On the final day of March, the last two pages of that sketchbook (#54 in the official counting system, not including all the others) I drew two prehistoric creatures. Now I must point out, the sketches from San Francisco in my last post were done before this but are in sketchbook #55, as are all of the as-yet-unblogged sketches from our recent trip to Washington DC (where I drew more dinosaurs) and New York City (where I drew more everything), but I had two pages left of that last sketchbook so went back to add these two there. These lovely beasts with more tooth per square inch than the Osmond Family are found in the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, the home of the nearly-named-the-same Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, right across the street from where I work (in the Mathematical Sciences Building, the home of the separate departments of Mathematics and Statistics). I must point out that even I got the name of the building mixed up with the name of the department when I wrote my notes. I was at the groundbreaking ceremony for that building so I should know. I just got excited by the dinosaur, and who wouldn’t. This is the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex, and is part of the UC Davis Paleontology Collection. I have wanted to draw the beast below for quite a while but never got around to it, but when I heard that they had crowdfunded and bought a full-size replica Tyrannosaurus Rex skull, well the sketchbook came out right away. They have placed it in the stairwell for all to see, and is cast from the fossil called ‘Black Beauty’ which is on display in Alberta, Canada. When I read that, I could not get the theme tune to ‘Black Beauty’ out of my head. That was a great show. It’s not the first T-Rex I have drawn (I have sketched quite a few now) and not even the only one I drew that month, but it’s right across the street so I can sketch this one as often as I like. Installed in a case right below it is the Smilodon Fatalis (which I presume means ‘Deadly Grin’), the famous Sabretooth Cat. We used to call these Sabertooth Tigers, but the Lions and Leopards wrote in to complain. What a beast though. I have drawn a skull before, on my day out at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles last year, but not the whole skeleton. This one comes from the same place though, the La Brea Tar Pit in L.A. I would like to visit that place some time. I feel the need for another trip somewhere where I can spend all day sketching at a Natural History Museum. In DC, I spent most of the day at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, but did get an hour and a half among the dinosaurs on the way back to the hotel. Smilodons lived sometime between 2.5 million to 8.2 thousand years ago, give or take a day or so, between the Pleistocene and the Holocene epoch, in what we now call the Americas but in those days probably had some other name. There were three species of Smilodon – Fatalis, Gracilis and Populator – but possibly less well-known were the Frownodon, the Sadadon, the Angryodon and the Laugh-Emojidon.