There's a lot to digest in the paper because even fish-eating taxa that some regard as lipless - phytosaurs and spinosaurs - are inferred as lipped. (I've argued this for spinosaurs for over half a decade now in blog posts and books, most recently in 2025's Spinosaur Tales).
Mark Witton
So artists who still regard that JP T. rex aesthetic as plausible, or who draw sneaky, snaggly teeth emerging from lipped reptile mouths, need to get with the times. Deep-lipped, gummy lepidosaur-style jaws with reduced tooth visibility is what we should be imagining for most extinct reptiles.
Mark Witton
A lot of Terras and colleagues' approach builds on our recent work on theropod lips (Cullen et al. 2023), which is great to see. We aimed to present a toolkit for assessing the likelihood of extra-oral tissues in extinct animals and hoped it would be useful to others.
Minor quibbles aside, this is yet another detailed, thoughtful study arguing that liplessness is not the default for fossil reptiles, and the absence of studies arguing contrarily is noticeable. It's looking more and more likely that just a handful of specialised reptile clades had exposed teeth.
Book 8 contract SIGNED. Am pretty excited for this one! I'll be sharing teasers and previews while I write and illustrate it over the next 18 months (especially at Patreon: www.patreon.com/markwitton).
That's all for no - hey, what's this weirdly-proportioned sauropod doing here?
