Typical - one day your office is bereft of non-tetrapod sarcopterygians (well, aside from fossils). The next day you're playing host to half the extant genera in the world. I've just been given live African (Protopterus annectens) and South American (Lepidosiren paradoxa) lungfishes. The Afro is fricking enormous... Currently hastily cleaning tank and filter media for him.

China - a country where you close the windows to keep the fresh air in.

The last 5 days have been an utter nightmare with air pollution literally off the charts. Knew something was wrong on Saturday when I started feeling faint and choking while walking home. Since Saturday evening I was pretty much trapped in my apartment while Beijing vanished beneath a stifling blanket of toxins. No matter where you went, the stench of an oily rag permeated everything - you couldn't escape it, even indoors.

Now, on the 16th, the air is finally starting to clear up a bit although the stench lingers on. Do not want to have to go through that again!

Literally just staggered off the plane.

Fossil bone everywhere, crunching underfoot - mostly surface scatter but many in excellent condition. There were also a few articulated specimens and isolated perfect large bones that were promptly jacketed - will have to be prepped out in the lab before we know exactly what they are. Commonly collected critters included hadrosaurs (likely Bactrosaurus), ornithomimids (likely Archaeornithomimus) and turtles (mainly trionychids but with a few from other families). Less common were the remains of tyrannosaurs (probably Alectrosaurus - including many stunning shed teeth), crocodylomorphs and fish (including some real whoppers - fish verts over 1cm wide). Rarities included a variety of maniraptorans, including bits of very small (new taxon?) and very large (subadult Gigantoraptor?) oviraptorosaurs.

Oh, and we saw bits of petrified wood from mid-sized trees - so the Iren Dabasu was not a treeless dunefield.

About to head off to Erlian  to spend a fortnight prospecting for dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous Iren Dabasu Formation (home of, amongst other things, Gigantoraptor). Will be good to get away from the concrete jungle for a while!

Sheesh its been an insanely busy fortnight.

First off, after some crazy resubmissions over this past year, the first ever evidence of dermal pelvic girdles in the Osteichthyes!: [link]

Then my great sprawling monograph on the Devonian actinopterygian Mimipiscis (=Mimia):
[link]

THEN my artwork, sent off to accompany the description of a giant fluffy tyrannosaur: [link]

Plus going hog-wild at the local Beijing petstore and buying a bichir and bunch of rainbowfish at absurdly low prices.

Between that and playing Skyrim and From Dust, I've had very little sleep...

Whoah.

Clueless berk that I am, I had no idea I'd been DD'ed  until yesterday.

Many many thanks to Astralseed and wdwparksgal for this humungous honour!

Hey there!

Only signed up last month and only just scraped together enough time to upload a few old bits and pieces. Have a huge backlog of more recent artwork that will hopefully be up in the near future.

Right now though, I have to head off to Las Vegas and SVP where I will be giving an oral presentation on Devonian actinopterygians! Really, its more exciting than it sounds.

Cheers!