The Drinker

Mechanical pencil on heavy paper 8x11". Birthday gift for my brother.

An adult Drinker nisti halts after almost crashing into a half-grown brachiosaur. Yeah. half-grown. Like the Felch Quarry Skull individual, only a few million years younger.

Drinker is a small basal ornithopod dinosaur at the very end of the Jurassic period, that was likely among the first flower-eaters, given flowers had just evolved. Other than that, it's a pretty boring-looking animal, like all hypsilophodontids, and was probably fair game on just about every predator's menu.

Drinker was discovered in 1990 by Dr. Bob Bakker, and is (officially) named in honor of American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope.
The species epithet, nisti, refers to the National Institute of Standards and Technology who funded digs at Como Bluff in the early 1990's. According to Tracy Ford, the species was named "in horror" of NIST, which had funded the dig. I can only imagine this was because Dr. Bakker was probably having to fight for every cent of the promised grant money from NIST, and the government agency probably kept interfering with the dig. At least they didn't try to pull a Sue on this one.

However, those of us in the Paleoart world have an alternative theory about how this otherwise unremarkable (and boringly SMALL!) dinosaur came to get its name. You see, certain dinosaurs get named after unusual (or more often just boring) parts of their bodies, their likely behaviors, or places where they were found, or even people who found them. But Edward Drinker Cope is a pretty bizarre name even at the best of times, so, no offense meant to the Colonel Sanders of paleontology, some of us have put forward the theory that Drinker was actually named for its addiction to alcohol. Yes, seeds and fruits (which were just beginning to evolve in Drinker's day) did ferment, and this little critter was possibly the world's first alcoholic. Yes folks, Drinker really was a drinker. The other plant-eating dinosaurs tried to help him get sober, took away his eggshell mugs and fern coasters and all his favorite pentoxylon tipple... but Drinker had other ways of feeding his habit! He was known to sneak drinks under the table, use old abandoned Brachiosaurus nests to brew cycad ale, store his booze inside old dead termite mounds, and in a final act of desperation, stash the moonshine near Goniopholis mating grounds in the hope that nobody would try to get past a bunch of angry crocs with raging hormones. Of course this is all just 20-millionth-hand hearsay (with pronated hands!), but if it does turn out to be correct, it would be front page news and make us rich. If it doesn't, we can disown the theory and give Jack Horner all the credit. After all, Drinker, Toroceratops, Scavengersaurus rex, and Homo sapiens are all *obviously* ontogenetic stages of gnathostomic fish, and Drinker was *obviously* the wild teenage binge-boozing stage.

What we do know for a fact: Drinker was a small agile beaked biped within the final stages of Wyoming's Late Jurassic Morrison Formation. Dr. Bakker has reported finding the remains of over thirty individuals in what might have been a burrow, though it could have just been a big hole they fell into, or a site where the whole herd got drowned together in a seasonal flood. Maybe they did get wasted on pentoxylon and stumble in, it's still an open question.