Asia's Vanishing Megafauna

As I drew up my list of species for this book of endangered mammals, I tried not to have too animals from one particular group or region of the world. Even so, Asia's vanishing megafauna will occupy a great deal of it. These species include not only charismatic conservation icons -- such as pandas, tigers, orangutans, and even the Asian elephant -- but also many overlooked species with close relatives that seem to be doing fine elsewhere.

Indian hog deer (Hyelaphus porcinus)
Current Range: Northern Pakistan and India to southern China
Conservation Status: Endangered

Dhole (Cuon alpinus)

Current Range: Swaths of Southeast Asia, from western China and southwestern India to Sumatra and Java

Conservation Status: Endangered

Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica)
Current Range: Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Brunei
Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (unknown wildlife population)

Turkmenian kulan (Equus hemionus kulan)
Current Range: Turkmenistan
Conservation Status: Endangered

Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis)
Current Range: Northeast China and east coastal Russia
Conservation Status: Critically Endangered (c. 57 in Russia and 12 in China as of February 2015)

Jurassic Giants: The Old, The New, and the Obscure

The most famous sauropods -- Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and now Brontosaurus again -- all hail from the Morrison Formation of the western United States, extending from Montana to New Mexico and the end of the Jurassic (roughly 155 to 145 million B.C.E.). These were hardly the first sauropods to evolve or be named, and while some genera from the Cretaceous (like Argentinosaurus and Dreadnoughtus) were even larger, the Late Jurassic is generally regarded as these dinosaurs' heyday, celebrated in documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs and When Dinosaurs Roamed America.

Some Early Jurassic sauropods, though, do deserve a mention: Barapasaurus, from the Kota Formation in southeastern India, is one of the earliest definitive large sauropods, dating back to between 195 to 180 million B.C.E. It measured about 40 to 45 feet long and around 8 tons -- about the same length and weight as T. rex, and making it one of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth at the point in time. More importantly, however, are its front toes, which retain the large claws of the sauropods' bipedal antecedents, the plateosaurs (or prosauropods), hinting its primitive place. While most of the skeleton has been found, a Barapasaurus head is still unknown. The drawing below is based on a mount at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, whose staff gave it a very Diplodocus-like head.

Cetiosaurus, the first sauropod ever described, roamed modern England around 165 million B.C.E. On the face of it, it's a rather un-glamorous, undistinguished sauropod, being only about 50 feet long and around 12 tons, though its toes claws are much blunter than Barapasaurus'. Here too, the restored skull is speculative, displaying cranial chambers that characterize Camarasaurus as well as the pencil-like teeth of Apatosaurus and Diplodocus. This drawing is based on the "Rutland sauropod" specimen on display at the New Walk Museum, located in Leicester in central England.

Even some of the Morrison sauropods aren't classic dinosaurs. In 2012, paleontologists Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus described Kaatedocus, a new diplodocoid from lower (i.e. older) Morrison Formation beds in Wyoming. Earlier this year, same two paleontologists, along with Roger Benson, described Galeamopus, a rechristened former species of Diplodocus.

As with previous sauropod drawings, I've elected to make the sauropod necks the most colorful and intricately-patterned part of the animal for display and identity purposes. For Galeamopus, I actually adapted the calico cat's light orange and inky black fur, only as scales.

Virginia v. Brown

While commuting to and from a close friend's wedding in South Carolina this weekend, I visited two natural history museums I hadn't been to before: The Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville and the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History in Charleston. Both were very much worth the visit, and their collections had a surprising number of items in common:

Pteranodons

Male Pteranodon (Virginia)

Pteranodon family (Brown)

Pteranodon father (Brown)

Pteranodon mother and chicks (Brown)

Ground sloths

Megalonyx (Virginia)

?Paramylodon (Brown)

Megalodon

Megalodon (Virginia)

Megalodon (Brown)

Whales

 Eobalaenoptera (Virginia)

Maiacetus (Brown)

Waipatiid whale (Brown)

The "Wando Whale" (Brown)

Although the Virginia Museum was much larger than Mace Brown (which consists primarily of two rooms at the College of Charleston's School of Sciences and Mathematics Building), it was a more general natural history museum, with a wings devoted to geology and modern animals in addition to fossils. Mace Brown's two exhibit rooms, in contrast, had more fossils than they knew what do with. In addition, admission was free, vindicating a hour-long trek to Charleston from the Isle of Palms morethan the Virginia Museum did for driving an hour out from Lynchburg.

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: