A QUARRY
Part Six of The Jurassic Journals

The last two days of the dig, Pete reassigned us from the gruelingly fruitless F Quarry to the bountiful A Quarry. My first assignment was cleaning up a bit of camarasaurus vertebra recently unearthed by the bobcat tractor.

The Faileontologists' response to being reassigned to A Quarry:

One day, after returning to the mess hall after a long day of digging, we came upon a crowd gathered around Matt Seney (the dude facing camera, in front of the van).

He had found a baby rattlesnake and was handling it with a hook in one hand while smoking a cigarette in the other. Matt used to work at a local theme park called Reptile Gardens. He informed us that, while baby rattlers are dangerous, it is a myth that they inject more venom than an adult. They inject a higher percentage of their venom, but because they have smaller venom reserves to begin with, a high percentage of their venom is about as much as a small percent of the adults'.

Matt also caught a scorpion. He showed us how the dromopods glow in the dark under a black light. Matt was quickly becoming my hero. Later, while a group of us were playing paleo-poker in the mess hall, we heard Matt utter, "Oops." We turned around to find him holding an empty cup and squinting at the gravel on the ground. We played the rest of the hand standing on our benches.

Every bench, table, outhouse, and shower stall was covered in graffiti. Here's my contribution.

Zack, Brandon, UK students Holly and Amar, and I decided to take a break from the dig and head into Hulett, Wyoming for some R'n'R. Our first stop was a local dive called the Ponderosa Bar. We played Thriller on the juke box in Michael Jackson's honor, and were amused to see two of the older local gals doing the zombie dance at the bar.

Zack and I tought the brits how to play Purple Rain, the greatest game since Telephone Pictionary.

We decided to visit Devil's Tower at night in hopes of spotting a spacecraft. We brought some Wild Blue, a blueberry-flavored beer and local favorite. After your first sip of Wild Blue, you smile and exclaim, "Tastes like a muffin!" By the end of the bottle, you're frowning and staring at the remaining dregs of beer as you mutter, "Tastes like a muffin." Honestly, when's the last time you felt the urge to dunk your blueberry muffin in beer? Despite the other-worldly flavor of our booze, there were no extra-terrestrials to be found. Still, it was an awesome experience, I could almost hear the John Williams.

Back to business! I make my most important discovery on the dig: a small theropod toe bone! Since theropods (being carnivores) are rarer than herbivores, and a toe-bone indicating the possibility of a body close-at-hand, Pete said this find earned me "the right to come back next year."

And Greg finds a ginormous camarasaurus toe claw, which makes him an instant legend. Pete says Greg definitely earned the right to come back next year as well. A Quarry rocks.

"Don't mess with me, man. I'm a scientist."

Tune in next week for the stunning conclusion of The Jurassic Journals:
Everything Prehistoric
OR
The Storm

ART BY COMMITTEE
and THE CHADES CHALLENGE

Above is my contribution (yeah, I had a little help from M.C. Escher) to one of my favorite blog games, James Gurney's Art By Committee. James challenges his readers to illustrate random excerpts from old sci-fi manuscripts. If you're into fun drawing challenges, you should check it out!

If you have some weird aversion to sci-fi texts, you can always contribute to my weekly drawing game, the Chades Challenge. Next week's challenge is

SWEATY ROBOTS

Everyone is welcome to participate and design their own perspiring automaton; just post a sketch on your blog and leave me a comment with your blog address. I'll post the oodles of doodles here on the Translation each Friday, along with the subject of the next challenge, so make sure to check back to see what everyone has done.

Thanks to everyone who contributed this week to Chades Challenge XX: Cheshire Cats. Here are the twisted tricksters for your viewing pleasure:

Everett "Jabberwocky" Downing

Stephan "The Caterpillar" Bugaj

Nes "Alice" beth

Vi-Dieu "Bill the Lizard" Nguyen

Emma "The White Queen" Coats

Austin "The Mad Hatter" Madison

BRINGIN' REXY BACK

According to Science Daily, scientists have confirmed the remains of biochemical material (proteins) in dinosaur fossils. T. rex fossils, no less! This organic material has survived for sixty-eight million years; I think this is proof that God wants us to bring the dinosaurs back. I am so excited by this news, I was inspired to write a haiku.

