Morrison Drought

Here's another dinosaurs-in-extreme-weather-themed piece I'm working on.

This one focuses on an adolescent Stegosaurus stenops, inspired by (but not based closely on) Sophie, a young specimen recently erected at the Natural History Museum in London. Sophie was about 18 feet long (a few feet short of the adult S. stenops length) and died around 150 million years ago in modern Wyoming.

 

Like the Shishugou Downpour piece, one of the drawing's aims to convey the discomfort of the dinosaurs undergoing these climatic extremes. Here, the Stegosaurus shuffles forward with her mouth agape, panting in exhaustion and bearing an eager, parched tongue. If you look closely, you can see her wincing in pain. 

In the upper left hand corner, you'll notice that a bloody bite has been taken out of one of the plates, with hungry flies swarming around it. This addition was based on a fossilized plate with a similar, U-shaped missing chuck that closely matches the shape of an Allosaurus' muzzle. 

At the right in the background lies the corpse of a Camarasaurus, the most common sauropod in the Morrison Formation.

While I try to give most dinosaurs a distinct but not too obvious color pattern, I deliberating drained the Stegosaurus of her colors for this piece to fit with the bleakness of the drought and to show that she's not in the best of health. In better times, her plates would be bright red and her scales would primarily have been a rich orange.

More flies gather over the festering corpse of another, older Stegosaurus, which ultimately collapsed on a dry lake bed. In the foreground and immediate background stand dead Nilssonia, a tree-like cycad that grew larger, fern-like leaves.

Update- Only just noticed an error in the Stegosaurus: They have 19 plates, rather than 17. D'oh!