Bob Nicholls: Paleoartist Extraordinaire

This episode is brought to you by the Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up fossils like dinosaur bones in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash paleo26. It's that time of year where you can get an exclusive patch from us, but only if you're a dino-it-all in our Patreon community. For the first time ever, we're doing a sauropod this year, Bajotosaurus, and it turned out great. If you want to see it, head over to patreon.com slash inodino, and if you want to get it, make sure you join at our Triceratops tier or above by February 28th. Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 557th episode, we have an interview with paleo artist Bob Nichols. Oh yeah, he's done so much cool stuff. We also have some news, some dinosaur discoveries that don't yet have names, including one that was found in a parking lot. It's like that king, right? Wasn't he found under a parking lot recently in the UK somewhere? We know all about that because that's not dinosaurs. You can tell. That one king that time. We also have dinosaur of the day, Emausaurus, an early armored dinosaur. And a fun fact, which is if you're looking for places to see fossils in the US, the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, has a list. Cool. Yeah, they have a lot of land. I think a lot of their land is like land that nobody else wants, which often is good for fossils because it can be very barren. Yes. but before we get into all of that as always we'd like to thank some of our patrons for supporting our show and this week we have 10 new patrons to thank yay we had a lot of patrons join between christmas and the new year which we really appreciate it was so nice while we were you know spending time with family we get a little alert in our email that we got a new patron and it just made made the holidays even better it really did so thank you all for joining and we We have even more patrons, new patrons to thank next week. But the 10 we're thanking this week are John, JJ, Jerrysaurus. Good little J run there. Cretaceous Sean. Oh, got thrown off because there wasn't a J. Emily, Kakosaurus, Second Act Science Teacher, Oki Boomer, The King's Fall, and Katie. Thank you so much for being part of our Dino It All community. We hope you're enjoying all of the perks. Yeah. We've been doing a lot of polls lately on our Patreon. We have. And we released all that extra content for the 12 days of Patreon around Christmas time, coincidentally. Sure. Coincidentally. Which is still there. So if you join, you can see all that stuff. Or if you recently joined and you missed it, just scroll back a little bit. There's some extra audio content, a couple of videos, some announcements about things that are coming out that we haven't publicly released yet. I also think it's funny. There's the king's fall and then get buried under a parking lot sometimes. That's one of the patrons names. I see. I don't think that's what they're referring to. No, I don't think so. I presume not, but I think it's funny. But yeah, if you want access to all that content, make sure you join at patreon.com slash I know dino. We also are offering our Bajadasaurus patch right now. So if you join by the end of February, you'll get that. Our first sauropod and our first yellow patch. Yes. Oh, you got to be at the Triceratops or above for that one. And update your address because we'll mail it pretty much anywhere. And jumping into the news before we get to our interview, I just want to quickly mention a few items. So one of them is that paleontologists found the world's oldest serapodon dinosaur in Morocco. Serapodon? Yes. So, well, first, this was published by Susanna Maidman and others in Royal Society Open Science. So it's open access. She's really expanding out of Stegosaurus and also spending a lot of time in Morocco, it seems. Right, yeah, because you've got Spicomelus. And she's also, I think, part of a new paper that has upended what we think about rhabdodonts. We won't be talking about that for a while, though. So stay tuned. Anyway, back to this one. It doesn't have a name yet, which is why it took us a while to get to it. So Cerepoda is the group of dinosaurs that includes ornithopods and Marginocephalia. That's Pachycephalosaurs and Ceratopsians. Yeah, Cerepoda sounds like Ceratops a lot. But it's not. But it also has Pachycephalosaurs and then all of ornithopods. Yes, and ornithopods were herbivorous dinosaurs and they're known for their bird-like feet and stiff tail. So it's a big group of dinosaurs here. Cerepoda is mostly known from the Cretaceous, but they were around in the Jurassic. and there's some track sites from the middle Jurassic that shows that there were some large ornithopods but the body fossils are hard to find. So this one though, there's a body fossil here. It's part of a left femur or thigh bone and was found in Morocco in the middle Atlas Mountains in 2020. It was found in the Elmer's III formation and it's from the middle Jurassic. So it's from about 165 to 160 million years ago. It's the same area where Spicomelus was found. That's the oldest known ankylosaur. So it makes sense that Susanna Maidman is part of this. Finding all the oldest stuff. Yeah, all this middle Jurassic stuff. So this fossil is the world's oldest Cerepoden. It's only the second middle Jurassic Cerepoden fossil found in the world. Before this one, the earliest definitive or for sure Cerepoden body fossil was a femur from Calivosaurus, which was an Iguanodontian. That was found in the UK. This one is fragmentary, this new world's oldest serapodon dinosaur that was found in Morocco, but it has features that shows it belongs to a serapodon, like a distinct neck of the femur. So Calivosaurus can still be the oldest named dinosaur in serapoda, because this one isn't named if you want to add a little caveat. You could go that way, yeah. Because serapoda, like you were saying, is a pretty broad group. So not being able to say anything beyond that must not be the world's greatest fossil. Like you said, it's just partial fever. And they didn't name it. Yeah. So then we've got from the world's oldest seripodon to Denver's deepest dinosaur. That's the name of the paper. I like that alliteration. By Hulder Peterman and others, this was published in Rocky Mountain Geology. So scientists found a dinosaur bone underneath the parking lot of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And it's almost 800 feet beneath the parking lot. Yeah. It's a partial vertebra from an ornithopod. It may be similar to Thessalosaurus or Edmontosaurus, which were in the area around the same time. This is from the late Cretaceous. It's about 67 and a half million years old. It's also the oldest known dinosaur from Denver, as well as the deepest one. So it's got two titles going on, being 4,548 feet or about 1,386 meters above mean sea level. It was found in January of 2025, so a year ago, and they drilled and retrieved a core to, quote, provide context for potential geothermal wells in the area. Ah, okay. I was wondering, why did they look 800 feet below their parking lot? We're looking for dinosaurs, yeah. So the core is known as the city park core and the core samples only two and a half inches in diameter or 6.35 centimeters. And they found two bone fragments. That means there's probably more dinosaurs under there. Yeah, but I'm guessing they're probably not going to excavate down 800 feet to get the rest of the skeleton. It would be tough. We've heard of that at least one other time. I believe it was off the coast of Norway where they were doing a core looking for oil or something like that. and they pulled up a little piece of a dinosaur too. It's remarkable that there are that many dinosaur fossils that occasionally you just dig a random tiny hole and you still find a dinosaur. And someone has to recognize that that's a dinosaur fossil and it doesn't have any of the benefits of eroding out and looking bone-shaped because you're just getting a little slice through it. So you have to recognize the texture of the bone, basically. Yeah. That's really cool. And obviously pretty fortuitous that it's right next to the science museum. That gives them such a good story. It does. I'll bet they'll put that core on display too so that people can see it. Oh, I hope so. But it might have to go somewhere else. Yeah, maybe. I hope it's on display. Yeah. Or at least a picture of it. Then moving over one state, there's some new theropods that have been found at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site in Utah in the US. So the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site is a world-class dinosaur track site. They have early Jurassic tracks. Those tracks were found back in 2000 beneath a sod farm, and now they're preserved in a museum. And then in January 2025, again, it took us a while to catch up because these don't have names. So the city of St. George announced plans to build an electrical substation across the street from the museum. However, there were fossils on that land. So over a two-month period, over 500 people volunteered and helped excavate the fossils. And then in May, the city relocated the substation, which gave the team time to study the fossils from what's now known as the substation quarry. And they have a lot of great finds. They're all preliminary. There's over a thousand fossils that have been collected. They include a lot of fish, but also two types of dinosaur teeth from small and large carnivorous theropods and some isolated bones from theropods. And they said that the theropods, quote, almost certainly represent new species. It's likely, or it seems, that the large theropods are closely related to Dilophosaurus and the smaller ones are likely Coelophysoids, but they need to find more fossils, especially from the skull before naming them. They also found some swimming dinosaur tracks. So a lot going on over there. Wow. That's very cool. Yeah. Dilophosaurus is so fascinating because it was so big for a predator in the early Jurassic. So it's nice to have a little more information about that group. Yeah. I'm always surprised. We've met people from St. George a few times and none of ever know that there are dinosaur things there. And to me, I hear St. George and I think dinosaur tracks. Right. That's the main thing I know about St. George. I don't know anything else about St. George. Yeah. That's in Utah. Yeah, it is in Utah. But nobody ever seems to know that about St. George. Right. Well. They need better PR, I guess. Although there's at least 500 people that know. Yeah. Because they showed up. They volunteered. Yeah. Well, our last piece of news is that there's a new large Iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in the late Jurassic in what is now Portugal. Again, it doesn't have a name, but this was published by Filippo Rodatori and others in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology. So it lived in what's now Portugal about 150 million years ago, and it's considered to be part of Ankylopolexia, which is a clade of Iguanodontians that includes dinosaurs like Camptosaurus. That name means stiff them. There's not enough fossils to give this dinosaur a name, but they were able to estimate its size and they found that it was a lot bulkier than other Iguanodontians from around the same time and place, like Eostrisaurus, which is estimated to be about 5.3 feet or 1.6 meters long. Although I don't think they gave an estimate for this new dinosaur. This new unnamed dinosaur. Yes. More fossils have been found in other sites in the area, including smaller isolated thigh bones or femurs. So it may have been a common dinosaur in this area. There's similarities with iguanodontians found in North America and other parts of Europe. So it seems the Iberian Peninsula was important for animals moving between continents. Yeah. And we've seen that with other stuff too, right? Like some of the sauropods and spinosaurs that you see in both Africa and the UK. I guess that Iberian Peninsula, or what was it called? The Ibero-Armorican Island or something like that. It depends on what time you're at. So 150 million years ago, it might not have been quite as islandy as it was in the Cretaceous when sea level was a little higher. Yeah. Maybe it was a better route at that point in time. Maybe. And in just a moment, we'll get into our interview with world-renowned paleo artist Bob Nichols. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break. This episode is brought to you by the Colorado Northwestern Community College. We got a little bit more information on what you might be digging up if you join them for their field paleontology program. And what might that be? It is a large mammal known as Euentotherium. Ooh. Yeah, Euentotherium is in a group of animals called Dinosaurata. Sounds kind of like dinosaurata. Yeah, even though we're talking about a mammal. Yeah, so it's the same dino as dinosaurs, meaning terrible, and then serata means horns. So a lot of them basically look like really epic rhinos. With the terrible horns. Yeah, really cool horns on their heads. Not all of them had horns. And of course, the horns don't always preserve. So it's hard to know which ones did have how big of horns. Sort of like with Pachyrhinosaurus, that debate. But Euentotheria and animals like them were part of the Bone Wars because they are from northwest Colorado and southwest Wyoming. not only is there really cool mesozoic rock in that area like the morrison formation which is the most common one we talk about but there's also paleozoic rock before the dinosaurs and quite a bit of cenozoic rock after the dinosaurs and in this case this is pretty shortly after dinosaurs went extinct there was a quick surge in these dinosiradins which are really cool looking. They remind me of a ceratopsian too, another Sarah named group. So if you join them this summer, there's a good chance you'll get to dig up this really cool animal. So if you want to dig up this animal or join their field geology program or their lab techniques program, you can head over to cncc.edu slash paleo26 and they also have some scholarships available and that information should be on the website shortly. Yes. So no reason not to apply to join. Yeah, it's a really great program. So again, head over to cncc.edu slash paleo26. And now on to our interview with paleo artist Bob Nichols. But as always, we got talking quite a bit about paleo art and other dinosaur things. So if you would like to listen to the extended interview, we make that available to our patrons. and you can get it at patreon.com slash inodino or from your premium content feed if you've set that up in your podcast app. We are here today with Bob Nichols, world-renowned natural history artist who specializes in prehistoric animals, plants, and environments. His work has been published in more than 40 books and exhibited in nearly 50 museums, universities, and attractions around the world. He's also appeared on a number of shows, and he's designed coins for the Royal Mint. Basically, if you're into dinosaurs, you've probably seen Bob's work, even if you didn't necessarily know it. And if Bob's name sounds familiar, he was recently on our show with Dean Lomax, where they discussed their recent book, The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs. And that includes some of Bob's research on Psittacosaurus. So thank you so much for chatting with us today. Thank you. And thanks for inviting me. It's good to speak to you. So, yeah, I know paleo art requires a lot of research. and you know i i don't or at least we haven't come across too many paleo artists that also do the scientific research side i mean even though there is a lot of research but in terms of like you know published research yes yes and you you were one of the researchers that described the world's first known dinosaur cloaca yeah we did yes i've got to first say that i'm not a first author on these papers so i don't want to claim more products that i'm due but yeah i have been a co-author on I think it's like eight or nine papers now which considering my background is something I'm very proud of yeah I have no formal science training since secondary school like GCSEs here in the UK so to get into paleontology through my artwork and then finally being a co-author on papers is really special for me I've actually got them framed on my wall if you look behind me you can see a couple of them there on the wall and we did I was part of the team along with Jacob inventor He was the first author We described the Psittacosaurus cloaca We even made it on the lake