Tylosaurus' Troublesome Tummy

While non-avian dinosaurs were my gateway to science and remain my favorite prehistoric creatures, I've developed an appreciation for other extinct animal groups, including ichthyosaurs, mammoths, terror birds, and notosuchians. Lately, I've been fascinated by mosasaurs, and not just thanks to Jurassic World. While I grew up with images of green, ridge-backed leviathans that tussled with serpentine plesiosaurs and snatched pterosaurs from the sky, I'm much more intrigued with mosasaurs as depicted now, in light of recent discoveries about their tail anatomy (which now includes a sickle-shaped tail), skin color (which in some was black on top and white on bottom), and birthing methods (live underwater birth, like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetaceans).

With that in mind, I set out to depict the largest, most famous -- er, the most famous mosasaur after Mosasaurus, Tylosaurus.

While sketching the beasts' skull was no cakewalk, the thing that gave me the most trouble was capturing the underside of the mosasaur in the flesh. The skeletal mount I used looked fantastic, peering down on visitors like Smaug over Bilbo Baggins in the second Hobbit film; in retrospect, however, Tylosaurus may not have been flexible enough to assume this undulating pose. This made capturing the animal's tummy a nightmare, with constant erasures and redrawing of borders.

In the end, I settled with the boundaries established in the draft on the left, and tried to make the proximity of each body segment as clear as possible with different degrees of shading, but I still feel the drawing could have been much better if I had gotten the underside right.