Utahraptor competition: the winner!

After consulting with the Chasmo-team, and taking into account the feedback from our readers (i.e. that one comment from Emily Willoughby - thanks, Emily!), I'm happy to present the winner of our Utahraptor competition: Castles Made of Sand by Rhunevild aka Madison H!

Yes, that's a Jimi Hendrix reference (as Madison's deviantArt page make clear), but there's so much more to the piece than that; it's artistically accomplished, the dinosaurs are lightly stylised but still essentially anatomically correct, and it's a single, text-free image that says everything through character and expression. In other words, it fulfils the brief very nicely. Madison also promoted the Utahraptor Project over on deviantArt. Nice work, Madison! Please leave a comment below with an e-mail address or somesuch and I'll be in touch. (By the way, it's very much a healthy dose of wry humour, I'll have you know.)

Thanks again to everyone who entered a piece - it's always a delight to see what our wonderful, talented readership can produce.

Utahraptor competition: the contenders

Just over a month ago, I launched our latest art competition in the name of drawing attention to the Utahraptor Project. The aim was to humorously illustrate how all those dinosaurs ended up caught in quicksand together - disregarding the scientific hypothesis that it was a predator trap, because pish, scientists, what do they know? Below, I'll lay out everything we've received, and although our decision is final, feel free to leave a comment in aid of your preferred winner.

We did get a couple of entries that illustrated Utahraptor (or, in one case, seemingly a JP raptor), but otherwise completely ignored the brief. So they're disregarded here. Sorry, guys. But everyone else is here...starting with Christian A Juul.

It's Utahraptor Week

We've talked about the Utahraptor Project a few times here at LITC, and three weeks ago we launched our latest art challenge to help promote it. To help combine efforts to spread the word about Jim Kirkland's crowdfunding effort to free those dinosaurs from that slab of rock, this week has been declared Utahraptor week, thanks to the Earth Archives/ Studio 252MYA crew. Check out the #utahraptorweek hashtag on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), and help spread the word by using it yourself and sharing others' posts.

Here are a couple videos about this pretty awesome discovery: Jim Kirkland tells the story of the find and National Geographic depicts the effort it took to move the block o' raptors from its original site of discovery.

To help support this research:

• Donate at GoFundMe
• Follow and share posts from the Utahraptor Project on Facebook and Twitter
• Take part in our art challenge (and be sure to share your work far and wide on the web)

The Utahraptor Project competition

TL;DR (added 31/03): Your submissions should be humorous! We'd like an amusing take on what might have happened. See paragraph 5 below.

As many of you out there in Chasmoland will already be well aware, one of the most tantalising bonebed discoveries of the last decade was the that of a huge trove of Utahraptor skeletons in (fittingly enough) Utah. Fossilised alongside the remains of at least two iguanodontian ornithopods are the bones of numerous Utahraptor individuals at different growth stages, which promise to finally reveal what this formerly rather engimatic animal really looked like. (Suffice it to say, it certainly wasn't the monstrous steroidal Deinonychus that you remember from your childhood.)

The site was discovered by Matt Stikes back in 2001, and the huge block o' bones was subsequently excavated by Jim Kirkland (who described Utahraptor), Don DeBlieux and Scott Madsen along with numerous volunteers. The block is now being prepared in the Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah, under the auspices of Madsen (as Chief Preparator). You can read the full story of the project - from discovery, to excavation, to preparation - over on the official Utahraptor Project site, where there's also a handy index of Utahraptor-related press...not to mention this lovely video featuring Jim himself.