Episode 557: Bob Nicholls: Paleoartist Extraordinaire. Robert (Bob) Nicholls has been painting, sculpting, and painting some of our favorite paleoart for decades. He joins us to share how he does it. Plus, a fossil found hundreds of feet below a natural history museum; The world’s oldest cerapodan dinosaur; And new theropod and iguanodontian fossils

News:

• Paleontologists found the world’s oldest cerapodan dinosaur in Morocco source
• Scientists found a dinosaur bone underneath the parking lot of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science source
• New theropods have been found at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site in Utah, U.S. source
• There’s a new large iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in the Late Jurassic in what is now Portugal source

Interview:

Bob Nicholls, world-renowned paleoartist, painter, sculptor, and illustrator. His work has been published in more than 40 books (including the Secret Lives of Dinosaurs) and exhibited in nearly 50 museums, universities, and attractions around the world. He’s also appeared on a number of shows and he designed coins for the Royal Mint. Follow him @BobNichollsArt on facebook, bluesky, threads, tumblr, instagram, and mastodon.

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The dinosaur of the day: Emausaurus

• Thyreophoran dinosaur that lived in the Early Jurassic in what is now Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
• Fossils found include the right side of the skull, right lower jaw, tail bones, part of the arm, part of the foot, a claw, fragments of ribs, scutes, and plates
• Holotype is a juvenile (though a recent study suggested it’s a subadult) and estimated to be about 6.6 to 8.2 ft (2 to 2.5 m) long and weigh 110 to 200 lb (50 to 90 kg)
• Adult estimated to be almost 10 ft to over 13 ft (3 to 4 m) long and weigh up to 530 lb (240 kg)
• What it looked like is often based on its relative Scelidosaurus
• Talked about Scelidosaurus as our dinosaur of the day in episode 196, titled Scelidosaurus
• Scelidosaurus was medium sized 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
• Had a long tail, somewhat bulky body
• Had a broad skull
• Body covered in armor
• Had relatively small conical to plate shaped osteoderms
• Probably herbivorous, and likely ate vegetation on the ground, like cycads
• Possibly sometimes walked on two legs and sometimes on all fours
• Parts of the feet that have been found for the forelimbs shows it could support weight, rather than grasp for food
• Bottoms of the forelimb were short and block-like, and similar to proportions of the feet of Scelidosaurus
• Possible as a juvenile it spent more time on two legs and as an adult it was on all fours
• However, it’s also possible Emausaurus is closely related to the two legged Scutellosaurus, so hard to say if Emausaurus walked on two legs or all fours
• Not enough fossils to be able to tell how it moved
• Type and only species is Emausaurus ernsti
• Named in 1990 by Hartmut Haubold
• Genus name is an acronym for Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (one of the oldest universities in Europe, founded in 1456)
• Species name is in honor of Werner Ernst, who acquired the dinosaur (the holotype) in 1963 from foreman Werner Wollin
• Lived in a lagoonal environment
• Other animals that lived around the same time and place include insects, ammonites, fish, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, theropods, and sauropods
• Emausaurus is the only named dinosaur from its area

Fun Fact:

If you’re looking for places to see fossils, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the U.S. has a list of BLM administered fossil sites and conserving museums at https://www.blm.gov/programs/paleontology/where-to-see-fossils

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