#dinapril

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DinApril 2026: The Final Compilation

Hello everyone! I just completed my springtime 30-day dinosaur drawing challenge, DinApril. You can find the prompts here. Enjoy the results!

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DinApril Day 30: Free day; go wild!

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our thirtieth and final day is my father's take on the free day: The Oxford Clay Formation! A male Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis, Callovosaurus leedsi, and Metriacanthosaurus parkeri have been washed out to sea by a storm and struggle to stay afloat, unaware of the hungry Liopleurodon ferox lurking below the debris.

My father's favorite prehistoric animal is Liopleurodon because he saw a clip of the oversized Liopleurodon from Walking With Dinosaurs hunting a Eustreptospondylus, and he wanted the pliosaur to be featured for today's prompt. I, of course, decided not to depict the pliosaur as 82 feet long and instead depicted it as a more realistic (although still rather large) 30 feet long. Fitting that a 30-foot Liopleurodon is featured on the thirtieth day.

This is it, folks. I actually did it! Tomorrow I'm going to make a compilation of all 30 pieces I did this year.

Coloration inspired by the Collecta Eustreptospondylus from 2007, the Jurassic World: Primal Attack by Mattel Callovosaurus from 2020, and the Collecta Metriacanthosaurus from 2016.

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DinApril Day 29: A dinosaur that you(r father) think(s) could plausibly have existed at some point even though no one has found any bones of it.

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-ninth day features a dinosaur that he thinks could plausibly have existed at some point even though no one has found any bones of it: Francospinus athleticus! This male is chasing the Pink Panther, whose misadventures have landed him 125 million years in the past.

Baryonychine teeth are known from France, but we don't know what the animal they came from might've looked like. I decided to go a little spec-evo and draw a cursorial spinosaurid related to Suchomimus that lived in northern France where Paris would one day sit.

Coloration inspired by the Wild Safari Suchomimus from 2006.

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DinApril Day 28: A dinosaur that you(r father) would like to see in a movie.

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-eighth day features a dinosaur that my father would like to see in a movie: Majungasaurus crenatissimus! This female has encountered a Beelzebufo and is going to throw him off her face. Will he turn into a prince when he hits a tree? Probably not.

Honestly, Beelzebufo creeps me out in a way that other frogs don't. Maybe it's the reputation for baby-eating, I dunno.

Coloration inspired by the Safari LTD Majungasaurus from 2023.

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DinApril Day 27: A dinosaur (or group of dinosaurs) that you(r father) think(s) are underappreciated.

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-seventh day features a dinosaur that my father thinks is underappreciated: Yinlong! Two females show what happens when the artist likes puns a little too much.

Bipedal non-ceratopsid ceratopsians don't get much love, especially ones that aren't Psittacosaurus. When I first learned about Yinlong in third grade, it immediately became my favorite, because learning that there were Jurassic ceratopsians that Triceratops might've evolved from was so exciting to me. My father learned about Yinlong in the same documentary I did (which was also where he learned about Guanlong, another favorite of late-preteen me (and it's still one of my favorite theropods)), and pairing Guanlong and Yinlong together just like their cousins/descendants Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops just feels right to me.

Coloration inspired by the Favorite Fukui Prefectural Museum Yinlong from 2016.

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DinApril Day 26: A dinosaur riding a train (that your father saw).

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-sixth day features a dinosaur riding a train: Edmontosaurus regalis! A male is being transported by train, and passes the time by eating hay.

You might be wondering about the lack of dorsal sail on the back of the torso. My logic is that because that sail is only known in a juvenile specimen of E. annectens but not the adults it might not be present in adults, i.e. as Edmontosaurus grew older more scutes erupted from the back until mature animals had a row of scutes going all the way to the back of the head (there is also a school of thought that the "sail" is an artifact of decomposition). In general, you should be careful about making reconstructions of adult animals that are composites of juvenile and adult specimens because of potential ontogenetic differences.

Coloration inspired by the Safari Ltd Edmontosaurus regalis from 2011, a toy that I actually own in real life.

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DinApril Day 25: The first dinosaur that you(r father) ever saw a skeleton of.

Welcome to DinApril 2025, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-fifth day features the first dinosaur that my father ever saw a skeleton of: Giganotosaurus carolinii! A female wades in Swann Memorial Fountain; you're not technically supposed to do this, but who's going to say that to a 44-foot carcharodontosaur?

The fountain is right across the street from the ANSP, which had the Giganotosaurus mount featured in 2024's piece for this prompt, so a piece involving the same species (as it was the first dinosaur skeleton my father ever saw excluding birds) & the fountain was the obvious choice. Speaking of the ANSP, it's not doing so hot right now due to Drexel's mismanagement of its funding; here's a petition to help support it.

Coloration inspired by the Safari LTD Giganotosaurus from 2017.

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DinApril Day 24: A dinosaur that was named in the year you(r father) w(as) born.

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our twenty-fourth day features a dinosaur that was named in the year my father was born: Talarurus plicatospineus! This male is standing next to a sign reading "1952", the year his species was formally described and the year that my father was born.

Talarurus was an easy choice because it's one of only two valid species of dinosaurs named from 1952 and the only new valid genus from that time (excluding birds, of course).

Coloration inspired by the DinoWaurs Survival Talarurus from 2011.