Ancient Marine Reptiles, montage 1

I've managed to do something I haven't done in a long, long time... namely, finish a bunch of drawings! My plan for Ancient Marine Reptiles - my in-prep marine reptile book with the London -Natural History Museum - is to feature cladograms very much like those included in Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. If you have an exceptional memory, you might know that I have previously illustrated a fair number of Mesozoic marine reptiles for the in-prep textbook. Here's an old selection of plesiosaurs I did, for example...

But I can't simply recycle them, either because I no longer like them, or because they now look inaccurate. I've therefore had to do new versions. Furthermore, there are several lineages that I'd never illustrated before. So far, I've made a start on plesiosaurs, and because I need representatives of those key lineages that will be used on a cladogram, I've 'only' had to illustrate members of the main 'families'. The animals depicted above are (A) Plesiosaurus, archetypical plesiosaurid and plesiosauroid; (B) Cryptoclidus, the best known cryptoclidid; (C) the polycotylid Dolichorhynchops; (D) Leptocleidus, best known leptocleidid; (E) Microcleidus, best known microcleidid; (F) Rhomaleosaurus, most familiar of the rhomaleosaurids; (G) the giant pliosaurid Sachicasaurus, and (H) the Early Cretaceous elasmosaurid Jucha.

The drawings were based on various skeletal reconstructions, including those produced by Henrique Paes (A), Adam Smith (F) and Dan Folkes (G). I screwed up the contrast on some of the drawings such that they now look way too dark and thick-lined relative to the others. All of these images will be passed to those compiling the pictures for the book, and I'm hope they can sort this out.

By the way, I intend to write a TetZoo article on competing views about plesiosaur phylogeny. A key 1990s article by Robert Bakker marks a watershed: the transition point from a 'traditional' or 'conservative' classification (in vogue between the 1940s and 90s) to a messier, but more 'detail-based' one that has been supported in more recent works.

Ok, that's it for now! I need to do mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and Triassic marine reptile groups yet AND I need to arrange the groups into draft cladograms. Thanks as always for your support.