DC part 4 – Dinosaurs and Co

May 6, 2025May 5, 20252 Comments

I walked across Capitol Mall towards the hotel, and stopped into the National Museum of Natural History, which still had about an hour and a half before closing time. I love that it’s free to enter the Smithsonian. If it wasn’t for my sketchbook I could have still seen a lot more of that museum, but I wanted to draw dinosaurs. Or rather, Dinosaurs And Other Prehistoric Creatures. The dinosaur displays at the Smithsonian are pretty great, and I did see as many as I could in such a short time, but I really wanted to draw the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex biting into the frill of a stricken Triceratops. It was a real frill-seeker. The museum was quite busy, and this was a popular display. Poor Triceratops though.

Nearby was this ashen-boned skull of an Allosaurus, another of my favourite dinosaurs when I was a kid. As with so many things, my all-time top-five dinosaur (and other prehistoric creatures) list was established when I was about five or six from the two very important dinosaur books I owned (one of which I still have, ‘Dinosaurs Discovered’ by John Gilbert), and specifically from the Guy Michel artwork inside. This was back when dinosaurs stood upright like people or kangaroos, letting their tails trail on the floor behind them, the good old days. One of those favourites was the Allosaurus, which I think I liked more than the T-Rex because it had three fingers instead of two on each arm. A bit like Mourinho holding up three fingers to show how many Premier Leagues he has won. I still remember being a young dinosaur lover, going to the Natural History Museum with my big sister, and still have my original pronunciations of prehistoric words in my head, like the ‘cretackus’ period, or the ‘velo-kee-raptor’, or the great feathered ‘archie-oper-terrix’. I wouldn’t say those now, but Diplodocus is and always will be ‘diplo-DOcus’, not ‘di-PLOD-uckus’, none of that nonsense. Allosaurus is easy enough to pronounce, although this one being ‘Fragilis’ reminded me of A Christmas Story, the box marked ‘fra-gile’ which must have been Italian.

One creature whose name I’ve grudgingly accepted isn’t pronounced my way is Dimetrodon (more ‘di-MET-rodon’ and not ‘DYMER-TRODON’, whatever).I say creature because this one is not actually a dinosaur, coming from a much earlier time period, the early Permian period (the Cisuralian epoch of that period if we are being precise, and there was no way five year old Pete was pronouncing Cisuralian without bursting into laughter, even forty-nine year old Pete thinks it’s funny). This one was on my top five list for sure, because I had a plastic toy of it and it had that cool sail on it’s back. Did you ever have those old plastic toy dinosaurs? I don’t mean like flimsy easy to break ones, no these ones were completely indestructible. In the early 1980s when we were all having nightmares about nuclear war (we still get those, don’t we fellow Gen-X-ers!) I knew for a fact that the only things that would survive a nuclear bomb were cockroaches and my toy dinosaurs. Even though this is not a dinosaur, as far as I am concerned it is part of the club. It’s like John Hagen, he was part of the Corleone family, but they would always remind him he was German-Irish and not really Sicilian. I had never seen a Dimetrodon skeleton in the, er, flesh, so I had to sketch this beauty. You would not mess with this. I’d like to see fight between a Saltwater Crocodile and a Dimetrodon, or Luca Brasi and a Dimetrodon. Things were better in the old Permian period though weren’t they, not like now. There weren’t all these ‘continents’ that you have nowadays, it was just one continent, Pangaea, and one ocean, Panthalassa. It was just better wasn’t it. If you were a Dimetrodon back in the old Cisuralian epoch, you could walk from Gondwana to Laurasia and not get hassled by ice ages. Then all the continents started breaking up, egos got involved, the dinosaurs came along, the Atlantic Ocean started filling up, and now there’s all this.

Before the museum’s closing time, which as coming at me like a steam train, I decided to fast forward several hundred million years to the Time of Mammals. The continents were not quite where they are now but they were well on the way, I think India was still sailing through it’s Ocean, leaving Antarctica very much out in the cold, and England had just started counting it’s ‘years of hurt’ since winning the World Cup. This is the Uintatherium Anceps (I’m not even going to try to pronounce that, I couldn’t even spell it while writing the word down from a sign), which was an early ungulate relative from Wyoming, you’ve all had those relatives. I think it was a bit like a massive rhino, but with big tusks like a Smilodon. Elongated Tusks were still quite fashionable back then, before everyone realized how weird they were. This skull is an amazing shape though, you wouldn’t want to tread on a plastic toy of this, never mind Lego blocks.

And then the people came around to tell me that the museum was closing, and the last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the museum. I’ve seen those films, they are very scary. I walked back out onto Capitol Mall with a book full of new sketches, and then decided to go and do some more. See you in DC Part 5.

prehistoric jaws across the street

April 19, 2025Leave a comment

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.

mammal bones at the NHM-LA

April 6, 20241 Comment

I drew more than dinosaurs at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. I explored as much of the place as I could (I was there all day after all, I wasn’t going anywhere) but when I saw the big mammoth, well, that was going in the sketchbook. I suppose technically it’s not a woolly mammoth because there’s no wool on the skeleton (and it was probably more of a hairy mammoth than woolly but I’m not going to, er, split hairs) (people kept saying “there’s a woolly mammoth!” but I wasn’t going to take them to tusk, etc and so on) (I was there a long time, my head ran through all the punning possibilities and decided none of them were worth it). I drew in fountain pen and was there quite a while; I considered adding some paint but it was a fairly white environment (ice age feeling I suppose) and I just couldn’t be bothered by the end. It was a magnificent display though, not every day you get to see mammoths. I have never visited the La Brea Tar Pits but I hear they have found some amazing skeletons of mammoths and other prehistoric creatures there, and still are; that’s a future visit right there.

Speaking of famous prehistoric mammals, there was the skull of a Sabretooth Tiger – sorry, ‘Sabretooth Cat’ as this one was more correctly called, they weren’t really tigers, the Smilodons – and I had to sketch that. The size of those incisors! I mean were they really necessary? I guess they were. What an impressive gob. I can see him hanging about outside the tube station shouting, yeah come on then you mug, getting into fights, all that. No wonder they went extinct, probably a bit too mouthy for their own good. There were excited kids looking at this while I sketched saying “wow, a sabretooth tiger!” without reading the sign that said it was a sabretooth cat and that you shouldn’t call it a tiger because science, but I wasn’t going to take them to tusk. Hang on I used that one already. It would be funny if we recreated one from its DNA and it learned to speak and said, “actually mate I’m ok being called a tiger, that’s fine.” Anyway tigers or cats, I like these a lot, but it f this is a cat I probably wouldn’t argue with it if it begged me to turn the bathroom taps on for it.

Next up, the Ground Sloth, every good Natural History Museum needs a Ground Sloth and I always draw them. This one was upstairs above the Mammoth and I loved the way it was standing, like an old end of the pier stand up comedian. I imagined him in a smoky Lancashire croak saying stuff like “I tell you, my missus, she says to me you’re so lazy you may as well be extinct, go and get a job, I says I’m a sloth! That is me job. I tell you she wears me down so much I’m a ground sloth” etc and so on. Catch him at your nearest Pontins (also going extinct). Now the one I drew from the London NHM (12 years ago) was actually a Megatherium which is a larger kind of ground sloth, living from the Pliocene to the Holocene, this one is a Nothrotheriops Shastensis (“that’s easy for you to say,” says the northern comic to much mirth), much smaller and living in the Pleistocene (“the missus tells me I can’t play with that stuff, it gets all stuck in the carpet” says the comedian, to a little confusion from his audience, forcing him to explain it, which didn’t go down well; “By gum you’re so slow, I thought I was the sloth!”). Perhaps though the Megatherium and the Nothrotheriops could form a double act, like all the old northern comedians used to do, Little and Large has already been taken by two other dinosaurs, so maybe ‘The Two Sloths’, ‘Megatherium and Wise’, ‘Good Sloth Bad Sloth’, I don’t know I’m a sketcher not a northern comic double act agent. They would have been long cancelled by now anyway.

Moving away from old bones and bad comedians, the gemstone and mineral section was pretty impressive. I sketched a few colourful ones with interesting names (the green one was surely Kryptonite) (I’ve always wondered about Kryptonite, did that planet explode because it relied too much on Kryptocurrency, was General Zod one of those Krypto-bros who don’t stop going on about it and was expelled to the Fandom Zone? So many questions). there was one room, a vault with tick walls and huge metal doors and security guards, that contained incredibly valuable gemstones of well over 100 carats each, it was like looking at the Infinity Stones. My son used to really like gems and minerals when he was younger and we’d spend more time in the geology sections of the NHM than the dinosaur sections, so I’ve drawn a few stones before, but this was a fascinating room to explore.

After going to draw the T-Rex having a chat with the Triceratops (see my previous post) I called time on the museum, and popped over to the California Science Center to have a very brief look before they closed. I drew this one plane, got a cold drink, and left as it was all closing up. All in all, a good day sketching old things. I wouldn’t have minded visiting the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the Science Center, displaying models of many of his inventions, but another time maybe. I know I would boringly have been taking everyone to tusk for saying ‘Da Vinci’ instead of ‘Leonardo’, and they’d have been saying “you mean taken to ‘task’ surely” and I’d have been like “look it was a call back to a previous joke you weren’t there for, I’m not a sloth you know.” It was a long day, though of course, I wasn’t done sketching just yet. Check back soon for more LA…

Dinosaurs at the LA Natural History Museum

April 4, 2024April 4, 20242 Comments

Part of the reason for taking a weekend in Los Angeles before the conference in Riverside is that I just really wanted to draw dinosaurs. I’d never been to the LA Natural History Museum before, but we had visited the California Science Center next door about six years ago when we went to look at the space shuttle Endeavour, so coming here had been on my wish list for years. As you know I’m a massive fan of the Natural History Museum in London, the superb building in South Kensington I have been going to since before I could even draw, one of my favourite places in the world. Well Los Angeles has a pretty cool one too, which beautiful architecture, lots of engaging exhibits and an abundance of dinosaur displays. Unlike the NHM in London it isn’t free to get in, but since the California Science center next door is free I don’t mind that. My plan was that if I had time or ran out of dinosaurs I would go there to draw planes. One of the last displays I drew here was the one above, the Tyrannosaurus Rex in combat (or conversation?) with a Triceratops,

It is actually the ‘Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County‘, and opened at Exposition Park in 1913. After a chat with one of the docents in the rotunda as you enter, where they have a statue of the three muses in a beautiful naturally lit space, I found the dinosaurs and started drawing the one above, perhaps my favourite dinosaur, Stegosaurus. By the way I’m sure I’m not alone in that ever since Jurassic Park I have to stop myself pronouncing ‘dinosaur’ as ‘Daano-sow’ like the little DNA cartoon character does. Yes, Jurassic Park is one of my favourite films, and no, I really don’t like the latest ones. Anyway I have always loved Stegosaurus with its big mohawk of bony plates, a punk vegetarian with huge spikes on its tail. I drew with my brown inked fountain pen. There was an Allosaurus behind it that you can just about make out creeping into view. It was getting busy, but not too crowded, a good amount of people for a museum crowd. I’ve sometimes been at the South Ken museums when they are mobbed, especially the Science Museum on a weekday with the school groups. This was just right, I’d say. I got down there as early as I could, I had aimed for opening time but was delayed by the LA Metro. I had packed snacks so I could make it through the day, I was well prepared.

There were three ceratopsian skulls side by side in a display cabinet, huge things though surprisingly narrow, a Triceratops, a Styracosaurus and this one, an Einiosaurus found in Montana. I was less familiar with this one, probably because the books I was reading when I was learning dinosaurs had left it out due it not yet being discovered. I really loved its downward curving nose horn, like a massive can opener.

In the same hall was found Thomas the T-Rex, along with a couple of smaller specimens, one clearly a baby Rex. You have to love the Tyrannosaur, I don’t think any other prehistoric creature has had such a popular grip on the public imagination. At once the greatest villain and greatest hero, its massive head and jaw always outweighs the tiny little arms with two tiny fingers. I drew another T-Rex, Sue, at the Field Museum in Chicago last year. The big one here is called Thomas the T-Rex. This made me think of Thomas the Tank Engine, which always gets mis-named by Americans as ‘Thomas the Train’ (or even worse, ‘Thomas Train’, which I’m convince people only say to wind me up specifically). Thomas the T-Rex is not a cheeky little blue engine from the island of Sodor, but I wonder if there is a Gordon the Gallimimus or a Percy the Protoceratops or even a Fat Paleontologist character in this story. It’s been a few years since we were in Thomas-world. This was a tricky dynamic scene to sketch though, and I had to really observe where I was putting all those little bones. But this was why I was here! I’d been in this one room for a long time already, so I went to explore the rest of the museum. There was another hall full of big dinos, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to draw them all (including a huge Ticeratops), but I couldn’t resist this T-Rex skull. As I drew, one of the staff complemented me on my drawing and asked if I was a paleo illustrator. No, I just love drawing dinosaurs! While I was drawing the scene at the top of this post, I did see another artist sat on the floor in an archway drawing the same skeletons. I didn’t go over to take a look, but it is always good to see another sketchbooker with the same idea.

There’s more to come, stayed tuned.

Funny Bones

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023Leave a comment

It is Halloween, so nearly time for my joke (“What do you call the day after Halloween? Goodbye-ween.”) So here are some skeletons. On Sunday it was the annual Zombie Bike Ride in Davis, when people dress up and ride a route around town all day looking at the different spooky spots on the way, and the houses decorated with Halloween stuff. It’s big over here, as you may have heard, and people go All Out. Some are less imaginative than others (I mean, we put out some pumpkins and not much else; the black widows on our porch are real), and some are incredibly creative. This one house which is on the north Davis greenbelt by the path had a really cool display, skeletons and pirates, a circle of really cool witches, a big inflatable dragon, and a band of skeletal banjo players, plus probably a lot more. It didn’t not look all gross and overdone, it is not even that big a house, but it was a delight to look at. So of course I had to stand on the greenbelt path and sketch. We had watched Scream (the original one) the night before; I’ve not seen that since the 90s, and it was still very 90s, and gorier than I remembered. We were going to watch The Lost Boys that night – so very 80s, but still so very brilliant, I love that film. People stopped and looked at all the fun stuff while I sketched, and I started to draw the skeleton banjo players below but realized the time, and ran home so we could go to the pumpkin patch to see what was left. I drew the banjo players the next day. Something about them just makes me smile. I suppose they remind us we are all smiling inside. Anyway, we spent last night carving our pumpkins (my wife and son’s ones were pretty awesome; I just carved one that said ‘Aloha’ and drew flowers on it) and watching old Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes, plus an old Addams Family episode. Tonight is the trick or treat night; we won’t be doing that this year, but the downtown has its annual Treat Trail. Anyway, Happy Halloween!

route sixty-six

July 5, 2022Leave a comment

Back in March we took a Spring Break trip to Arizona. The last time I was in Arizona was 20 years ago, on my first trip to America when my future wife drove me out to the Grand Canyon. On this trip, we would be seeing the Grand Canyon again but also some other parts of the state, some places we’d always wanted to see. We started off our trip by flying into Phoenix, and spending about an hour and a half in line for a rental car with loads of other people. Eventually we made it out with a vehicle, and drove through a landscape studded with thousands of the iconic cactus-shaped cacti, the exact ones you see in cartoons, the symbol of the Wild West. Honestly it was exciting just to see that. We drove past all of that country until the landscape changed, and ended up in Flagstaff, on the old Route 66. We were staying a couple of nights here, and it has an interesting old downtown (see the above sketch) and a dramatic backdrop, with snow speckling the nearby peaks. In fact we got snowed on ourselves while walking down to the Mother Road Brewing Company for dinner (and tasty beer). No escaping that Route 66 feel here, this town was mentioned in the old Chuck Berry song you have probably heard.

We motored east down the modern Interstate, but we could see signs of old towns long gone from the original route. We were headed for the Meteor Crater, sketched above. I have wanted to visit this since I was a kid. Growing up I had this book, the Atlas of Natural Wonders. It was one of those glossy books you get from those book companies years ago, remember when you would get adverts to sign up for a free trial and get a bunch of books, which then turns into some sort of monthly subscription? I think it was probably something like that, we had loads of those sort of books, because my dad would sign up for them for the free books and then cancel, probably. I always had a lot of interesting hardback books on my shelf, maybe about Mammals, or The West, or this one book on The Atlas of Natural Wonder. Or maybe it was given to me for Christmas? Lost on the memory of time, and I have no idea where the book is now, but I must have read that book to death. The Delicate Arch in Utah was on the cover. I remember clearly telling myself that my ambition would be to go to every place in that book. I have slowly been checking those off; I visited three places from the book on this trip alone. The first was Meteor Crater, a massive mile-wide impact crater out in the high northern Arizona desert. For years they didn’t know exactly what had caused it (um, lads, it’s called ‘meteor crater’, hello like). Cost a bomb to go in, astronomical entry fee, but it was worth it to me to finally see this massive hole in the ground. I couldn’t really sketch it too well, so I did a quick one, while my family sheltered from the wind. It was a special moment though, and I’m really glad we went.

We journeyed on, heading towards another place from the book, but this is Route 66 country, and that will always be exciting to us because when my son was little, he was obsessed with the movie Cars, and so by extension we were obsessed with it too. Cars is a brilliant film, and really gets creative with the mythos of the old Route 66, and what happened to all those old towns along it when the freeways were built. One town that reminded us more than any other of Radiator Springs (except maybe Moab in Utah, which really has the look of it down, although much much busier) was Holbrook. It felt like time had left it behind a little, to get old and rusty. We were looking specifically for the Wigwam Motel, not the only one of its kind left, but pretty iconic. In the movie Cars, this corresponds with the Cozy Cones motel run by Sally. “Gettin’ cozy at the cones, is we?” as Mater tells Lightning McQueen. At the Wigwam, all of the rooms really are these large teepee-shaped cones, outside of which is parked an ancient rusting classic car. It’s no exaggeration that if I could have spent sunrise to sundown there sketching I would have. As it happened, we were a bit pressed for time so I had to do the quick outline sketches and draw the details in later from the pictures I took. This place was heaven. There’s nothing I like more than something metal and rusty, probably because I myself am a bit metal and rusty. Look at that old Ford below though, with its headlights knocked out, what a beauty. It would have been interesting to explore Holbrook a little more, we just drove through it to find here, but that was definitely a town I could sketch a lot of.

But we were on a schedule to reach another National Park for our collection – Petrified Forest. This was in The Book, a diverse and unusual place full of strange unearthly landscapes, like the Painted Desert, the Blue Mesa, and the Rainbow Forest, and scattered everywhere are so many broken logs, hundreds of millions of years old, that time has turned into stone, or ‘agate’. Many of them look like normal tree logs from the outside, although the bark has turned stony since the late Triassic, but inside might be the most colourful crystal colours, due to the process of fossilization. It was fascinating. We wandered about the strange landscapes, trying to imagine the forests millions of years ago that eventually left us with these, as the face of the planet shifted up and down. These trees were probably on Pangaea. When 200 billion years old you reach, look as good you will not.

I know ‘Petrified Forest’ sounds like something from a Halloween movie, but there are no scary monsters here. There are a few dinosaurs though, and not just dinosaurs but other prehistoric beasts, which we discovered at the Visitor Center. Many date from the Triassic Period, which as you will know comes before both the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. The Triassic was the period in which we saw the rise of the dinosaurs, the New Hope following the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction event, while the Jurassic was more like Empire Strikes Back I guess, Diplodocus being like the AT-ATs, and the Cretaceous very much the Return of the Jedi of prehistoric periods, with T-Rex being like the Emperor, and the Ewoks being that big asteroid. I’ve not thought this through, but I think Han Solo being frozen in carbonite is significant. Anyway I drew the skeleton below which is of Placerias Hesternus, a herbivorous “not-quite-a-mammal” from the late Triassic, which look a bit like the creature that Anakin Skywalker rides in the Geonosian arena in Attack of the Clones, because everything is about Star Wars.

Side note, I went to see the new Jurassic Park movie this weekend, “Jurassic World Dominion”. Now I love Jurassic Park, the original film, it’s perfect. Jurassic World Dominion on the other hand…phew, glad that is over. Those newer movies should now go extinct, please, never dig them up. It’s like they never took their own advice from the first film, they never stopped to think about whether they should. Jurassic Park had its shot, and nature selected it for extinction. Now what I am doing there is making references to the brilliant original film, which is what the new film does constantly, and badly. I only went to see it to see the original trio of Alan, Ellie and Ian (the Han, Luke and Leia of the Jurassic films, if you will) back together again, which was nice. Every scene though it seemed like, hmm there’s no dinosaur in this room, let’s put dinosaurs here! And here! And here! Too many dinosaurs, not enough story. They really wanted to explore the idea of dinosaurs in the snow though, for some reason, it was like Barney on Ice. And oh look! T-Rex v Giganotosaurus! Who wins? Who cares. Not relevant. Next time, just make a Street Fighter style game but with dinosaurs. It was a pretty terrible movie. At one point Jeff Goldblum even says, “Jurassic World? Yeah, not a fan…” and like everyone on set stares at the audience for about ten minutes (I might have imagined that last bit) until we all died inside, got buried beneath rock for millions of years, then were cloned again using amphibian DNA for the grand finale, which was basically “so nothing’s changed then”. Jurassic World Dumb-inion more like. Two Iguanadon thumbs down.

Anyway back to our Arizona trip! That was our day along Route 66. We ended it with some local pizza in Flagstaff, getting ready for the next part of the trip – the Grand Canyon…

the bones of the blue whale

May 16, 2018May 16, 20186 Comments

NHM blue whale 2018 sm

Back in February, I went back to London for a very short (unexpected) visit. I was down in Devon for a few days, and then back home in London for a day before heading back. For my one day in London, there was only one place I wanted to go – probably my favourite place, the Natural History Museum. It really is the best. I want to spend all day there some day, just drawing, drawing and drawing a lot more. I got a late start on this day, partly because, hey, nice to get a lie in after a lot of busy busy, but also because I’d spent the previous night with friends in Camden Town, after a long journey back from the South West of England. So I made it to the Natural History Museum by almost lunchtime. It was the first time I have been there since Dippy moved out. Dippy was (sorry, is) (if you call being a skeleton of an extinct animal present tense) (I say skeleton, it’s only a model) moved out last year to go on tour around the country, and make room on the ground in the Hintze Hall for more fancy events. Dippy was a Diplodocus, by the way. I realize I’m making Dippy sound like a House Elf. I sketched Dippy’s rear end back at the end of 2016, shortly before Dippy’s departure. Dippy was replaced by the large skeleton of a Blue Whale which now hangs majestically from the ceiling, the largest mammal in the world. I really wanted to sketch it. I don’t know if the Blue Whale has an inventive nickname yet, Bluey or Whaley, but I look at it and imagine I am one of the Avengers, facing down against a Chitauri space vessel. Well, in my head obviously. I’m not standing there doing Hulk impressions. I sketched from above, from one of the staircases in this most magnificent of London buildings, the sort of building that makes me really wish I had never left, that makes me so proud to be a native of a city that has such a place just right there where anyone can go and learn every single day. Sorry Davis, your bike museum is fine, but my heart is in Albertopolis. So, I drew Bluey the Whale from above and always intended on adding the colour, the browns and golds with purple tinted shadows of the museum, contrasted with the pale luminescent blue of the skeletal whale, but my friend Simon arrived and I didn’t want to keep him waiting about while I faffed about with the paints, so I left it as it is. We went around and looked at all the dinosaur skeletons and stuffed animals, and he expressed his grief at the removal of the much loved national treasure Dippy, which made me laugh as he’d just told me he hadn’t stepped foot inside the museum in well over twenty years.

NHM mantellisaurus 2018 sm

I did draw one dinosaur though, the one above. “Dinosaur” the sign called it. Thanks, but isn’t this, you know, Iguanadon? I know it is. They have moved everything around in there since my last visit (just over a year before) but I know my NHM dinos. When I was four or five I went there with school and was the resident dino expert in my class, counting vertebrae, knowing all sorts of things I cannot remember now (though I still have a couple of my old childhood dinosaur books, themselves relics of a past scientific age). It turns out this is The Dinosaur Formerly Known As Iguanadon, now renamed Mantellisaurus after its discoverer, Gideon Mantell. I wish I had discovered a dinosaur, maybe I could have one named after me. Scullysaurus has a nice ring to it. I don’t know what I’d be doing to discover a dinosaur, I don’t exactly go out digging in the rocks, but I might find one in a park or an art shop. It wouldn’t need to be a ‘saurus’ either, I would take a ‘dactyl’ or a ‘docus’, even a simple ‘don’ like my old big thumbed friend Iguanadon here. Maybe Pteranodon was named after a Pete but they mis-typed his named, we all do it, I’m always typing Ptee or Pere, to the point my autocorrect has given up and says I can be called whatever I want.

South Kensington Books 2018 sm

We were done with the museum, and it was dark outside already. I could have spent hours longer in there, but I had to get back to Burnt Oak as my family wanted to take me out for a curry (I was flying home next day), so Simon and I walked down to South Kensington and into the little shops there, and I did one last sketch, of South Kensington Books. Small independent bookshops are among the best things in the world, because I am the sort of person who says so, having worked for a couple over the years. I want to draw all of the old bookshops in London, while they are still there. Actually not a day goes by when I don’t miss London, this London, not the crowded working rainy expensive irritated London, but my London, the one I spent my teenage days looking for on Saturday afternoons with a travelcard. I am glad to have had an unexpected afternoon there, a last minute very short trip, but it reminds me how much I really miss it.

pigeon street

February 15, 2013February 16, 20131 Comment

It’s been a funny week. State of the Union address, Rebuttal by thirsty Republican, flaming Meteors crashing into Russia, the Pope resigns, North Korea detonating a nuclear weapon underground and causing an earthquake, Oscar Pistorius shooting his girlfriend, a big fight on top of a moving train in Turkey between a spy and – no hang on, that last one was the James Bond movie I saw last night, Skymall or something. It’s been a busy week for me as well. Lovely weather, but my lunchtimes have been disorganized, so little sketching. Yesterday I did pop into the building next door to where I work, for some reason, and saw their display of stuffed birds in glass cabinets. The Bohart Entomology Museum is in there, not that entomology has anything to do with birds. I was interested in the bird skeletons. This was all I had time to draw, a pigeon. Look! I am drawing birds! Not so much a rat with wings (and pigeons are certainly not rats with wings, they’re not even mammals), more the leftovers of late-night fried chicken left in a greasy box on the N5.

When I think of pigeons, sure I think of Trafalgar Square in the olden days, and do you (in the UK) remember those short TV kids movies that would sometimes be on the BBC at about 5pm on a Friday, terrible old movies they were, but they would always open with a shot of a deeply grey Trafalgar Square with deeply grey pigeons suddenly taking off? Yes you do. But when I think of pigeons I really think of Pigeon Street. Remember that? (again, thinking more of UK folks of a certain age) Pigeon Street was great. Well when I say great, it wasn’t as good as Rainbow or Emu or any of those shows, even Tickle on the Tum was better, even Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, but Pigeon Street had its charms. Fortunately I cannot remember what they were, or I would have to tell you. But I’ll bet one thing it never had was a skeleton pigeon.

megatherium bones

July 5, 20122 Comments

No posts this past week; it’s been busy, and I’ve been ill – one thing I hate about being sick is that it’s so unproductive, such a waste of time. Still I managed a little sketching, though no scanning. This one, however, I drew a few weeks back, after coming back from London. From a photo, taken at the Natural History Museum, of a Megatherium skeleton. It’s pretty tall. A Megatherium, well that was some kind of giant ground sloth back in the prehistoric times. Pretty much sums up how I feel right now too! It was fun to draw this though.