Turtle Beaks And Dinosaurs

It’s interesting to note that that beaks of animals come in all sorts of strange shapes, including hooks and serrations. Sometimes, none of this matches the underlying bone structure.

Qilong’s Tutorial

Hexinlusaurus multidens is the name given to a skeleton of a not-quite fully mature animal from the famous Dashanpu dinosaur quarry in Zigong City, in the Ziliujing District of Sichuan Province, China. The animal was originally given the name Yandusaurus multidens (He & Cai, 1983) but later transferred to Agilisaurus as Agilisaurus multidens because it was determined to be “not that similar” (Peng, 1992). Later, the same treatment was given in regard to Agilisaurus, and it was transferred to a new name, Hexinlusaurus, to honor one of the species’ original descriptors, Dr. He Xin-lu (Barrett et al., 2005).

The name will eventually be changed, but this really is Hexinlusaurus multidens, I swear!

The Devil, Hairier

As an update to my previous post, Rendering Unto Nature What is Nature’s Due, I’ve taken the opportunity to create another careful skeletal diagram for the purposes of creating silhouettes for Mike Keesey’s Phylo Pic. I’ve already rendered one for Pterorhynchus wellnhoferi, which as it turned out is the 600th image submitted! This time, however, I decided to render my Sordes pilosus Sharov, 1971 (you know, the “hairy devil”), which proved a bit more challenging.

Canadian Amber, Fin-Tailed Dinosaurs, and a Despairing Blogger

Science, as a process, promotes an adversarial system. A scientist poses an hypothesis from an observation, then attempts to refute this hypothesis through further observations arrived at from experimentation and testing, and poses a further hypothesis from the results; if it stands, he can make a claim that a thing is, or isn’t. Another scientist comes along and attempts to refute that finding, and so on and so forth. We can presume that scientist A and scientist B are both using the same data or are merely increasing the data used to make observations, and that the same data is included by further authors, thus merely expanding the perspective. But it seems there are adversaries, and there are enemies. Some scientists, against seeming logic, will not even regard the same datasets offered, and use this as refutation of previous datasets or observations. Science, we presume, is not served when workers talk past one another, or make claims that a thing simply is, without any substantiation for why.

Rendering Unto Nature What is Nature’s Due

Ah, bastardizing titles, my favorite.

Today is a look at a skeleton I showed off before, that of the Hell Creek oviraptorosaur, hereafter HCO. This animal, represented by a few different skeletons (one of which was found with the great “Sue” skeleton, FMNH PR2801) is one of the most enigmatic of known oviraptorosaurs, due to its ubiquity — there are casts of this thing everywhere! — while having not been described … yet.

Enquilled

It’s kinda of a mystery, and I’m not sure I can solve it, but…

The Never-Ending Artistic Revision Cycle – MPC-D 100/42

Every so often, new data gets thrown out there that requires us artists to change how we present the scientist’s work. Recently, I’ve been sharply reminded that even when scientists mean well, some things just get mucked up. One of the best examples in the Zamyn Khond oviraptorosaur, commonly called Citipati sp., which is based on a well-known, but rather obscure specimen, MPC-D 100/42 (formerly, IGM or GI or GIN or GI (SPS) 100/42 — so many names!).

Caught in a Moment

Oviraptorosaurs are my favorite group of fossil animals, a fact I do not think anyone doubts. WAAAAY back at the beginning of last year, shortly after ending a somewhat lengthy drawing hiatus of about 2 years (egad!), I decided to test if my skills were too rusty or if the impetus to improve had shown fruit as I put graphite to paper … and sought to be better at what I was doing before. As such, the result, a depiction of the poorly-known oviraptorid Conchoraptor gracilis, was a trial to show a profile of the forward body. He (or she?) seems to be reaching out, but I wanted to provide an ambiguous dynamic, where the lower portion of the image seems in motion but the upper is still. Perhaps he is in display for his mate, or to get another girl to lay her eggs in his nest. I think I succeeded in applying some ideas about reconstruction of the beak, eye, feathering, and general form to this, while keeping a distinctive style intact. Whether I succeeded in achieving “better” work than I have in the past is up to the viewer. I mean, well –  it’s not my best, I know, but it is pretty up there and high on my favorites list.

The Strange Case of Dr. Masiaka, Preview

Just a short post, and a picture.

Reconstructed entire skull of PVL 4061, holotype of Noasaurus leali (Bonaparte & Powell, 1980).

Dinosaurs of the Morrison Had No Lips … or Did They?

Just a minor post. I wanted to present a portion of a larger project on attempting to illustrate typical dinosaurs (especially ornithischians), and I thought “What better method than that well-sampled and intriguing Morrison Formation and its remarkable diversity?” So I started using a minimalistic stippling technique to draw the “busts” of the Morrison paleofauna, focusing on ornithischians. This has the advantage of allowing me to approach well-studied, well-photographed, and decently accessible taxa from the Morrison Formation. This runs into a small problem, that of the composition of the Morrison “fauna,” which is in fact comprised of several temporal (and apparently regional) faunae. To simplify things, I am ignoring all of that.