Chasing the rains

Chasing the Rains Acrylic on paper 4"x6"

©2011

One of the earliest museum visits I can remember is a trip to the Natural History Museum on Kildare street in Dublin in the 1980s. Like any kid under the age of ten, I was palpitating at the thought of a vast dinosaur hall, crammed with stegosaurs, towering sauropods and, of course, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. Museums, to my mind, were nothing more than monuments to prehistoric glory - without dinosaurs they couldn't exist.

If you've been to the Natural History Museum in Dublin you can probably imagine how disappointed I was. A mouldy basking shark and a handful of Megaloceras skeletons are no substitute for the glories of Jurassic North America. Implanted in my mind that day was the idea that dinosaurs are foreign, that all the "good ones" (i.e. the big, fearsome ones) are not only from the distant past but from far flung, exotic locations such as Montana and Morocco, which I could never hope to visit.


Nothing could be further from the truth. Several decades of discoveries in the south of England (particularly the Isle of Wight) paint a picture of an early Cretaceous world every bit as dramatic as that of North America. Above I've depicted a few of them: two Neovenator chase a sauropod (Angloposeidon?) across a floodplain in early Cretaceous England, with Hypsilophodon in the foreground. Giant sauropod remains are rare and fragmentary in the South of England and it's been suggested they migrated through the area. In the foreground of the thumbnails below is Baryonyx, a unique but equally dramatic carnivore that subsisted primarily on fish. But more on that later...