#deinonychosaurs

[normal-about-dinosaurs]

stilllll getting the hang of alcohol markers but i think im making progress. anyway. rusty red utahraptor

[paleoprojections]

A small sketch of Dakotaraptor sniffing a magnolia

[normal-about-dinosaurs]

increasingly small dromaeosaurs

[paleoprojections]

A quick restoration of Linhevenator tani done for Wikipedia(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linheven…). I plan to make a cleaned up and more detailed version of this piece, but that could take a while if it happens. I could not really find any (good) skeletal reconstruction on this animal so I had to make my own (which was terrifying at first) which means I'm not sure how accurate these proportions are, but I tried to stay within what the animal's description specified. I also used skeletals from related genera to reconstruct it. The main issues I ran into were the length of the radius and ulna and the shape of the skull. Luckily for me there was quite a bit of wiggle room (at least I thought so) to reconstruct these parts because they are either absent (as in the case of the forearm bones), or only know from highly crushed, fragmented, and weathered material (as in the case of the cranium). I reconstructed the empty parts with generic troodontid proportions. In the case of the forearms the single skeletal reconstruction I found restored these bones as being pretty long, but the skeletals from some notable skeletal paleoartist restored short armed troodontids with shorter forearms, so I chose something in between with a forearm slightly longer than the humerus.

For the feathers I chose to restore them with a "basic" deinonychosaur dementions. I say (wrote) basic in that way because deinonychosaurs have a highly diverse range of plumage dimensions, but I restored it more along the lines of what we think troodontids' plumage patterns looked like along with adjustments to a make it more reasonable for a larger animal. The color pattern I gave it does not reflect any know animal; it just seemed reasonable to make it look like that based on where and how it lived. I don't like making color patterns too closely resemble live animals anyway because extinct animals lived in different times, places, had different cladistic placements and relations, and the main reason: they are different animals.

Hope you like it :)

Thanks for looking/reading.

[paleoprojections]

This is a quick sketch I did for the Wikipedia article for the newly described unenlagiine theropod Ypupiara.

[ayellowbirds]

Art of the Raptoricons, by Matt Frank, from the new Transformers Collectors Club free prose fiction, Life Finds A Way. The deep-voiced sniper Slice and the tiny, exciteable Shred are shown in robot mode (with glimpses of their beast modes in another couple images), while leader Thrashclaw and the strange scarred Gnash are only shown in their dinosaur forms. That’s right, a new all-girl team of Transformers, who turn into deinonychosaurs!

[dinofloof]

So, uh...was it ever resolved if troodontids are closer to birds than dromaeosaurs?  As cool as that would be, I do have one gripe.  I like the word deinonychosaurs as a handy way to sum up all the raptor-clawed dinos.  And if troodontids are closer to birds, then that means there can be no clade including both of them that doesn’t also include birds.

Wait.  Does...does that mean birds are deinonychosaurs?

Because that would be amazing.

[albertonykus]

I now have a new favorite xkcd comic.