Niobrara Aquarium

Lately I've taken a break from drawing dinosaurs and have focused more on modern animals as well as what naturalist Nigel Marven dubbed "the co-stars" of the prehistoric world. This two-page spread focuses on large fish known from Kansas' Niobrara Formation, which 87 to 82 million years ago was submerged beneath a shallow sea. The fish here were drawn to scale with one another, with one inch used for one meter. To give you an idea of their size, the smallest -- Enchodus -- was 1.5 meters (5 feet) long.

1) Cretoxyrhina mantelli

2) Xiphactinus audax

3) Scapanorhynchus rhaphiodon

4) Pachyrhizodus caninus 

5) Enchodus petrosus

6) Bonnerichthys gladius

7) Saurodon leanus

8) Protosphyraena perniciosa

9) Ptychodus mortoni

Ironically, I found Cretoxyrhina the hardest to re-create. Sharks are not only deceptively difficult to draw and while this particular species belonged to the same order of sharks as the great white, I didn't want it to be a Jaws clone. Add to that the fact that only shark teeth fossilize (as the rest of their skeletons are made of cartilage) and many clashing artistic depictions for comparison, and you have a very hard creature to capture on the page.

Choosing color schemes for these animals was also quite difficult, since none of these species were likely reef-dwellers, yet I didn't want them all to be blue or gray. Both Scapanorhynchus and Ptychodus I made brown -- the former to stay obscured in the deep waters where it may have hunted, the latter for camouflaging itself along the seafloor in order to avoid mosasaurs. Enchodus is actually related to modern salmon, so I gave it similar markings (though with goldenrod and reddish brown instead of olive green and bright pink). Bonnerichthys has no close living relatives, but since it was a filter-feeder I based its colors on a photo of basking shark with marbled markings.

Capturing the Cause

For some of my endangered species drawings, I attempt to also capture the reason(s) why an animal is threatened with extinction. Even in the remote Amazon and Pantanal, the pollution menaces the giant otter, while the Sumatran tiger's existence is threatened largely thanks to deforestation, its jungle kingdom supplanted to make way for acacia plantations.

 

Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis)

Current Range: Northern South America, especially the Amazon River and the Pantanal.

Conservation Status: Endangered

Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis)

Current Range: Central Ethiopia

Conservation Status: Endangered

Somali wild ass (Equus africanus somaliensis)

Current Range: Northeast Africa, from eastern Eritrea to Somalia

Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (pop. c. 700-1000 in the wild)

Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae)

Current Range: Sumatra, Indonesia

Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (441-679 as of 2008)

Candeleros Tsunami

The third in my series of dinosaurs-amidst-disasters drawings, this one focuses on a small band of Limaysaurus attempting to outrun the rushing wall of water from a distant tsunami. Around 100 million years ago, the Andes were only just beginning to form, and though the Candeleros Formation is in modern Argentina, it is close enough to the modern Chilean border and Pacific that its inhabitants may occasionally have fallen afoul of these monster waves.

Tiouraren Titans

This spread sketch is from autumn of last year, depicting the sauropod Jobaria and the megalosaur Afrovenator. Both of these animals are known from the Tiouraren Formation in Niger, dating back to the mid-Jurassic (though previously believed to be from the early Cretaceous) and both are unusually complete dinosaurs. In retrospect, I'm not wild about the colors I gave the rearing Jobaria in the background and the legs on the Afrovenator look a little to spindly, but I'm otherwise happy with it. I decided the reverse the traditional image of a predator pursuing prey since I very much doubt a 1-ton, 25-foot long Afrovenator would be able to bring an adult Jobaria to the ground.

Close up on Afrovenator:
 

Carnivora Obscura

More endangered species. Lately, I've been focusing on lesser-known subspecies of iconic carnivores long menaced by over-hunting:

Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica)
Current Range: The Gir Forest, Gujarat, India
Conservation Status: Endangered

Persian leopard (Panthera pardus ciscausica)
Current Range: Northern Middle East, from eastern Turkey to western Afghanistan
Conservation Status: Endangered

Darwin's fox (Lycalopex fulvipes)
Current Range: Southern coastal Chile, especially Chiloé Island
Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (pop. c. 320 estimated in 2008 -- 70 on the mainland, 250 on Chiloé Island)

Red wolf (Canis rufus/Canis lupus rufus)
Current Range: North Carolina and pockets of the southeastern United States
Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (pop. c. 300 estimated in 2007, mostly in captivity)

Formosan black bear (Ursus thibetanus formosanus)
Current Range: Taiwan
Conservation Status: Endangered

Fukuistein's Monster

Despite being the birthplace of Godzilla, relatively few dinosaurs are known from Japan. One of the most notable is Fukuiraptor, uncovered in the Kitadani Formation in the Fukui Prefecture, and described by paleontologists Philip Currie and Yoichi Azuma in 2000. About the size of a Siberian tiger, this predator is one of the better-known megaraptorans, an enigmatic branch of Cretaceous theropods also known from Utah, Argentina, and Australia. Depending on who you ask, they were either the last of the carnosaurs, cousins to the better-known allosaurs and carcharodontosaurs, or a sister group to the tyrannosaurs. Fukuiraptor only complicates matters because it seems to have features suggestive of both carnosaurs and tyrannosaurs (or to use more exact and technical terms, allosauroids and tyrannosauroids).

Incidentally, other Kitadani dinosaurs include the ornithopod Fukuisaurus and the sauropod Fukuititan, also co-described and named by Azuma. Creative.

The Sauropod Club

This was another drawing where my decision to use a sketchpad limited my illustration options. Instead of showing a full Shunosaurus lurching forward on one page or bestriding two, I chose to draw two partially-concealed individuals in order to highlight the animal's odd extremities.

This sauropod is one of a handful known to have had tail clubs. Each of these animals lived during the mid-to-late Jurassic and all but one were native to modern-day China (the exception being Spinophorosaurus, from Niger). It would have been especially useful for Shunosaurus, which as adults grew only about 30 ft in length and a few tons in weight -- not a whole lot bigger than some of the local predatory dinosaurs.