show with Stephen Colbert which I was very pleased about He made some unsavory jokes about candles smelling and things like that, which I won't go into. Was the Psittacosaurus paper your first paper you co-authored? No, the first one was actually the one you can see behind me, which is a paper first authored by Don Henderson at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada. and he saw one of my illustrations some years ago now time flies isn't it but um he saw one of my illustrations of two caca redontosaurus carrying away a sauropod oh yeah and yeah and he thought well i want to work out you know is that possible what's the largest weight these these two big theropods could could carry so he went away and did some calculations things that i didn't quite understand they look like aliens to me some of these equations and worked on precisely what they could carry and so as a result of that i had to resize the sauropod i think it was a sauropod that weighed 850 kilograms was the most it could carry so i did a new version to be released with the with the paper yeah it's quite something in fact i think that might be the only time that well at least i'm aware of where an artwork the paleo artwork has been the inspiration or the subject of an actual published paper in terms of you know trying to explain what a picture is illustrating I think. And then you came full circle and updated it. Yeah yeah absolutely yeah. That's awesome. Is that the one that's like it almost looks like their tug of warring on like a baby? That's the one yeah. Yeah so the idea is that they kind of carried it away from the herd or the group and that just kind of try to get some distance between them and any other sauropod that could hurt them sort of thing. And yeah they're tugging at it and pulling at it. It's quite a horrible way to go I guess. And some of my friends if you were you know sauropod researchers they're not happy about the picture they want more sauropod on theropod abuse yeah if I've got the time I'll do that for you yeah like the what is the I want to say brontomiris the one that's sort of like kicking the theropod off to the side yeah yeah yeah yeah in fact I have done a few sketches of sauropods kind of practically decapitating theropods with their tail look tail and things just to please them that's why you find like an isolated theropod skull. It was decapitated by an angry sorority. That would be good, right? Yes. Okay, but going back to Psittacosaurus. So the Cloaca paper came out that was a few years after you made the famous life-size Psittacosaurus, which was the most accurate dinosaur reconstruction ever. Yeah, I think it's a contender for sure. I mean, the fossil is so girth there's so much information in it we had almost a complete skeleton and then on top of that all the soft tissues of other soft tissues are preserved so you have the kind of the outline of the dinosaur so you can see the thickness of the muscle mass and things like that and then there's skin impressions so you know we could see all the different variety of scales all over the body and the size of them and the color patterns as well so we had everything in that fossil. So I think it has to be a contender for one of the most accurate dinosaur reconstruction ever. I mean, there are very few fossils that could be compared to it. So yeah, it's certainly a contender. And not a lot of questions left. Did you find it more or less fun working on that than one where you could have some artistic license with some of the details? I don't know. That question's a bit like, what's my favorite dinosaur? Because the answer is, it's whatever I'm working on at the time because I'm usually learning stuff that I didn't know before so I think it was just as much fun it's nice having a bit more leeway which with filling in the gaps but even then you're filling in the gaps with kind of in form of speculation you have to be able to reason why you've made those decisions you can not just make stuff up at the hour that'll do you know you're always looking at the most closely related species to get the right the most plausible result so not having to kind of investigate that and just observe what i could see in the fossil that was quite refreshing you know i did enjoy it yeah and i kind of i kind of had my eyes on the end game as well knowing that we were going to show this to people and you know see wow we can not only reconstruct this but then do experiments with it and work in what environment it was living in that was that was great and we got to carry the dinosaur model into the like the botanical gardens here in bristol and put it in we didn't have to do that we could have just done it in any woodland and open environment because we were trying to work out how the shadows cast on the model from different light sources so when we went into the botanical gardens we could have just got into any woodland but we want to put it amongst you know contemporaneous plants we wanted to do that because we're nerds yeah so um yeah that was great fun you know wandering around with the star and sort of putting it amongst the trees and seeing how the light interacted with the color patterns bring it on let's do that again that's awesome it is were you i know there's like a full sculpture of it are you a sculptor as well as a illustrator yeah when i started out i was an illustrator but it was difficult to make a living then i realized if i was daft enough to limit myself just to paleontology i should at least be able to offer my services in a variety of different mediums so i started building models and building theme you know doing some theming around fossils and things in museums. That wasn't the intention, but it became a way of keeping busy and bringing in more work. And as the years have gone by, actually, I've done fewer and fewer models because I kind of feel like I'm more comfortable as an illustrator, I think. But I know going through your work, you've kind of done it all. You've got paintings, traditional and digital, murals, dioramas, sculptures. Coins. Coins, yeah. If anybody's got a budget, I'll have a crack at it. Well, yeah. Speaking of coins, the Royal Mint Coin Series, and you've done a few of them. We've got Dinosauria from 2020, the Mary Anning in 2021, Dinosaur Celebrities 2023, and Ice Age Giants from last year. Yeah. They were great fun to do. In fact, when I first got the Dinosauria, the first series, I had no idea there were going to be more. and to get that job I had to do was kind of a competition there was more than just me in the running to get that job so I felt a lot of pressure because I really wanted to do it but if I had had any idea that it would end up being four series in 12 different coins I would have been there I'd been in the right state so it was nice yeah so fortunately I won that that contract and yeah we did the Dinosauria coins which was great fun and then really quickly after that we almost immediately started the Marianning coins. There was a bit of a break, I think, because there were a few national events that they do commemorative coins for. And then the celebrities, and then most recently the Ice Age Giants. I think they're probably my savior. I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it while I got around to Ice Age Giants. What's the process like for designing a coin? I imagine there's a lot of parameters. yeah it is it is quite unusual to be working on a project where the final product is so small it's more normal for me to be doing book illustrations or even murals you know they could be like 40 meters long or on a huge wall so working a different scale was it took a bit getting used to but working digitally i can zoom in and get all the details precisely how i want them so yeah so the process is that they approach me with a brief and we discuss you know what details need to be in the coin you know there has to be like the name there has to be some additional kind of text like the time period something like that and we started out showing the fossil as well some kind of characteristic fossil they and so we talked about how we could fit them on their best and then they let me go away and start doodling really and i usually give them several options and they'll tell me what they like what they don't like and yeah we'll go backwards and forwards a few times until they get they're happy with what i'm proposing and then they'll take my drawing and they hand it over to their sculptors at the raw mint and they sculpt it into the coin and then they send those to me and i double check them and make sure there's nothing gone wrong along the sculpting process a few tweaks here and there and then then they they press them in the in the factory which is had the pleasure of going to the raw mint as well than having a look at it and watching them do it, which is really great. That's awesome. That's cool. Yeah. Did they pay you in minted coins? I know. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Yeah. Have a massive stack of coins going up at the house. That'd be great. Yeah. Be very heavy. Yeah. It'd be jingling around as I walk around the chains. I thought it was that guy with a massive pocket full of coins again. It would be funny if that was the mint's policy. Like, we're the mint. What are we going to do? We've got to pay in minted coins. No, Mr. Nichols, we can't let you pay for your shopping with a massive stack of dinosaur coins again. We have other customers. It took two and a half hours. Counting it all out. I didn't realize, too, I'm just perusing some of your illustrations from over the years, that you did the one of some kind of brachiosaur getting struck by lightning. I really enjoy that one. That was one of my first ever artworks I did that was 100% digital. So that was digital paintings, some of my own photographs, and my own digital sculpted model. So those sauropods were sculpted in ZBrush. And yeah, that was the first time I'd ever done an artwork. Or one of the early artworks I did that was 100% digital. I mean, then that's, you know, that's kind of the method I still use now. Yeah. Yeah. I love the, for whatever reason, the idea that sauropods were like the lightning rods of the Mesozoic is just hilarious. Yeah. I mean, I still get people coming, you know, coming to me saying, oh, I don't think that would have happened. It's like, why don't you think that would happen? It happens to humans. Humans, you know, a tall human is two meters tall and they get struck, you know, all around the world, you know, almost every day. why wouldn't something potentially 15 16 or more meters tall you know occasionally get hit by lightning i mean it's documented as happening in in gerats and in dews and things so yeah of course it happened how often i don't know maybe they had the habit of lying down and keeping the hedge though when there was thunderstorms maybe i don't know but even then it still would have happened if it happens to it happens to sheep and cattle so yeah yeah it happened yeah and that's in a world without buildings and, you know, like copper and steel sticking up into the air. So I know you have also made art for the Leicester Museum, illustrations and models. I saw a scale model of Leoplerodon that you built, which is a pliosaur, plesiosaur. Pliosaur, yeah. Pliosaur, yeah. Pliosaur. So that was a great project. They actually, they refurbished their whole fossil gallery and they asked them to go in and create scale 3D models. So whole environmental images and some what's called spot artworks of just the animals on white ground and things like that. So I completely, the whole gallery is full of my artwork, which is really wonderful to have, walk into a gallery and see your artwork wall to wall. It's really special. Plus when it was opened by Sir David Attenborough, so I got to go to the opening and meet David and have lunch with Sir David. I must remember sitting next to Sir David Attenborough having lunch. That's awesome. A bit shaky. He first sat next to him. Yeah, and the gallery was opened by him. And I thought, wow, this is a special moment. I'm never going to forget this. So what is Sir David Attenborough like in person? Well, he's exactly how you'd expect him to be. He's absolutely lovely. Yeah, it's like I don't get starstruck very often. But yeah, I kind of found myself searching for words, kind of overthinking what I was going to say. Because I thought, I don't want to look at form. I make a fool of myself and put him to David Atten. You know, I care what he thinks, especially, you know, he's about to open the gallery full of my artwork. I don't want him to think I was a bit fool. But he's exactly how you'd expect him to be. And they were filming while we were there as well. So I got to watch him do his filming. And wow, that guy is a professional. It's like action and he just becomes who you'd expect him to be. It's impressive to watch. Yeah, it's remarkable. I remember we heard from somebody that worked with him that he works super hard and they're like, but I don't think he's going to travel much anymore because he hates traveling. And like a couple months later, he had something that they shot in like Argentina. I was like, you can't, he can't stop. The energy of that guy, yeah. the first time i got to meet him was when i was reconstructing sophie the stegosaurus are you aware of that fossil yeah in that museum they um when they asked me to you know to to reconstruct that skeleton it was before it had been announced to the public so they actually invited me to the museum and i got to go behind scenes into this back room where they put the the skeleton together and i was like oh my god she's amazing so i got to spend the day kind of taking measurements and looking at this fossil. And then Sir David Atteborough just wanders in. It's like, oh, here it is. It's like, okay, this is quite a surreal, wonderful moment where I'm reconstructing one of the best preserved stegosaurus skeletons before anybody else has seen it in the Natchez Museum. And David Atteborough has just walked in the room. That was pretty amazing. That is awesome. That is amazing. And you can still go there and see. I've had two artworks reconstructing Sophie and you can go and see the artworks in the museum. Yeah, I can picture them in my head. Yeah, there's lots of naturist museums in the world, but there's only one original NHM, and it's the one in London, and having work in that museum feels really special. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was the first Stegosaurus I saw too that had the more modern tail way up in the air sort of thing, which is why I think your artwork is stuck in my head because like we were saying, that's the updated version, and it was like, oh, it's not that tail dragging or almost dragging sort of look. Right. Yeah, well, that's the perfect response. Hopefully, you know, everybody will have that kind of response to an art where you do as an artist. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That also sounds like you checked like two or three things off your bucket list in an afternoon, you know, going in there. New fossil, amazing drawing, David Atmore. That was a special day, yeah. Because, yeah, we even did some filming where I was like talking with Professor Paul Barrett as well to camera. It's like, it's quite a surreal day. This isn't a normal day for me. Although if we're talking about great memories at the Natural History Museum, I have to talk about the filming we did for the first coin series, the Dinosauria coin series. We actually went to the museum after hours. So I turned up to the museum, was walking around, and then it closed, and everybody left. And then we just had the main hall to ourselves, the Heinz Hall, where they used to have the Diplodocus. Now they've got the Blue Whale. We had that whole huge room to ourselves. And they got me walking up and down underneath the whale filming me. And it's like, this is the most real evening of my life. We're talking about releasing the Dinosauria coins with a royal mint. And they're interviewing me underneath the blue whale. It's just an amazing experience. I'll never forget it. I've got a photo of it on my lounge wall because I need to remind myself that it actually happens. Yeah. That is awesome. That's amazing. So how did you find your way into paleo art? You also mentioned you have dyslexia. Yeah, I did not thrive at school. I think it's fair to say. I was also born in August, so I was quite young for my year. And so I was never diagnosed with dyslexia. So I just kind of struggled my way through primary and secondary school. I was always in love with