Squawk Role-Playing Game

The Squawk Role-Playing Game that we have been working since the mid-90's is finally available as a book from CreateSpace and Amazon.com or as a PDF from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

See the Game Arts Guild Press Release for details.

Raptor Rapture

Dromaeosaurs are those sickle clawed "raptor" dinosaurs which have become contenders for scariest dinosaurs in popular imagination (in spite of their modest size) thanks to Jurassic Park.

If you know your dromaeosaurs, you probably thought those "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park were a tad on the big side. That's because they are actually supposed to be Deinonychus, a man-sized dromeosaur species which Greg Paul had classified as a subspecies of Velociraptor for a while. You can see this in Paul's excellent dinosaur art/science book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (hardcover and paperback versions available at Amazon.com.) Since writing that book, Greg Paul has concluded that Deinonychus is actually a separate species after all. (The Jurassic Park Deinonychus are still much bigger than they should be, but the dromaeosaur Utahraptor actually was that big.)

Jurassic Park's "raptors" inherited another mistake which was common for dinosaur artists and scientists at the time: the wrists are broken. The palms of predatory dinosaur hands face inward, not backward, with the "thumbs" pointing forward - like the wrists of a bird or like our hands when we climb a rope, but not when we climb a ladder. I was at the "Collossal Fossils" exhibit at the Pacific Science Center recently and all of the predatory dinosaurs had their wrists the wrong way. When you look at the bones up close you can see how this just doesn't work.

When I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have any feathered dinosaurs. They used the Greg Paul's new classification scheme, and his ridiculously fast Tyrannosaurus, but left out his feathered dromaeosaurs! Paul illustrated all of his small dinosaurs with downy "protofeathers" and gave the dromaeosaurs wing feathers. We don't know if all of the small dinosaurs had feathers, but last month Alan Turner, Peter Makovicky and Mark Norell described direct physical evidence for flight feathers on the forearms of Velociraptor.

Dromaeosaurs are so closely related to birds, that they might actually be secondarily flightless descendants of the first flying dinosaurs. I recently read Greg Paul's new book on this subject: Dinosaurs of the Air. The new book is more science and less art-oriented than Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Paul looks at dinosaur metabolism in terms of aerobic excercise (instead of "warm blooded or cold blooded") which allows us to draw conclusions from the bones themselves, and even identify which dinosaurs probably had "in-between" metabolisms.

The Right to Keep and Arm Bears

In the last 24 hours I've scanned in more than 300 of my old drawings. This one reminds me of a Panserbjørne from the His Dark Materials trilogy - although it was drawn before I'd heard of that series. Speaking of which, the movie is coming out in December!

This saddled ornithomimid dinosaur was drawn with mechanical pencil on lined paper, then colored with colored pencils. To remove the blue lines, I first created a new transparent layer. I used the "divide" blend mode, and copied and pasted a slice of the lines from the original image into the new layer. Then I copied and pasted that slice over and over to cover all of the lines.

Here's some of my favorite Squawk drawings from the last few days of scanning: