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All your dinosaurs are wrong.
I mean ALL of them. Every few years we hear of x revision or y development in how artists "need" to restore dinosaurs, as new information is discovered. Some of it valid scientific data, the rest over-hyped happenstance. We've seen relatively valid changes to dinosaurs' appearance in the last few decades (such as light feathers on coelurosaur-line theropods and deep skin folds on the shoulders of duckbills) to unexplained and largely unwarranted innovations (like GSP's overly thickened "bison necks" on his duckbills and tropical raptors seemingly drowning in a 60kg pile of big clumsy turkey feathers) to downright inexplicable bandwagon flip-flops based on whatever paper gets more press coverage on dumbed-down "mainstream" media (such as the rapid bounce-back of many ignorant copycat artists not worth naming, in the practice of changing many sauropod necks from horizontal (copying after Alexander) to vertical (after Bakker and GSP) to horizontal (after Stevens & Parrish) and then back again (after Taylor, Wedel and Naish), all without doing any research on the validity of each one's points or lack thereof.
But now with the discovery of yet another Edmontosaurus mummy, it becomes evident that the formerly flat-headed duckbill had a fleshy rooster-like display crest with absolutely no bone core: blogs.scientificamerican.com/o….
Or at least one of the two sexes had it as an adult. And this blows a hole in everything we thought we knew about dinosaur anatomy.
Think of what this means for a second... if a species as seemingly plain and commonly understood as Edmontosaurus regalis had soft-tissue features that we never knew about before, which the bones don't even hint at, what can this mean about less well-known dinosaurs that are known from only one or two good skeletons and no skin impressions?
If we find a Malawisaurus mummy, is it going to have fleshy dragon whiskers on its lower jaw? Did Yutyrannus have soft tentacles on its nostrils like a star-nosed mole? Was Concavenator's bizarre "dorsal fin" part of a much larger and more complex array of mostly soft-tissue display structures? Were the crests of big-nosed sauropods just a simple nasal chamber, or the core of a much larger inflatable resonating structure, with interdermal colors which can be revealed through inflating, then retracted between duller-colored segments of skin by deflating, like the display patches on certain birds and baboons? For now, you be the judge.
Of course it's not that controversial for those of us (like Brian Engh) who have long speculated that dinosaurs' life appearance involved far more extensive display structures than what we can find evidence for in most fossils. Only now there's a little baseball-sized piece of fossil proof for it. And now we know for sure that no matter how imaginitive (like Engh), or how conservative (like myself), you draw your dinosaurs, chances are you're all (albeit unequally) wrong. But that won't stop us from trying. We don't yet have an InGen or a Jurassic park, and now there will be many more revisions to Edmontosaurus, and who knows what next. Go crazy once in a while, you may get lucky and second-guess the next soft-tissue phenomenon. I'll see you all in the cloning room.
I mean ALL of them. Every few years we hear of x revision or y development in how artists "need" to restore dinosaurs, as new information is discovered. Some of it valid scientific data, the rest over-hyped happenstance. We've seen relatively valid changes to dinosaurs' appearance in the last few decades (such as light feathers on coelurosaur-line theropods and deep skin folds on the shoulders of duckbills) to unexplained and largely unwarranted innovations (like GSP's overly thickened "bison necks" on his duckbills and tropical raptors seemingly drowning in a 60kg pile of big clumsy turkey feathers) to downright inexplicable bandwagon flip-flops based on whatever paper gets more press coverage on dumbed-down "mainstream" media (such as the rapid bounce-back of many ignorant copycat artists not worth naming, in the practice of changing many sauropod necks from horizontal (copying after Alexander) to vertical (after Bakker and GSP) to horizontal (after Stevens & Parrish) and then back again (after Taylor, Wedel and Naish), all without doing any research on the validity of each one's points or lack thereof.
But now with the discovery of yet another Edmontosaurus mummy, it becomes evident that the formerly flat-headed duckbill had a fleshy rooster-like display crest with absolutely no bone core: blogs.scientificamerican.com/o….
Or at least one of the two sexes had it as an adult. And this blows a hole in everything we thought we knew about dinosaur anatomy.
Think of what this means for a second... if a species as seemingly plain and commonly understood as Edmontosaurus regalis had soft-tissue features that we never knew about before, which the bones don't even hint at, what can this mean about less well-known dinosaurs that are known from only one or two good skeletons and no skin impressions?
If we find a Malawisaurus mummy, is it going to have fleshy dragon whiskers on its lower jaw? Did Yutyrannus have soft tentacles on its nostrils like a star-nosed mole? Was Concavenator's bizarre "dorsal fin" part of a much larger and more complex array of mostly soft-tissue display structures? Were the crests of big-nosed sauropods just a simple nasal chamber, or the core of a much larger inflatable resonating structure, with interdermal colors which can be revealed through inflating, then retracted between duller-colored segments of skin by deflating, like the display patches on certain birds and baboons? For now, you be the judge.
Of course it's not that controversial for those of us (like Brian Engh) who have long speculated that dinosaurs' life appearance involved far more extensive display structures than what we can find evidence for in most fossils. Only now there's a little baseball-sized piece of fossil proof for it. And now we know for sure that no matter how imaginitive (like Engh), or how conservative (like myself), you draw your dinosaurs, chances are you're all (albeit unequally) wrong. But that won't stop us from trying. We don't yet have an InGen or a Jurassic park, and now there will be many more revisions to Edmontosaurus, and who knows what next. Go crazy once in a while, you may get lucky and second-guess the next soft-tissue phenomenon. I'll see you all in the cloning room.
The Egyptian Keystone: Mansourasaurus shahinae!
Recently we have this new species of titanosaur from Egypt which helps fill in some HUGE gaps.
Egypt is of course famous for much mythology and lore surrounding the raising of obelisks and pyramid keystones or capstones. Now we can add to that list, the "holy grail" or "keystone" of titanosaur evolution - Mansourasaurus shahinae.
Mansourasaurus shahinae is not all that large by titanosaur standards (the published skeletals shows it at about 8.5m, but I suspect that the neck was a good bit longer than they illustrated, as well as having more than the mere 13 vertebrae drawn here, so more like a total length of 10.5 or 11m at least), but enou
Regarding References
Just a happy jolly reminder to all who come here, please ask before using my work as reference for your work. If I know about it ahead of time, I'm usually okay with it. If you want references, respect the artist. If I see the opposite continuing to happen, I can simply stop posting skeletals here or make them purely pay-to-play (already get contracts so I don't need DA prints revenue, if this whole site died it wouldn't hurt me). Your choice peeps.
Another note; if you need a scale figure, please create your own human silhouette and scale bar. Don't copy mine. It's not that hard.
Argentinosaurus may actually still be the biggest.
I'd been meaning to get around to this for a while...
We all know Argentinosaurus is woefully incomplete. But for the first time we can get a mostly solid ides of what it looked like. For a long time, most Argentinosaurus reconstructions had been either purely speculative (i.e. Greg Paul - though he wasn't too far off the mark given the data available in the 1990s) or based on "cloning" the body of a distant relative (Ken Carpenter most notoriously used Saltasaurus, which as a low-grazing dwarf species, is among the worst models for restoring any fragmentary titanosaur over 20m).
More recently some speculative skeletals have cloned Malawisa
The Chubut Monster is now described and named!
Today the Chubut Monster, possibly the largest dinosaur known, has been published.
There are apparently six specimens from the same site. The largest of them may have exceeded 120 feet in length, and though the paper proposed a maximum mass of 82 tons, I suspect that when restored with the correct rib curvature and soft tissue levels, this animal may have exceeded 115 tons.
The AMNH mount, which is entirely made of fiberglass replicas, appears to be based on the holotype and a few similar-sized specimens. These are still smaller than the individual represented by the gigantic femur on the forklift pallets, which is a bit more eroded than
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