paleontology, but it was never really a career option for me because I was just always in the bottom set for everything and I struggled. I don't know if you have the saying in in states or in Canada but um in the UK people say all the best years of your life but they weren't for me they were awful so I what I could do though is draw and I could draw well so I kept drawing and when I drew I drew dinosaurs even from the other stage I could hold a pencil when I drew I drew dinosaurs so when I left school I kept drawing and I thought what am I going to do with all this kind of art education I should at least try to that make a living in pediwar I kept being told it wasn going to work There you know there no such thing as a pediwar artist as a profession They were probably right I don know if there was much at the time but I thought I got to give it a go Right? So yeah, I started going to conferences and listening to talks about paleontology and learning. Wasn't a great reader either. So reading wasn't fun to me. I've kind of learned to read really quite well comparatively in the last 10 years, reading to my daughters. I've got two daughters, so I've learned to read with them, so I can read well enough to enjoy reading that. I still struggle a bit with scientific papers. Everybody does. So I kept drawing and illustrating dinosaurs, and then when I did a master's degree in visual communication, and then I started sending my artwork to people at museums and universities to see if I could get any interest. And this was going way back now. This is before social media. So when I wanted to show people my work, I had to take a photo of my paintings, get lots of envelopes, search, dial up internet, looking for names of museums and individuals I could send them to. You know, put stamps and addresses on envelopes. This is really going back to snail mail, isn't it? So I'd have to do all that. These days you can do an artwork in hand and show it to the world in seconds where, you know, then I couldn't do that. So I started sending off my work to people and got a bit of interest and started getting some paid work. One of the first jobs I did was Manchester Museum. Made lots of mistakes, but finally finished the project. Yeah, and to be honest, I didn't expect it to work, but I thought I'd give it a go, and yeah, it got easier and easier. Here I am 25 years later, yeah, doing coins and murals and talking to you guys. That's amazing. Yeah, it's very inspirational. It is. I hope so yeah because my results at school were awful and it was kind of a bad experience but through a dogged determination to try and do a job in Penny OR yeah it was it's only hard work really not brain power that's got me to do what I do so yeah we're hard work folks yeah seriously I mean I know plenty of people that are very smart but not hard working and it's hard to accomplish much if you don't have a little bit of drive yeah i was never lacking drive i mean the thing is i did i do penny art even if i wasn't getting paid for it it's my hobby it's parties it's as much a part of me as the sound of my voice so i would always do penny art but being in a position where people would pay for me to do it is really wonderful i never take that for granted i'm always conscious there are lots of new young artists coming through that could make me unemployed so you got to stay keen yeah well like you said you started in painting switching to digital now yeah actually modeling digitally that's keeping up with the times yeah i think yeah being able to kind of yeah modernize as you go with your techniques and things yeah it's been key i guess and being willing to diversify into mogul building as well when i needed to that was important and also stretching out into the past too you're willing to learn how to make something from the 1800s yeah right yes you need to do yeah absolutely yeah i'll take on anything really yeah i like the challenges yeah so you mentioned your work with manchester university and the museum there and that was sounded like that was more of the traditional you you painted for them but then wasn't it i read something that they had to they printed it to the size of a door the painting oh yes yeah yeah so the manchester museum work was one of the first projects i ever had and i had lots to do there i had like two large paintings to paint onto the wall i had some texturing some theming to do around some of their fossils and i did a bunch of illustrations that were then enlarged to go in the showcases and uh one of the mistakes i made for that job is massively undercharging i mean that's what you put a zero on the end of some of the things they charge um simply because i had you know i had no kind of reference for what i should be charging for this job because i'd never done it before and there was no one in my life i could turn to and say what should i charge for this so i just kind of guessed really and massively went in too low but yeah illustrations the painting work i did lots but the enlargements of the illustrations was another problem because the designers asked me to create the artworks small enough that they could be scanned on an A4 scanner. And I should have said no chance, but I said, yeah, okay, you know, I'll have a crack at it. So I did these A4 paintings, but they were enlarged, enlarged at the size of a door. So obviously any kind of slight imperfection in my illustrations, you know, they're very obvious in these enlargements. So when I go back, I'm actually quite pleased with the quality of them, considering the process I went through to get them, you know, to get them finished. that sort of enlargement was pretty crazy to attempt really i should have said no you know we need to do do it some other way because that enlargement was going to show all of the imperfections so yeah i look back to them and think oh they look a bit crude know those illustrations but they were my first attempt you know a large museum project and uh yeah it wasn't entirely in default that they were they were looking a little bit ropey i liked them i was Looking at some of the images, you got the engraver, where a man is making a deer engraving, and that to me seems a little bit meta. That's one of the illustrations for Crestwood Crags. That was the caves, a place called Crestwood Crags in the north of England. That was a project I did very soon after, Manchester Museum. And oh, that was so exciting. I got to go to the site. It's a gorge, a natural limestone gorge with a stream running through it. on either side in the eclipse there are caves that were used by you know humans throughout and and the underdogs throughout the tens of thousands of years so i got to go to the site and they took me inside the the caves and i got to look at all the kind of the engravings and things oh it's fantastic and then i had to reconstruct the gorge as it looked through the ages yeah and yeah that was such a fun project i thought yeah this is really what i want to do for a job this is crazy I got to go see these amazing places and then reconstruct them as they would have looked back in the time. So, yeah, that was where I really got the bug. Because Manchester was my first big museum project. But like I said, there was lots of stress involved with that. Whereas the Crestwood Praggs project was a joy from start to finish. I just turned up, looked at these caves, then went home to do all these paintings. It was really wonderful. That's great. And it gave me the bug. I wanted to keep going Nice Switching a little bit to your work with books I think all of your books Are very popular I was looking through them I just wanted to start with Dinosaurs New Visions of a Lost World by Michael Bendon We loved that one I know a lot of our listeners Oh good, yeah Such fun reconstructing animals That were kind of unusual looking This is what we think dinosaurs really look like rather than kind of regurgitating the same kind of stereotypical images we looked at these particular species that we knew we had something new to show so yeah i mean wow yeah working with mike benton and thameson hudson to do these really up-to-date illustrations of extinct animals with you know accurate color patterns and all these different types of scales and feathers i mean yeah that i couldn't think of a better a project to have worked on at the time it was amazing perfect yeah i can see with your i mean you've spoken multiple times about how you like a challenge you like getting things precise as i mean it's exactly up our alley which is probably why we love your art so much and i'm sure why it resonates with so many other people because seeing these really precise but novel at least in one way and other illustrations is really enjoyable. Yeah, it's trying to get a nice balance between the precision. Like in Archaeopteryx, I measured the dimensions of the feathers and things, and you can count the correct number of feathers in the wings. Well, I went so crazy with the detail on that. But you also have to balance that with personality. You need a creature to look like it's alive. You're not looking at a diagram when you're looking at these illustrations for that type of book. it has to come alive and kind of leap off the page a bit so yeah i'm thinking like colinda dromius where it's kind of looking over its shoulder back at the viewer sort of thing showing you its tail you know showing its backside i kind of wanted to have that sort of oh look at me sort of so yeah then i hopefully i got a nice mix in there of the kind of precise high resolution detail with kind of sun and positions and postures in a bit of personality hopefully that comes across because that's what i tried to do yeah definitely not every theropod needs to be in profile with one foot partially off the ground and the other yeah right yeah yeah you try you need to do is at least try to do something a little bit different with each one i think but there were 15 different species in that book oh yeah so i needed to cut that thought that is possible to come up with 15 sort of different personalities hopefully and you know that's what i aimed for yeah yeah it was great there's also locked in time by dean lomax which is another favorite of ours and i think our listeners and we talked a little bit about this last time but yeah yeah that was great fun i mean working dean's always great fun and um even like here you forget how many years it is it's been a few years now but yeah that's always got still got a five star rating off on amazon so yeah we're really pleased so the content is really good and finally it really the only criticism we got for locked in time was that people wanted color illustrations so what do we do for the follow-up which is the secret lives of dinosaurs we did color illustrations yeah so if you like locked in time well you are gonna you're gonna love for the secret lives of dinosaurs does that change how you approach illustrating if you know it can't be in color yeah so if you're not working with color if you're just using grayscale you have to be a little more clever about how you use tone and yeah i'd like you're very more very precise with where you're putting your darkest blacks and you know where you're where you're going to use light that needs to be you know white will be your your light reflections and things like that so you have to be just be a little more clever about how you're using the values in an image really if you're turning a color illustration to black and white often it doesn't work quite as well as it could you have to then go in and adjust your grayscale version of your color artwork to work better than you know can be done better than just changing color to black and white oh it's nice to hear you do that because i i have seen a lot of black and white photos that were clearly in color i mean the worst ones are when they're graphs and they have the legend and it's just like seven different grays that are marginally different but is did you do them originally in color and then like you're describing sort of touch them up or did you draw them in grayscale to start they're all done in grayscale from the beginning yeah because we knew when we when we were commissioned to the to do the book by columbia university press we knew it was going to be grayscale artwork so i can actually create grayscale artwork a little quicker than i can color artworks so it made sense considering that's what they're going to be in the book so that's what i'd rendered them in so yeah so they were done originally and they are i did colorize them for the korean translation there was a korean translation of locked in time they wanted them color so they actually commissioned me to color them oh cool yeah so if you have a rare korean translation right i'm gonna have to go buy the korean version yeah right i don't know how easy it is to get a hold of it but yeah you'll have color images if you get the Korean translation. That's cool. I wonder if they would ever a special release like a color version of it in other markets. If we have any listeners in Korea. Yeah, send it to us. Yeah, and so actually color, the color arm works for Secret Lines of Dinosaurs. That does give us the chance of telling some stories that we couldn't in locked in time. So we have the insects that are mimicking leaves. So I was able to illustrate not just their shape is mimicking but their coloration is mimicking and and then show that cryptis in the composition so they're actually these leaf-shaped insects are kind of clustered amongst the leaves so you have to you know they're really difficult to see whereas i think it was just the shape of them trying to hide amongst the leaves it wouldn't have been such a the composition wouldn't have worked so well so they were working in color brings a new dimension that we were able to play with that we did do with the new book yeah i mean especially with your focus on precision without the color camouflage doesn't work so because you would look at it and be like yeah that's obviously a bug right there I can see the legs I can see the head whatever yeah they definitely work better using color and I was glad that we kind of we didn't include a few specimens in locked in time because we didn't think they worked quite so well as illustrations but you know we were able to go all out with a new book but you know using color meant we can there was nothing off the table we should go for the absolute best every time yeah yeah I hope it's a bestseller. Yeah, me too. I've got a lot of questions for you because you've done so many amazing things. That's okay. So you've also got the Everything Dinosaur Evolution Tyrannosaurus Rex model, which as of this recording, it's going to be coming out soon. Like in a couple of weeks, you could pre-order it. And it's this museum quality, scientifically accurate model. what was the process for creating something like that okay i imagine it's a little bit different because you know that this has to be made many many times oh yeah this project it began with my consumer contacting me saying we're planning you know my they have such amazing experience with selling dinosaur models and merchandise all around the world and they decided that they wanted to have a crack at it themselves they had you know and i think who better to have a go at it than them so mike and see from everything dinosaur contacted me and said we're planning this we've got our paleontologist steam loan racks um would you be kind of would you consider coming onto the team and helping design the model and i said yeah i'd do that for sure yeah you know as you can see on the camera i know your listeners won't be able to see it but you'll be able to see behind me there's these this variety of dinosaur toys that i've got yeah i grew up collecting them And to be asked to be a part of a team to design a new range of models was amazing. Yeah, I'd be on board for that. So we had a chat about what series we would design first, and we've gone to the Hell Creek. They know full well that their biggest seller is Terranosaurus Rex, so we've started with that one. So what we did, we talked about what we were going to do, and I went away and I designed RT Rex. And I sent it to Dean, who was our paleontologist, and he checked all the details with the literature, made sure we didn't make any mistakes. And then when everybody was happy with the design, they sent it to our digital sculptor, Glenn Southern. And yeah, he sculpted the T-Rex, and every now and then he'd send us his progress, and we'd critique it, and we went backwards and forwards like that. Him sculpting, us critiquing, asking for a few tweaks here and there. and only once everybody was happy which as you can imagine probably took actually took quite a long time when everybody was happy we went ahead with it and mike and siri used their contacts and they worked really hard finding the best way to build these this model and package it we've gone for like zero plastic packaging and things like that we've got some collector's cards that come with the model as well in the packaging which explain how we built the model and the process and how serious we were about every aspect. I think we spent three weeks on the shape and the coloration of the claws on the feet and things like that. Wow. Yeah, we really went to town and we thought, yeah, if we can't do it right, then we need to try harder until we do. So yeah, then the next one will be Triceratops. Yeah, it's been amazing to work on. Hell Creek right Yeah yeah I guessing Ankylosaurus is going to be in there I couldn possibly try on the game Oh I hope it is That my favorite No I can tell you Actually I joking It will be T to start with Then we have Triceratops. And I'm not sure which order they're going to go in, but we will also have Edmontosaurus and Anzu. Oh, okay. So, yeah, those are our four dinosaurs. Maybe someday there'll be a fifth one and you can do Ankylosaurus. Yeah, I'd be up for that. Put in a request, Garrett. We were just talking to Mike and Sue earlier today, coincidentally. If I had known they were skipping a chylosaurus, I would have begged. I'm going to make a note. Garrett wants a chylosaurus. Go ahead. Make a fifth one just for us. I'm pretty pleased. So I do have to ask, how do you spend three weeks discussing the toes and the claw coloration? And like, what was the debate? Do you remember? Yeah, well, I think it was to do with what's the most plausible, you know, coloration of the keratin was one part. But also, you know, we had to talk about the ends of the claws being worn down with contact to the ground. And then there was discussion about how much of the claw should be visible and how much of it would be embedded in soft tissue. I think they should get the specifics but I think there was a fossil not too long ago discovered that suggested that perhaps the claw is actually embedded in soft tissue so they wouldn't actually have looked quite as large as they're often reconstructed so yeah I forget all the specifics but it went on like this that's my kind of discussion oh yeah it's interesting so every time we thought we got it right somebody would bring up another point and say, have we considered this? And would the middle toe wear down before the others? And things like that. So yeah, it was just a group of really passionate, geeky paleo people getting together and just bouncing ideas off each other until we thought we got it wrong. That is something I'm going to have to keep in mind now because we always talk about, I know with Borealopelta, they discussed because some of the keratin was preserved there. And on the scutes, it was like, okay the bone when you look at it in a museum and almost every mount you just see the bone and you imagine okay so there would have been skin on top of this whatever but that would have been the size of its armor but then with some of these discoveries over the years it's like no they would have been bigger because of the keratin but i never considered the other end of that which is no they could also be subtracting from it with the amount that's embedded in the skin so there's the balance there yeah yeah i think it's it's always more complicated than might first appear i'm thinking yeah so now i wonder if now in like another five years all these claws and things are going to be shrinking again as people add more flesh around the base of these oh so yeah well i think teeth of theropods are an interesting thing because they're often during the you know decay process and the fossilization process the teeth are often pushed out their sockets so they often appear and much bigger than they would have been in life. Plus, if you put soft tissue, and I'm doing lips in quotation marks, if you include lips on them as well, it might be that you could barely see the teeth at all. And if you look into the soft tissue of Komodo dragons and things like that, you can't really see the teeth at all unless they're biting into something. So we're so used to having these reconstructions of T-Rex with these huge teeth on show, but There's a real possibility that when it roared, or I say roared, but they might not have roared at all. But when it yawned at you, you might not have seen any teeth at all. You might only have noticed it had big teeth and took your arm off. Yeah, that Komodo dragon thing. I've looked into that multiple times now, trying to see if there's updated research on why they have so much gum tissue and the teeth are really embedded. And I still haven't found an answer that's really satisfactory to me in terms of why some animals have so much gum. Because that's what I'm wondering, too like with dinosaurs how much gum did they have we don't have a good answer if you get an answer to that email me i want to know i will vice versa yeah i think i think there are some you know real thing important things that we need to readdress like the teeth how much teeth is visible yeah yeah it's definitely one of them well for our listeners where is the best place that they could go online to find out more about you and your work and your upcoming projects yeah well I try to keep up to date on my social media sites. I'm on Facebook. Bob Nichols are on Facebook. I'm on Blue Sky. Again, Bob Nichols are on Blue Sky. I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Tumblr. I'm still on Tumblr. I think it's still on Facebook there. Instagram. I'm at Bob Nichols dot art at Instagram and threads. Same. I'm no longer on it. Got it. And we'll post links to all of your social media handles. Excellent, thank you. I do have a website, but it's very out of date. And I've been meaning to build a new one for years, but I'm too busy doing pictures. I'm like, do I take time out of commissions work to build a website when I already can't keep up with demand already? It doesn't seem to make sense. Until I get quiet time, I'm just going to have to go with the old website. Yeah, that makes sense. well thank you so much for for chatting with us today and for chatting with us very for a long time because we had so many questions yeah that's okay thank you this is easy i get nervous doing this thing but you made it very easy thank you thanks again bob for explaining so many different styles of art and how you make coins so many things we've wondered over the years it was great to talk to you and i'm sure we'll be talking to again about even more dinosaur work in the future. Yes, that was so much fun to chat. Thank you again. And now we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors, and then we'll get on to our dinosaur of the day. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is a website platform where you can find and claim your domain, showcase what you have to share with the world, and grow your brand as well as get paid all on their single platform. That all sounds great. It does. One of the ways you can grow is with email campaigns, which is really great that it's all included with Squarespace because there are a lot of options out there, but it can be overwhelming. So with Squarespace, they have all the tools you need to engage people, promote your services, grow your business, and you can set up automated emails and schedule them out so that they come out at just the right time. Yeah, it's really nice that that's integrated. Back when we started our website, it was not. And Sabrina had to do a lot of work to figure out how to do this. It's nice that it's integrated in one place now. We have a domain with Squarespace that we have been using for quite a few years, and it has been worry-free. We haven't had any issues with it going down or losing anything at all. It just has been working tirelessly for years without any input from us, which is exactly what you want when you have a website up online. So check out squarespace.com slash IKD for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code IKD to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, that's squarespace.com slash