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A Dinosaur A Day

@a-dinosaur-a-day / a-dinosaur-a-day.com

An edutainment blog about dinosaurs, birds, and prehistoric life
Run by Meig Dickson (ey/em/eir), Msc, a paleoecologist who should be researching.
Every Bird is a Dinosaur. No exceptions!
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About the Blog: This was once an ongoing daily dinosaur encyclopedia. Since I and the artists have gone off to start "real careers" and whatnot, it's become a repository for (mostly) accurate dinosaur content on tumblr. AKA, birds and reconstructions of extinct dinosaurs that don't make my eye twitch

About the Blogger: I'm Meig (ey/em), a paleontology doctoral candidate trying to finish my damn dissertation. I'm also a fat intersex disabled neurodivergent insane nonbinary pansexual jewish anarchist with five companion parrots and a fantastic spouse. I've been trying to use social media less as I've realized how much it impacts my own mental health and wellbeing, so I'm not really online much. But when I am, I post shitposts to @zygodactylus and Jewish/Leftist stuff to @jewish-kulindadromeus. My account is @anachronornis because I thrive on chaos.

About the Blogger's Research: I'm studying the paleoecology and adaptive radiation of birds following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction and during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

About asks: Feel free to send them, but I cannot guarantee I will answer them, as I am trying to graduate in the next year or two

About the Blogger's Birds: I have two cockatiels, Minerva and Ahsoka; two conures, Ellie and Willis; and a caique, Bumi. All are adoptees, most from shelters. Willis had a mate, Aurora, who was very sick - we took her in for hospice care, as she and Willis had been in a shelter for sixteen years and we wanted her end of life to be more peaceful. She actually lived longer than we thought she would, but she sadly crossed the rainbow bridge in December of 2023. The only one who poses for photos to any capacity is Ellie, so you may have seen a photo of her elsewhere. We're also each other's ESA's so there's that I guess.

Aaaand that's probably all you need to know. Enjoy the dinosaurs, aka, all the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon (and Cetiosaurus if you wanna be a pedant about it). Enjoy the floof.

If you are looking for the 2026 Draw Dinos Daily Prompt List, here's a google doc!

2026 Dinosaur Prompt List
Google Docs
#about the blog#about the blogger#palaeoblr#actual scientist#birblr#DrawDinosDaily#2026DrawDinosDaily
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1.1.2026 Can't promise I'll keep up with this, but I started, so that's cool Original post https://www.tumblr.com/a-dinosaur-a-day/804334192315006976/2026-dinosaur-prompt-list

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2.1.2026 Panurus biarmicus, but make it fashion Pose/Color ref credit

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3.1.2026 Bonitasaura salgadoi

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4.1.2026 Rollulus rouloul living up to the name by being the most shape borb

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5.1.2026 Gargoyleosaurus parkpinorum doing a very good job

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6.1.2026 Cypseloides niger wyvern

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7.1.2026 Caudipteryx zoui Maybe it's cuz I live with them but the "tail feather dino" made me think of turkeys.

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8.1.2026 Sarcoramphus papa He papa

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9.1.2026 Leptoceratops gracilis. Weird dog.

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10.1.2026 Loboparadisea sericea. Fluffy and mad about it.

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11.1.2026 Ceratosaurus nasicornis Nasicornis...ceratops...dinos were horny

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12.1.2026 Dromornis stirtoni You can't show me a camel size bird and expect me NOT to try to ride it.

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13.1.2026 Aralosaurus tuberiferus Forgot a lo in there. Oh well. Not late!

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14.1.2026 Fregata magnificens I feel like garbo today so no fresh baked doodle, but here's a frigate-inspired wyvern idea from a while ago.

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15.1.2026 manipulonyx reshetovi Saved the most important fingies

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16.1.2026 Lithornis vulturinus Not many good refs of this thing but the few renditions I could find kinda looked like a little shorebird so have a wiggle

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17.1.2026 Massospondylus carinatus

Finally, tickle chicken

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18.1.2026 Prenocephale prenes What if lil mushroom

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Januaraptor day 20! Vireo huttoni (Hutton's vireo)

Apparently am having a week of villagers

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thatonegaycactus asked:

Is there an order to how non avian dinosaurs are placed in the list or did you just randomly place them?

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There’s both randomness and order!

Basically I divided dinosauria into 27 groups. Each month has at least one dinosaur from each group. The remaining days typically fill in with diversity I couldn’t get to in each group. I then went and assigned dinosaurs to each day as such:

1) special dinosaurs for special days (description days, holidays, friend birthdays)

2) dinosaurs closely related to special day dinosaurs put as far from that special day within the month as possible

3) everything else filled in as balanced (ie, not like, five passerines in a row) as possible, and as much alternating between extinct and extant as possible

The specific dinosaurs were picked by myself and my friends who are also paleontologists and ornithologists

#drawdinosdaily#palaeoblr#birblr#dinoblr#dinosaurs
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Quantitative analysis of stem-palaeognath flight capabilities sheds light on ratite dispersal and flight loss

Klara Widrig, Fabio Alfieri, Pei-Chen Kuo, Helen James and Daniel J. Field

Abstract

Lithornithids are an assemblage of Palaeogene fossil birds thought to represent stem-group members of Palaeognathae. Among extant palaeognaths, which include flightless ratites such as ostriches, only tinamous can fly, though only in anaerobic bursts. Despite their limited dispersal capabilities, the phylogenetic interrelationships and geographic distributions of palaeognaths imply that their early relatives were capable of long-distance dispersal, although quantitative skeletal evidence has not been applied to this question. We investigate the flight capabilities and ecology of the Palaeogene lithornithid Lithornis promiscuus using a three-dimensional geometric morphometric dataset spanning the avian crown group. Our models reject the hypothesis that Lithornis would have relied on tinamou-like burst flight, and show that its sternum morphology is consistent with a range of aerobic, flapping flight styles—closely resembling those of many extant birds exhibiting pronounced dispersal capabilities. Our results are consistent with inferences from lithornithid wing shape, supporting the hypothesis that at least some stem palaeognaths were capable of long-distance flight, helping to clarify the origins of the transoceanic distributions of extant flightless ratites.

Read the paper:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0320

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Today's dinosaur is Torosaurus. A large ceratopsian from the late Cretaceous. It's much like it's more recognizable cousin the Triceratops, but is nearly double the size and displays a proportionately larger frill.

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Januaraptor day 13, Aralosaurus tuberiferus. I don't actually have a fun text to go with this one, I just kind of did whatever. I was going to put bright markings on the wings too for startle effect but couldn't get them to work.

Bought a set of pencil brushes to try out. Most are kind of useless to me (even the coloring pencils are very small in size and need fiddling to size up), but there are a few that seem interesting. Tomorrow I'll try actually coloring with it instead of just doing it all on one layer and then hue-shifting.

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Januaraptor 19: Prenocephale prenes

i was not excited to learn how to draw pachys today so i put this off tremendously, but im really digging how this one came out!

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