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.

Para Group - Attempt I

Here is my first attempt to recreate the three Parasaurolophus species in color, traced over the drawing of the skulls I posted last week before being colored with pencils (minus the beaks for now).

From Top: "Joey"the baby Parasaurolophus (probably P. cyrtocristatus), P. cyrtocristatus, P. walkeri, and P. tubicen (not to scale).

Choosing an appropriate palette for iconic dinosaurs can be frustrating, since I feel the need to find a distinct yet practical one that hasn't been utilized by artists (e.g. dull green with a blood red crest). The challenge is made even greater when you have a feature as alien of Parasaurolophus' crest to color.

The main leitmotifs of this piece are a combination of dark stripes and spots, a paler underside, a war between reds, yellows, and browns, and a striking crest that be used to distinguish an individual animal. I think I dropped the ball with this last theme, and hope to improve next time I take a stab at this perplexing animal.

Corythosaurus Collection 2014

Between a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and multiple visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences last year, I did several sketches focusing on Corythosaurus, complete skeletons of which are mounted at both museums. The AMNH also had a few skulls on display at the time (last I checked, the Dinosaur Hall was being renovated).

 

 ANSP skeleton from the front, along with a hand study.

ANSP Corythosaurus from the left flank, sans hands. Drawn under the instruction of Dr. Jason Poole.

AMNH Corythosaurus skulls

Ornithopod comparative hand study. All but Edmontosaurus' represent the left hand.

Young Corythosaurus from the Carnegie Museum.

ALSO: My review of Jurassic World on Hubpages (published on Wednesday)

The Lambeosaur Identity Crises of 1975
 

Initially, the smaller crests of some lambeosaurs from the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta were thought to represent a genus called "Procheneosaurus", christened by William Parks in 1920. In 1975, paleontologist Peter Dodson reassessed these skulls and found that they belonged to juveniles of larger local lambeosaurs such as Corythosaurus and Lambeosaurus itself. Ironically, the name Lambeosaurus was crafted three years after "Procheneosaurus", but ended up superceding it (unlike Brontosaurus, now valid once more).

Parasaurolophus also went through an identity crisis, though this one had to do with sex rather than genus. The same year as Dodson's "Procheneosaurus" paper, another hadrosaur expert called James Hopson believed he had found proof of sexual dimorphism in these lambeosaurs, with males sporting larger crests than females. Presumably, this difference in size would have made the males' appearance (and perhaps their mating calls) more appealing to potential mates. This hypothesis was based on skulls from New Mexico and has since been rejected, as the New Mexico skulls are now known to have represented two separate species: The older, short-crested Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus and the younger, long-crested Parasaurolophus tubicen.

1) "Joey", the baby Parasaurolophus- Discovered in the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah in 2009 and measured about 8 feet (2.4 m) long. Probably belongs to Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus.
2) Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus- From the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah (76.1-74 MYA) and the Fruitland Formation of New Mexico (75.5-74.5 MYA).
3) Parasaurolophus walkeri- From the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta (76.5-75.3 MYA). This was the first species of Parasaurolophus described and seems to be the one that most artistic depictions of this animal are based on.
4) Parasaurolophus tubicen- From the Kirtland Formation of New Mexico (74.3-73 MYA).

COMING SOON:

A colored, skin-and-muscle version of the last drawing and a link to my review of Jurassic World.
 

Experiments in Sauropod Color

Few dinosaurs present more challenges for an artist than sauropods. To do them properly, you not only need to set their necks and tails at believable angles (i.e. not have either snaking around or the former arching swan-like above the ground), but you also need to capture the sheer size of their bodies and their comparatively tiny and often-bizarre heads at the same time. 

Perhaps even more difficult, though, is choosing an appropriate color scheme for these creatures, especially if — like me — you don't want to just make them uniformly gray or dull brown like elephants or rhinos.

When coloring dinosaurs in general (or at least those without preserved melanosomes), I try to follow these rules:

1) Choose a color scheme that won't make it too obvious to predators, or — if your dinosaur is a predator — too obvious to prey.

2) For a realistic-looking color scheme, the modern animal kingdom is a good place to start. But...

3) If you adopt a modern animal's colors directly, make sure it's not too obvious. What are the chances that a Triceratops would be white with thick black stripes like a zebra?

4) When possible, you should consider making a dinosaur's oddest features the most brightly- or boldly-colored ones. Crests, plates, frills, sails, and even horns may likely have played some part in species recognition or sexual selection, so why not make them stand out? For sauropods, I tend to do this with their necks.

No book or course openly preaches these rules; I've just set them for myself over the years and believe they've helped my paleo-art. I'll let you be the judge.

Isanosaurus 

(with koi fish colors)

                                                 

 Brachytrachelopan

Futalongkosaurus

(with monitor lizard stripes)

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!

Shishugou Downpour

This is a piece I started last week, coinciding with a much-needed, on-and-off downpour here in Philadelphia.

The setting is present-day Xinjiang, northwestern China, (the Shishugou Formation, to be precise) during the mid-to-late Jurassic (160 million years ago, to be imprecise). Here, a herd of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum — a candidate for the much-contested title of largest dinosaur — treks through a drenched floodplain. Along the way, they cross paths with Guanlong, a distant relative of the much later tyrannosaurs.

This is one of the few drawings in the rain I've ever attempted and I tried to get everything down: The thick, relentless curtain of raindrops, the ripples, the flecks of water dropping off the dinosaurs and the water's surface. I feel, though, that the dinosaurs themselves don't look particularly wet and that I'll need to go in with an eraser to add the shine of the water to their pelts and feathers.

To give you an idea of scale, Guanlong stood about three feet tall and stretched about ten feet long. M. sinocandorum is projected to have reached about 35 feet high and 115 feet long.