Rain-slicked poncho blue
Primordial forest green
Stain on pants yellow

Speaking of inspirational new stuff, there's some awesome new music out there by Weird Al and Regina Spektor. Weird Al's new song, CNR, is a JibJab exclusive, though it's already on YouTube. I was shown the CNR video by my buddy Raph, who is an exact doppleganger of the ill-fated fellow at the video's 1:42 mark. Raph's adopted, so he may just have an identical twin out there!

JibJab's Alan Cook:


Pixar's Raphael Suter:

Uncanny, eh? Kudos to my friends and fellow CalArts alumni Amanda and Justin, and everyone else at JibJab for keeping up the inspiring work!

The other song I was inspired by is Regina Spektor's new single, Laughing With. I'm one of those people who would check both the box for God and evolution in my "What do you believe?" poll. So I'm greatly inspired by anything God-or dino-related.

Laughing With begs the question, why do people only laugh at God when they don't need to depend on Him? It's one of the more profound songs I've heard in a great while, so I thought I'd share it with you all (regardless of which boxes you select in my poll).

F QUARRY
Part Five of The Jurassic Journals

"Grant's like me...he's a digger."

The Waugh dig is a collection of quarries working their way into the Morrison formation, hunting the titans of the Jurassic Era. These quarries are labeled A-K, and carefully plotted on a map as each site is developed. Pictured above are the Pixar paleontologists (from left): Chuck Waite, Brandon Hyman, Greg Dykstra, Zack Keller, and me. We were assigned to F Quarry, where we were supervized by seventeen year-old veteran dino hunter Kyle Lindsey. Below, Kyle (left) helps Zack uncover a new find.

While Greg got straight to work, Kyle taught us rookies how to 1) know a fossil when we saw one, and 2) carefully excavate said fossil from the surrounding rock matrix using exactoblades, brushes, and paleo-bond (a sort of superglue used to repair fractured fossils). Below are (from left to right): BHI staffer Matt Seney, Greg Dykstra, Kyle Linsdey, Chuck Waite, BHI staffer Sam (I forget his last name), Oguchi Shota, and (on the ground in front), me and Brandon Hyman.

After hours of toil with no bones to show for our efforts, we began to come up with new F-names for our quarry (Fruitless-, Frustrating-, and just plain Fucked Quarry were among the favorites).

We were also lovingly christened as "Faileontologists" by the other diggers, particularly those in A Quarry, who were unearthing all the good stuff. I'm pretty sure the A stood for Astounding-, Awesome-, Amazing-, and Allosaur-Teeth-Everywhere Quarry. Here Pete Larson is uncovering another Admirable A-Quarry find. His daughter, Ella, doesn't seem as impressed as we are.

This gorgeous allosaurus tooth is an example of the fine specimens A Quarry would be uncovering on an hourly basis.

Meanwhile, over at F(ractured fossil) Quarry, we were brushing as carefully as possible around this brittle, oxidized fractured camarasaur bone. Note the bottle to the left; that's paleo-bond, which we kept pouring onto our constantly-breaking bones. On several occassions, Sam even told us not to use the adhesive, that it was worth more (at $10 a bottle) than the specimens we were laboring to recover.

Here I am staring longingly at A Quarry as UK students Holly and Amar dig away.

Greg mentioned that it was the first time at the Waugh dig that he hadn't been assigned to A Quarry, but he dug dutifully with the rest of us faileontologists and shared in our small victories, like Chuck's croc tooth.

The croc tooth was our first flag-able find; diggers flag areas where complete bones are found so that they can be carefully mapped and excavated. Here we are, striking the Iwo Jima pose in honor of our first flag.

And, once again, A Quarry for contrast.

Here's another of F Quarry's small victories, Zack's hypsilophodontid claw.

