Dicynodonts as Sloths, for TetZoo (Patreon)

Hi everyone -- once again, I'm so sorry for recent silence. I'm working hard on consultancy (a lot of such work has come in across the whole COVID-dominated period), and it's left hardly any time for work on my 'other projects'. I haven't done anything on the textbook, for example, for MONTHS now -- which is depressing. And, over the weekend, I had a look at the draft text for Tetrapod Zoology Book Two... and managed to remind myself that it's nowhere close to completion, ugh. Likewise on Cryptozoologicon Volume 2, the planned second edition of All Yesterdays, and Dinopedia (which has to be finished by the end of the year). Some breaking news: I've said yes to a marine reptile book to be published by the Natural History Museum, more on that soon. Plus my paper (co-authored with Will Tattersdill) on Dale Russell's dinosauroid has made it through review, giving me two weeks to make the required changes.

I try and make time for blogging when possible though, and I recently published an article I've planned for a while: a discussion of Arthur Cruickshank's 1978 proposal that kannemeryiiform dicynodonts were semi-bipedal and behaved like certain giant ground sloths. The article is now online at TetZoo, here: http://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/3/the-dicynodont-as-ground-sloth-hypothesis

Here, I thought I'd share the steps in the creation of the leading image, which shows the South American kannemeryiiform Dinodontosaurus engaging in bipedal rearing. By using the proportions established in this skeletal reconstruction from Morato et al. (2008), I depicted a 'correct' Dinodontosaurus in a (partly impossible) hypothetical bipedal pose...

I then added bulk and inked it in, eventually tidying the image before superimposing it on a background of Triassic flora (I drew horsetails, cycads and so on, and then cloned them, flipped them, and repositioned them to make the scene look appropriately vegetated)...

The article discusses Cruickshank's hypothesis and then says why it doesn't withstand scrutiny if you look at the details. I knew Arthur pretty well (we worked together on the Appleby Legacy Project, a long story for another time) and did talk to him about dicynodonts on a few occasions. We did discuss one specific take he had on dicynodonts - this being that they had a long, prehensile tongue (!) - but we never got round to discussing his ground sloth idea, which I presume he'd abandoned by this point. As I say in the TetZoo article, that about brings an end to the saga. But it doesn't do that entirely. Implicit to the ground sloth hypothesis was that the last kannemeryiiforms were ecological 'relicts', living lonely, isolated lives in marginal habitats. This idea didn't die, but persisted for a while, even overlapping with Walking With Dinosaurs (some of you will know that I wrote the book Walking With Dinosaurs: the Evidence). It's that idea I want to explore next, and it'll be described in another TetZoo article.

As ever, there's a ridiculous list of things I want to cover at TetZoo, and one day I will. At my side at all times (at least, when I'm sat at the desk) is a to-do list of TetZoo articles. I'd share it with you, but that kinda seems like a spoiler...

Ok, I gotta go. Thanks so much, as always, for the support - it's much appreciated! I really need to get moving on the illustrations for Dinopedia, so expect lots of dinosaur drawings coming soon! All the best.