luis is apparently happy to send this anywhere in the world, so there’s no restrictions there. If you’ve already sponsored the project for at least 10 bucks then no need to do anything else, and if you’re under, it is possible to bump up what you have.

Right, a chance to win a unique piece of Rey art and help out? Surely there’s something to like about that. Thanks again to all those who have contributed so far. I know it’s a lot to ask, but any contributions at all make a difference, and do please blog, tweet, and generally let other people know about the project.

Knight statues

I’ve found a bit of time to get back to the planned Berlin posts and thought I’d kick off with these. Anyone with an interest in reconstructions of dinosaurs will know the name of Charles R. Knight and his work in books and murals. These however are rather obviously statues, but ones that are apparently identical in all but the number of dimensions to his most famous pieces. I’ve seen things like these before in storage in Munich as was told these were produced alongside his murals, though whether by him or not I don’t know. Still, they are really rather nice and quite literally add another dimension to how these are normally seen.

If you know a bit more about this series (I’ve seen a Stegosaurus too, but unpainted) please let me know. I’m intrigued as to what they are. Did Knight create them as models to work from? Were they sculpted by him or another artist? My suspicion is that they were produced after the murals and then cast and sold onto museums, but I really don’t know.

New achievement unlocked

OK, a small bit of self-promotion on here. This last week the Musings had entry number 1250! Wooo. While there’s been various guest posts and interviews, obviously I’m really proud to have worked up to this figure – that’s a lot of entries and information out there.

On top of that, this morning I posted my 1000th answer on Ask A Biologist, which rather appropriately was about pterosaur evolution.

I’ve already hit nearly 50 entries in the Guardian over the last few months, and while Dinobase seems to be down at the moment, there were the best part of a 100 entries on there before I moved to WordPress. On top of that, there’s Pterosaur.net and the accompanying blog, various magazine articles, guest posts on other blogs, podcasts and the like I’ve put together. All of this has been in the last 5 and a bit years. That’s averaging out at a post or entry around every 0.8 days (and not including the thousands of comments I’ve had answering people’s questions about posts or the e-mails I get).

I genuinely do all of this because I like it and think it’s important. I can’t imagine I haven’t reached really quite a good number of people and helped get more people interested and involved in palaeontology and outreach.

And yeah, I’d be stupid at this point not to remind you I’m still looking for sponsorship in my tyrannosaur research. Please help if you can.