Zack and I immediately start digging where the hypsolophodontid claw was found. Twelve hours of digging later (I kid you not), after having found absolutely nothing else, we cut our losses, abandon the site, and return to our original dig positions.

At the end of every day, though, we'd be all smiles as we trekked back to the camp site. Covered in dirt, sweat, blisters, and sunburns, but laughing about the endeavors of the day and our small successes. Here we are after the first day when we were too tired to hike and took the truck back.

But don't worry, the Faileontologists had a chance to get even with the A-Diggers every night when we sat down for paleo-poker. Instead of chips, we used belemnites (squid fossils) that we found in the gravel around the mess hall. I came away each week with pockets full of belemnites, feeling quite vindicated.

Next Journal: the faileontologists graduate to A Quarry. Will we find our fortune and glory or remain as empty-handed as before? Stay tuned to the Jurassic Journals to find out!

SUPERMAN vs ZOD (colored)

Colored version of an earlier post. I've been inspired by the blogs of James Gurney and Shiyoon Kim to work more on color and lighting.

The photo-background is a total cheat, but the image was just too perfect to pass up. The swirling mass of dark cloud invading the warm sunset was a nice echo of the drawing. Maybe I'll do a third version of this drawing when I actually learn how to draw clouds!

I picture Superman outweighing Zod by quite a bit, but Zod's got the military training and willingness to kill, so he'd probably dish out a few cans of whoopass on ol' Blue. Like Yoda says, "Size matters not."

CHADES CHALLENGE XX: THE CHESHIRE CAT

Alice was just beginning to think to herself, "Now, what am I going to do with this creature, when I get home?" when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm.

For more wonderful Cheshire Cat designs, please visit the other denizens of Wonderland:
The Caterpillar
Bill the Lizard
Alice


"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat, "We're all mad here."

CHADES CHALLENGE XX:
THE CHESHIRE CAT

That's right, folks, The Chades (Character Design) Challenge is back! Mostly because Vi and I are excited about Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland and we're inspired to do our own versions of our favorite character, the Cheshire Cat. If you're also feeling creative, post your own design this Friday on your blog. Let me know once you have, and I'll put up links to everyone's designs.

Bonus points if you also draw Alice.

Aww, Steve, now I have to forgive you for Crystal Skull.

THE ACTUAL JURASSIC JOURNAL
Part Four of The Jurassic Journals

I'm not much of a journaler. In fact, I've never kept an on-going journal in my entire life (other than reading journals required in English class). However, my memory is lousy and extremely unreliable, and I wanted to remember everything about my first dino trip. So, I decided to keep a journal of my adventure into fossil country. My sketchbook doubled quite nicely as a dino-diary and I was able to catalogue, not only all of my frustrations of finding nothing but dirt for hours on end, but also great quotes from my fellow diggers.

One fella in particular, a fellow newbie named David Bourke, had the greatest quotes and stories. His anecdotes would start with these amazing hooks like, "So I was drinking moonshine at a fiddler's convention..." My favorite quote of David's was when he and I were talking about Disney's Fantasia:

David: "Fantasia was one that I went back and saw in the sixties in a whole different light."

Me: "Because of your appreciation for music?"

David nods, thoughtfully.

David: "Plus I was really high."

The nearly illegible notes on this spread are from a conversation I had with Pete Larson about whether or not dinosaurs reached REM state of sleep and were capable of dreaming. Pete reckons they could based on the fact that birds do.

Most of these sketches are me copying out of Robert Bakker's book The Dinosaur Heresies in an attempt to learn actual dinosaur anatomy.

And, just for fun, here's a picture of a female wolf spider covered with her babies taken by my buddy and fellow digger, Amar Dosanj. Sorta brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it?

TOY STORY 1&2

IN THE THIRD DIMENSION!

In case you haven't heard, Toy Story 1 and 2 are being rereleased theatrically in 3D this October. Just in time for my mom's birthday; I guess I know what I'm doing with her this year. I've got to say, Toy Story is still my favorite Pixar film, I'm looking forward to enjoying it in a whole extra dimension.

Check out the trailer here!