In with the old, except that it's new!

A little quick update on the activity here now that I have a bit of time on Thanksgiving weekend:

1. The eighth version of my Futalognkosaurus dukei skeletal is now up. This one is very different from the others, it's a full multiview redo with practically none of the old (and distorted) renditions of the bones carried over. It's somewhat bittersweet that this isn't the version ROM ended up using for reference (they chose one of my earlier renditions: torontoist.com/2012/02/the-gre… ), but time constraints aside, when you're working with bones that were measured rather haphazardly at initial publication, and referred specimens that were not described to the extent of everyone's satisfaction (translation: barely mentioned at all!) some creative differences are bound to result. Needless to say, there have been some new photos from new angles of the actual fossil material appearing on the net which forced me to reconsider my own previous version, and which render ROM's Rapetosaurus-headed and peg-legged Alamo-Futa-Malawisaurus-on-steroids mishmash mount outdated in a heartbeat. (Did the curator even realize how little of the Futalognkosaurus material was actually used in casting that mount, and how much of what was used was badly crushed and the replicas were never "de-crushed" in casting?) The new Mark-VIII skeletal is more detailed and powerful than anything ever done for Futalognkosaurus before by any artist (it certainly knocks Greg Paul's bland and rather wimpy foot-dragging silhouette version deep into Lago Barreales).

2. Argentinosaurus is modified once again, with even narrower limb spacing (still feels a bit too wide, but an improvement in any case). This became necessary as I realized that (a) most titanosaurs are incorrectly drawn with the legs and feet splayed too widely apart in blind imitation of Wilson and Sereno - violating everything known about graviportal limb biomechanics and titanosaur footprints - and (b) Futalognkosaurus had wide gauge limbs for a sauropod (and even for a titanosaur) but they were oddly coming out far narrower than my Argentinosaurus despite the latter being a more basal titanosaur with less flared hips and (presumably) a proportionally narrower gut.

3. It's going to be time to update both Sauroposeidon and Giraffatitan soon. Sauroposeidon because of the new juvenile material (which reminds me, I should probably ramp up work on Paluxysaurus to see how far the similarities and differences truly go), and Giraffatitan because the Janensch papers contain plenty of unused data and little-known bones that have never been restored, which provide far more background on Giraffatitan than I was able to work into my initial skeletal. A couple of elements even appear to have been properly understood (let alone addressed) only by Janensch despite not being reflected in his rather cursory skeletal reconstruction, and then flat-out ignored or omitted by every paleoartist since then.

And as always, I am thankful for every day that I have on this earth, as it's another opportunity to put smiles on people's faces (including my own) while improving in all areas of life, and producing such fulfilling and original work while being a constant unapologetic thorn in the side of the blind conformity of all paleoart's latte bandwagon dilletantes.