The Hunchback of Las Hoyas

Concavenator has to be one of the most baffling dinosaurs discovered in recent years. Named in 2010, this Spanish predator conforms to most carcharodontosaur anatomical conventions, apart from the two extremely high vertebrae before its hips, which may have supported a camel-like hump in life. This dinosaur was also initially believed to have had quill-like feathers along on its arm (a la Velociraptor, which has been found with feather-anchoring knobs along its forelimbs), but this hypothesis has since been criticized by experts like Darren Naish.

Initially, this sketch was going to be a full skeletal recreation with the living dinosaur stalking somewhere behind the stone slabs. Due to lack of space, however, I decided to split the specimen between fossil and carcass right where the two higher vertebrae meet, and the drawing is now better for it. The coloration is based on the Gila monster, a modern predator that thrives in harsh conditions, while the little black dots you see around parts of the corpse represent carrion-feeding flies.

Menaced Marsupials

Along with my open-bound, black dinosaur sketchbook, I've also been drawing my way through a smaller red book I purchased in Denmark a few years ago. I have an irrational weakness for blank, hardcover notebooks like this and for a while I wasn't sure how to fill it. Candidates included scenes from classical operas or ballets, Greek gods, heroes, and monsters, and DC or Marvel characters, but I eventually decided to devote it to endangered animals -- in part because of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 's Red Book of Endangered Species, but also because I had recently read Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. In a few decades, some of these creatures would join the ranks of the thylacine, the dodo, and the mammoth, so why not capture them on the page before we have nothing left but photos and taxidermy? It would also be a chance to draw more mammals (and eventually birds and amphibians) when the vast majority of my animal drawings have been of non-avian dinosaurs.

The first animal group I approached were the Australian marsupials, many of which have been pushed to brink not by European invaders such as dogs, cats, and rabbits, but also the infamous and nigh-invincible cane toad, first plopped on to the continent in 1935.

Northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus)

Current Range: Northern Australia

Conservation Status: Endangered

Numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus)

Current Range: Southern Australia

Conservation Status: Endangered

Northern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus krefftii)

Current Range: Northeastern Australia

Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (pop. 163 in 2010)

Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii)
Current Range: Tasmania
Conservation Status: Endangered

 

In contrast to other endangered marsupials, the biggest current threat to Tasmanian devils is devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), a gruesome parasitic cancer spread by face-biting as shown in the first drawing. The tumors disfiguring the devil above are mild compared what a quick Google image search of DFTD will show you.

J. Rex

Perhaps the dinosaur closest to Jurassic World's Indominus rex (barring the enhanced intelligence and ability to change color) was Saurophaganax maximus, or as some paleontologists regard it, Allosaurus maximus. Regardless of its true identity, this predator was a close relative and contemporary of Allosaurus, though significantly larger.

Skeletal sketch of the type specimen at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with skin, muscle, and keratin outlines.

Saurophaganax (color scheme still pending) chomps into a diplodocoid's tail.

Both of these drawings were challenging to execute and while I'm mostly happy with both, I wish had came up with a better target for the lunging head in the second drawing. Allosaurs are believed to have slammed their jaws into their victims, causing them to bleed to death before eating them in earnest. An allosaur that attacked an Apatosaurus or Diplodocus from the tail would either be exceptionally petty, considering the more fatty, vulnerable flanks, or exceptionally stupid and risky, given that these tails may have been these sauropods' best weapons.

The Biggest Americans

In honor of the 4th of July, here's a drawing I did about a year ago of the United States' biggest and best-known sauropods. It currently hangs on the wall my desk is propped up against, along with a few other drawings and memorabilia (hence the color wheel penetrating the photo):

1) Alamosaurus
2) Brachiosaurus
3) Sauroposeidon
4) Camarasaurus
5) Diplodocus
6) Apatosaurus

Some of the sauropods recreated here (notably the Alamosaurus and Apatosaurus) were drawn directly from skeletal mounts. Hence, I'm happiest with how those sauropods turned out in a piece that otherwise doesn't come together all that well. The Camarasaurus is too large and the Diplodocus too small, while my color choices here and there were a bit suspect. Also, about a month after completing this piece, I learned that Sauroposeidon is now regarded as a titanosaur, meaning it would have looked more like Alamosaurus than Brachiosaurus.

The hardest part of this drawing was the two brachiosaurs, since there's really only one reliable giant brachiosaur mount in the world (that being the Giraffatitan skeleton at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin). I made another attempt to capture Brachiosaurus about a month ago in my sketchbook, basing my reconstruction of the mount in front of the Field Museum in Chicago, believed to have been a subadult. I'm a lot happier with the results.

Head and neck profile.

Skull and full profile.

Happy Independence Day!

Oligocene Oddities

In a departure from dinosaurs in color, here are some sketches I did last winter of North America's Oligocene mammals:

Archaeotherium, an early member of the entelodonts (a.k.a. the "terminator pigs", though they're now believed to been more closely related to hippos and whales.

Miohippus, an early horse.

Subhyracodon, an early, hornless rhinoceros. This cow-sized herbivore lived at about the same time as the indricotheres, hornless rhinos that grow taller than giraffes and heavier than the largest elephants.