Africa's Jurassic Park
Though Spinosaurus has a superstar among dinosaurs (thanks, in part to Jurassic Park III and Paul Sereno's aquatic restoration of this animal proposed in 2014), few other dinosaurs from this continent receive half as much exposure. About a decade before Ernst Stromer described this bizarre theropod, however, other German paleontologists like Eberhard Fraas and Werner Janensch uncovered a host of amazing new dinosaurs from the Tendaguru Formation in Tanzania (then the colony of German East Africa). The largest of these was Giraffatitan, known as "Brachiosaurus brancai" until the 2000s. Its skeleton at the Museum fur Natürkunde in Berlin stands over 40 feet high and remains the most complete of any large brachiosaur.
Despite the sheer size of this sauropod, Kentrosaurus is easily the Tendaguru Formation's stand-out dinosaur. It was smaller but thornier cousin of Stegosaurus, and according to a 2011 study by Heinrich Mallison, a single swipe of the tail would have been more than enough to crack open a human skull. Like many other dinosaurs, Kentrosaurus is believed to have had a much thicker tail than previously thought (thanks to a 2010 paper by Phil Currie and W. Scott Parsons). In addition to the animal's rear anatomy as a whole, this drawing is intended to reflect that idea, as well as the discovery of small osteoderms in other stegosaurs.
One of Kentrosaurus' contemporaries was Dicraeosaurus, an oddity among Late Jurassic sauropods in that A) it was less than 50 feet long, B) it had an unusually short neck and C) an strangely high spine. To emphasize this latter feature, I gave my Dicraeosaurus bright markings along its back, drawing inspiration from the Malagasy rainbow frog (albeit without the blue). Since the skull of the Berlin mount is quite obviously a plastic cast based on Diplodocus, I chose to draw this copy rather than reconstruct the actual head.
Theropods are also known from the Tendaguru Formation, including the early spinosaur Ostafrikasaurus and the carcharodontosaur Veterupristisaurus. Since neither is known from a good skeleton yet, however, I chose to portray an equally mysterious theropod from the site.
Like Dicraeosaurus, Elaphrosaurus is also mounted at the Museum für Naturkunde as a half-bone, half-cast skeleton. Growing up, it was also portrayed as an early, carnivorous ancestor to the toothless ornithomimosaurs. In recent years, however, paleontologists have come to regard it as a ceratosaur -- possibly a large relative of the short-armed, ostrich-like Limusaurus. which was running around China about this time. My sketch of Elaphrosaurus is meant to wed this idea with the museum's current mount, implying that the animal was a long-legged herbivorous theropod rather than the dinosaur equivalent of the cheetah.
Though Spinosaurus has a superstar among dinosaurs (thanks, in part to Jurassic Park III and Paul Sereno's aquatic restoration of this animal proposed in 2014), few other dinosaurs from this continent receive half as much exposure. About a decade before Ernst Stromer described this bizarre theropod, however, other German paleontologists like Eberhard Fraas and Werner Janensch uncovered a host of amazing new dinosaurs from the Tendaguru Formation in Tanzania (then the colony of German East Africa). The largest of these was Giraffatitan, known as "Brachiosaurus brancai" until the 2000s. Its skeleton at the Museum fur Natürkunde in Berlin stands over 40 feet high and remains the most complete of any large brachiosaur.
Despite the sheer size of this sauropod, Kentrosaurus is easily the Tendaguru Formation's stand-out dinosaur. It was smaller but thornier cousin of Stegosaurus, and according to a 2011 study by Heinrich Mallison, a single swipe of the tail would have been more than enough to crack open a human skull. Like many other dinosaurs, Kentrosaurus is believed to have had a much thicker tail than previously thought (thanks to a 2010 paper by Phil Currie and W. Scott Parsons). In addition to the animal's rear anatomy as a whole, this drawing is intended to reflect that idea, as well as the discovery of small osteoderms in other stegosaurs.
One of Kentrosaurus' contemporaries was Dicraeosaurus, an oddity among Late Jurassic sauropods in that A) it was less than 50 feet long, B) it had an unusually short neck and C) an strangely high spine. To emphasize this latter feature, I gave my Dicraeosaurus bright markings along its back, drawing inspiration from the Malagasy rainbow frog (albeit without the blue). Since the skull of the Berlin mount is quite obviously a plastic cast based on Diplodocus, I chose to draw this copy rather than reconstruct the actual head.
Theropods are also known from the Tendaguru Formation, including the early spinosaur Ostafrikasaurus and the carcharodontosaur Veterupristisaurus. Since neither is known from a good skeleton yet, however, I chose to portray an equally mysterious theropod from the site.
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