Hațeg Island Residents

At the end of the Cretaceous period, Hațeg Island in modern Romania was home to one of the strangest animal communities known to science: With a few exceptions (including one very big one), most of the animals here were miniature versions of creatures from the mainland. I had long wanted to visit this island through my art, as well as do another two-page, multi-species spread like my Niobrara Aquarium piece (see the last post of September 2015). Here, then, is the result:

1) Rhabdodon priscus
2) Struthiosaurus transylvanicus
3) Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus (note the extra "s"; don't ask me why)
4) Allodaposuchus precedens
5) Bradycmene draculae (yup)
6) Magyarosaurus dacus
7) "Hatzegopteryx" thambena (I use the parentheses because some scientists regard the genus as synonymous with Quetzalcoatlus)
8) Zalmoxes robustus
9) Balaur bondoc

The two smallest animals here, Struthiosaurus and Bradycmene, were both about two meters (six and a half feet) long.

Choosing color schemes for the three largest dwarf dinosaurs (the largest of which was 20 feet long) was a challenge, but I ultimately opted to give both rhabdodonts spots (based on an earlier hand drawing I did of Muttaburrasaurus, now classified as a rhabdodont by some) and to give Telmatosaurus a striped tail, just as skin impressions of North American hadrosaurs seem to suggest. So as not obscure Magyarosaurus' osteoderms, I made the animal a solid, bluish-green.

Balaur is reconstructed according to the hypothesis that it was a flightless, paravian theropod rather than a dromaeosaur, hence the shorter skull (the real one still hasn't been found). As for the star of this spread, Hatzegopteryx, I worked off the idea that azhdarchid pterosaurs were more like storks than vultures, opting for river game over carrion. With that in mind, I based loosely based its body colors on the saddle-billed stork of sub-Saharan Africa, while I based the crest and beak coloration off of the wrinkled hornbill of Southeast Asia.

I'm hoping that image of a giant pterosaur towering over much smaller dinosaurs (plus Allodaposuchus) will take people who view this piece off-guard and that their eyes will linger on this beast. The other eight, I'll admit, are drawn rather small and perhaps under-rendered, but given their size in life and the crudeness of some of their fossils, that's sort of the point.