@dilophosaurusbard
Writer and artist of things prehistoric, aquatic and sometimes mythological. Cranky bio-wizard (he/him/they/them) 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ my art: https://johnmeszarosart.com State Cryptids blog: http://statecryptids.blogspot.com
A short friend
Some studies I did for this drawing based on stills from the movie.
Drew one of my favorite alien designs, the being from the original ending of Disney’s 1980 gothic ghosty story film “The Watcher in the Woods”. The reshot ending of the theatrical release depicted the Watcher as a column of light, but the original alien puppet is waaay cooler.
The original fotoplayer of scicomm
Just wanted to show off this little display about nature in winter that I put up at my library job.
Really enjoying all the cool classic free noir movies on this channel
youtu.be/lqQtxcCKD_k?...
Cryptids in the planetarium
Took the cryptids to my planetarium job today. Mothman from the Mothman Museum. Flatwoods, Van Meter Visitor, Enfield Horror, and Vegetable Man from @cryptidcomforts.bsky.social
Parking lot ice and salt stains that look like spacecraft views of Kuiper Belt objects.
Caprellid party off the docks today
🐙🦑🌿
A slightly late entry for Goblin Week. Made to express my frustration at white supremacist losers using Mac Tonight as a mascot for their racist rap albums, and thus making me feel uncomfortable about using moon-headed creatures in my fantasy artwork.
(It’s, uh, a bit of a niche frustration.)
Goblin Week Day 2!
This green dude’s playing is playing one of my favorite weird musical instruments, the glass armonica!
Made of a series of glass bowls stacked inside each other and turned on their sides and played with wet finger tips on the bowl rims.
Chondrocladia lampadiglobus carnivorous sponge, which looks like a pole with several translucent spheres at the top. Photo taken by the Cyana submersible, during the GEOCYARISE 2 campaign, on the East Pacific Ridge. Sourced from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Campagne_GEOCYARISE_-_Eponge_carnivore_Chondrocladia_lampadiglobus_(Ifremer_00703-81529).jpg
I was on Tune FM (the University of New England student radio station) to talk about Sponges, Carnivorous Sponges, and a worm that lives with carnivorous sponges 🧪
#Invertebrate
www.tunefm.net/2025/12/19/c...
Fantastic article on these amazing creatures by the incredibly talented @restingdinoface.bsky.social!
(Also, for more on evolution of elephant/proboscidean tusks & trunks, check out my recent exploration/review paper [More to come soon!]) anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)
Putting out some winter decor this morning.
First post for Goblin Week 2026!
Here’s a little dude based on the clothing moth Tineola bisselliella.
I think Tineola is super cool because it’s descended from moths that feed on keratin-rich bits from mammal carcasses like fur and horns- parts that other scavengers don’t eat.
It took me more than 4 years to capture a scene I could only dream of. A magnificent Condor soars above the peaks of Argentina's Mount Fitz Roy, as they are spot lit in beautiful morning light.
#bluesky #photography #landscape #birds #nature #art
#landscapephotography #naturephotography #sunrise
An illustration of Paul Bunyan, the giant American mythic lumberjack, giving one ICE agent a wedgie, and punting another with a shoe. Another ICE agent has just slipped and eaten shit on the ground, without anyone’s help. The text reads PAUL BUNYAN SEZ FUCK ICE.
Paul Bunyan sez FUCK ICE.
Ohio’s Loveland Frog and Portland’s Inflatable Frog both agree.
Hashtag All cryptids are antifascist.
Close-ups of the ghosts-ups* from the spooky playset I made to give to trick-or-treaters last Halloween.
*(ghost stand-ups… I needed it to rhyme somehow…)
Finally posting this ghost cut-out standees playset I made this past Halloween to give to trick-or-treaters.
Based on a real group of gregarine apicomplexans that live as internal parasites in bamboo worms.
More microbes from Enceladus. These are Rubber Chicken nitrophages, tiny predators that play an important role in nitrogen-cycling in the ice ecosystem.
Currently two known species. One lives in the detritus of Cryoconite holes, and a bioluminescent one that lives in the deeper ice tunnels.
Just finished as the clouds rolled in.
Orion Nebula captured tonight from backyard with Seestar S50.
2 hours and 12 mins of integration.
Happy with how it turned out!
That damn Sydney-Dallas A380 (?) just clipped the lower right of the image so you can see the light trails from it passing.
🔭
Dang, this is a straight-up poem.
Weed Smoke
Undulating in a sunbeam
Like a pyrosome
Just came up to visit
Y’all should check out this online program my sister-in-law is teaching about Babylonian Star-lore.
www.worldvirtualtours.online/events/babyl...
When I worked at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum there was a neat visible woman statue. She disappeared when the museum moved to their new building, and I like to think she still wanders the basement halls of the university like a ghost.
This is a “sister project” to my Saturn book, about the life of the solar system’s icy ocean moons.
These creatures are part of a kinetotrophic ecosystem that live in and under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Callisto and derive energy from the seismic forces of meteor impacts.
We have 526 scientists signed up for spring semester. We try to get that to about 1000 scientists before unleashing the teachers on the database. Wanna connect a class of kids with science this spring? Sign up!
Yeah, I definitely didn’t know any of that stuff when I watched it. Kid me thought he was supposed to be a guy who literally was trying to be a pirate (specifically a space pirate, for some reason), but he wasn’t good at it, so he mostly just watched cartoons.