IKD. This is probably the last time you'll hear us mention that we're mailing out our Bahatosaurus patch very soon to all of our patrons at the Triceratops level and above. So if you haven't already joined and you want a really cool Bajatosaurus first ever sauropod patch, even cooler than a Margosaurus, then make sure you sign up at the Triceratops tier or above by February 28th, 2026. Because again, on February 28th, we're just going to download all the names, all the addresses and start the work of packaging them all up and sending them all over the world because we'll mail them anywhere in the world. so if you want to get your patch and you're already a patron make sure your address is up to date so that it gets to you where you are and not to where you used to be and if you're not yet a patron but you want a super cool behatosaurus patch that you can't get anywhere else then head over to patreon.com slash inodino and sign up at the triceratops tier or above by february 28th again that's patreon.com slash I know Dino. And now for our dinosaur of the day, E-Mouse-saurus, which was a request from paleomike716. I'm doing my best guess here as to how to pronounce E-Mouse-saurus because that genius name is an acronym for Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald. It's one of the oldest universities in Europe. It was founded in 1456. That is old. I thought maybe it was Maus because it's spelled the german way for mouse but clearly not well with acronyms i feel like we get a little more leeway for how to pronounce it i bet if you pronounced it in germany they would make it mouse so i should call it e-mousaurus nah do whatever you want we're doing the anglicized version of it that was actually pretty similar to how i said it yep anyway it's a thyreophorin dinosaur lived in the early jurassic and what is now mecklenburg vorpomerm in germany the fossils found include the right side of the skull the right lower jaw tail bones part of the arm part of the foot a claw fragments of ribs scutes and plates and the holotype's a juvenile although a recent study suggested it's a subadult It's estimated to be about 6.6 to 8.2 feet or two to two and a half meters long and weigh 110 to 200 pounds or 50 to 90 kilograms. As an adult, it's estimated to be almost 10 feet to over 13 feet or three to four meters long and weigh up to 530 pounds or 240 kilograms. What it looks like is often based on its relative, Scalidosaurus. Oh, now I know all about it. We talked about Scalidosaurus as our dinosaur of the day back in episode 196 titled Scalidosaurus. It's a good one. Yeah, it was a medium-sized dinosaur with a short beak, a large gut, and light armor on its body. And it may have sometimes walked on two legs, but mostly walked on all fours. I feel like saying light armor is light in terms of dinosaurs. Right. When you look at Scalidosaurus, it looks like a lot of armor. Well, yes. It basically looks like an ankylosaur. and it is i mean it's an ancestor to true ankylosaurus a mausaurus had a long tail and somewhat bulky body as well as a broad skull and its body was covered in armor it had relatively small conical to plate shape osteoderms it was probably herbivorous it likely ate vegetation on the ground like cycads it possibly sometimes washed on two legs and sometimes on all fours Parts of the feet that have been found for the forelimbs, the, I guess, arms, show that it could support weight rather than grasp for food. The bottoms of the forelimb were short and block-like and similar to the proportions of the feet of Skolidosaurus. Now, it's possible as a juvenile, it spent more time on two legs, and then as an adult, it was on all fours. I like the idea of a little ankylosaur-looking thing scampered around on two feet. Yeah. Although, I guess it might not have had that much armor as a baby, too. We don't really know. Right. And it's also possible that Amalsaurus is closely related to the two-legged Scutellosaurus, so it's hard to say if Amalsaurus walked on two legs or all fours. There's just not enough fossils to be able to tell how it moved. The type and only species is Amalsaurus Ernstii. It was named in 1990 by Hartmut Habold. And like I said, that genus name is an acronym for that university. Ernst Moritz-Arnst University. The species name is in honor of Werner Ernst, who acquired the dinosaur, the holotype, in 1963 from foreman Werner Volan. The Amalsaurus lived in a lagoonal environment, and other animals that lived around the same time and place include insects, ammonites, fish, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, theropods, and sauropods. And a mousaurus is the only named dinosaur from its area. That's why it's theropods and sauropods, because that's as much as we can tell about them. Yep. At least for now. Yeah. That's really cool. Scalidosaurus is one of the coolest early dinosaurs. It's got that really articulated, complete look to it. And it's so early being in the early Jurassic for such an armored dinosaur. It's neat to know that there's another one that could have been as armored, although it doesn't sound like we really know how armored it was yet. Yeah. And now for our fun fact, which is if you're looking for places to see fossils, the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, in the U.S. has a list. They published a guide on where you can see fossils. There's 15 states in the U.S. It includes exhibits at museums and universities, as well as hiking trails and visitor centers. I think a lot of it includes the museums and universities that work on BLM-managed public lands, which makes sense. Fossils from BLM-managed public lands are housed in over 80 museum collections around the U.S., and that includes the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Who knows, maybe eventually they'll let you drill to see more fossils or something. Maybe. I think it's a really good starting point, although maybe you also want to go to our map for even more places to visit, especially outside of the U.S. Yeah, our map focuses on the actual museums where they are displayed. This has exhibits at museums and universities, but also hiking trails and other things. Yeah, our map doesn't focus only on BLM, although we should probably double check it and make sure we have all of their stuff on our map. But yeah, our map's at minodino.com. The BLM guide will have a link in our show notes because it's a long URL. Yeah, it's a little longer than our URL. So yeah, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. We'll have another episode in a couple weeks, which will be about dinosaur tracks and traces and also an interview where we talk about escape rooms. In the meantime, if you want your dino fix, well, paleontology fix, we'll have our next I Know Paleo episode 35 out on Patreon. And if you want to join so you can hear it, go to patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Thanks again, and until next time. I Know Dino before February 28th. And if you want to see the patch, you can also see it on Patreon. I think it looks great personally. Sabrina did most of the work, but I put on some finishing touches. And then, of course, somebody else printed it for us. Sewed it, maybe I should say. It's got really nice relief of the spines of the Hadasaurus. But of course, now we think it had a sail around it. So that is also depicted. So check it out, patreon.com slash I Know Dino. As a listener of I Know Dino, you probably already know science shapes every part of our lives, but so much of its influence is overlooked or buried in the past. Tiny Matters is an award-winning science podcast about tiny things from molecules to microbes that have a big and often surprising impact on society. and we've been enjoying listening to their episodes very much. From deadly diseases to forensic toxicology to the search for extraterrestrial life, hosts and former scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in history and today and how it could impact our world's future. They tackle questions like, can we de-extinct a species and should we? How was IVF invented? Why did the dodo bird really go extinct? and does life exist beyond Earth? Some of those topics sound pretty familiar. They do. A lot of good overlap here. New episodes of Tiny Matters are released every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.