William Stout

Yesterday's post dealt with a sauropod-eating snake. This fossil is, objectively speaking, one hundred percent of wicked awesome. It's also reminiscent of a piece by artist William Stout, which depicts a huge python-like snake wrapping around a rather alarmed sauropod. You can check it out here. Stout is one of the great modern dinosaur illustrators, bringing anatomical accuracy together with a pulpy sensibility. Stout has put his stamp on much of the great genre imagery of the last couple decades, providing production design and other pre-production work for such disparate work as Jurassic Park, "Thriller," Pan's Labyrinth, Predator, Men in Black, and Disney's Dinosaur.

Stout has a bunch of books out, including a couple of recent releases. New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z is a primer on recent discoveries in paleontology, aimed for the kids. Dinosaur Discoveries is billed for all ages, though Michael Stearns in his Amazon review notes that the text is pretty simplistic in this one as well.

His murals are the centerpiece of the Fossil Mysteries exhibition at the cute lil' San Diego Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park. Just my luck, I last visited around the holidays in 2005, and the museum was in the midst of renovating for the exhibition. It's another good reason to coax myself back to sunny, idyllic Southern California.

Coastal Dinosaurs, a Stout mural at the San Diego Museum of Natural History

Lots of Stout links out there, too. Flesk Publications puts out a bunch of Stout books, and Palaeoblog recently featured reviews of a couple Stout books. And Lines and Colors had a pretty nice post on Stout's SDMNH murals a couple years ago, and a longer profile a couple years before that. And be sure to poke around at William Stout's personal website.