#inaccurate paleoart

[alphynix]

April Fools 2024: The Curious Case Of The Chunky-Necked Ceratopsians

Much like the aquatic Compsognathus featured here a couple of years ago, not every novel idea that came out of the Dinosaur Renaissance was a winner.

And one of the oddest examples came from author/illustrator John C. McLoughlin.

His 1979 book Archosauria: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur featured an unusual interpretation of ceratopsian dinosaurs' characteristic bony frills, proposing that they were actually muscle attachment sites for both powerful jaw muscles and enormous back muscles to help hold up their large heavy heads. This would have completely buried the frill under soft tissue, giving the animals massive thick necks and humped shoulders, and resulted in an especially weird reconstruction of Triceratops with a grotesque sort of wrinkly sewn-together appearance.

This concept didn't entirely originate from McLoughlin – three years earlier in 1976 he'd illustrated Ronald Paul Ratkevich's book Dinosaurs of the Southwest, which seems to have been the inspiration for Archosauria's fleshy-frilled ceratopsians. A few paleontologists had also proposed jaw muscles attaching onto the frills during the 1930s and 1950s, and there's even a book from as far back as 1915 that also shows the top of a Triceratops' frill connected to its back! But McLoughlin's Archosauria image is still by far the most extreme and infamous version of the idea.

There were a lot of things in Archosauria that were actually very forward-thinking for the time period, such as putting fuzz and feathers on small theropods and depicting non-avian dinosaurs as active fast-moving animals. The unique ceratopsian reconstructions, however, never caught on for several big reasons:

Firstly, all that hefty muscle tissue would have locked ceratopsians' heads firmly in place, unable to move at all, which just doesn't make sense biomechanically. Then there was the lack of skeletal evidence – muscles that big should have left huge visible attachment scars all over the frill bones, and there was no sign of anything like that on any fossil specimens. Finally, it turns out the ceratopsian head-neck joint was actually highly mobile, suggesting their heads were free to make a wide range of motions in life.

As wrong as they were even at the time, McLoughlin's ceratopsians were still an interesting speculative idea, and notable for advocating for fleshier dinosaur reconstructions at a time when paleoart was trending towards shrinkwrapping.

Further reading under the cut:

A Very Alternative View of Horned Dinosaur Anatomy, Revisited – https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/22/alternative-view-of-horned-dinosaur-anatomy

Trope of the Buffalo-Backed Dinosaur – https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/27/trope-of-the-buffalo-backed-dinosaur

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Archosauria - Part 3 – https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2013/10/vintage-dinosaur-art-archosauria-part-3.html

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs of the Southwest – https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2016/11/vintage-dinosaur-art-dinosaurs-of.html

The Forgotten John C. McLoughlin Book – https://www.manospondylus.com/2021/03/the-forgotten-john-c-mcloughlin-book.html

[deepdreamnights]

Three Upstanding Bachelors

Except, perhaps, Mr. Rawrcy, who is by all accounts a bit of a cad despite his status.

The image(s) above in this post were made using an autogenerated prompt and/or have not been modified/iterated extensively. As such, they do not meet the minimum expression threshold, and are in the public domain. Prompt under the fold.

Prompt: a cute dinosaur-anthro butler, 18th century butler uniform, character design, white background, fantasy character art, colored line art, in the style of 1st edition D&D, tony diterlizzi, norman rockwell

[geek-jpeg]

Korvus 𓄀

[barghest-land]

16: leedsicthys

[zombiethethinker]

australovenator

[the-dragon-girl-27]

flocking drawings!!

Young Altispinax preparing to do a mating display

Thyreosaurus slaying a Theropod

Ornithoprion just swimming round

Mama Mapusaurus bringin home a Chakisaurus carcass for her daughter

[nessiefynn]

Opabinia

[dead-clade-waltz]

Bachelor male Tyrannosaurid with some funny courtship colors

[xaeyrnofnbe]

hi y'all fun fact about me i'm very in favor of paleoart being. y'know. accurate? up to date? with one major exception. old megalosaurus,,,,

he is so very dear to me

[birlarks]

troodon, based on a toy i have

[alphynix]

April Fools 2023: How Titanis Lost The Right To Bear Arms

Huge, flightless, and carnivorous, the phorusrhacids (or terror birds) were some of the largest apex predators in South America during its Cenozoic "splendid isolation" as an island continent – and they were possibly the closest that birds ever came to reclaiming the ecological roles of their extinct non-avian theropod dinosaur relatives. 

And for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a hypothesis that they'd even re-evolved clawed hands.

This idea was based on the wing bones of Titanis walleri, the only terror bird known to have dispersed northwards during the Great American Biotic Interchange when North and South America became connected via the Isthmus of Panama.

Living during the Pliocene and Pleistocene in Florida and Texas, between about 5 and 1.8 million years ago, Titanis stood around 1.5-1.8m tall (~5-6') and was heavily built, with long strong legs and a massive hooked beak. Remains of its small wings were incomplete and fragmentary but had seemingly unusual joints, with what looked like a stiffer wrist and more flexible "fingers" than other birds, which led paleontologist Robert Chandler to propose in 1994 that this terror bird species had modified its wings into clawed grasping arms similar to those of dromaeosaurs, used to restrain prey animals while its beak tore them apart.

But the idea of a giant murder-bird with added meathook-hands only lasted about a decade. Further investigation in 2005 showed that Titanis' arms weren't that weird after all – the same sort of joints are found in terror birds' closest living relatives, the seriemas, and so Titanis really had the same sort of small vestigial wings as many other large flightless birds.

…However, there still could have been some claws on there. Many modern birds actually have one or two small claws on their hands that aren't visible under their feathers, and terror birds like Titanis having something like that going on is completely plausible – they just wouldn't have been using them for any sort of specalized predatory function.

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Twitter | Patreon

[deepdreamnights]

Combining character reference and the new nijijourney personalization style ( my code used here is --p p6grcgq) to make some DeinoSteves. Unmodified gens presented to demonstrate "First draft" results.

Verdict: Promising.

Prompt: a red deinocyhus-dinosaur-anthro wearing a orange leather jacket, yellow t-shirt and black jeans, silver utility belt and bracers, walking down the road, heroic, city street background, comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth 1968, in the style of 1960s marvel

Character Prompts:

[geek-jpeg]

A hadrosaur, iguanodont, carcharodontosaurid, and dromaeosaurid walk into a bar right-

[sealsorceress]

i heard this guy is making the rounds again. idk who he is but he has no manners (my art, 2023)

[cryptidcosmicist]

It’s Leviathan! I know this isn't totally canon-accurate, as it's more in line with how I originally imagined him while reading through arc 8.

- The description of Leviathan’s face as “flat” made me think of a perfectly smooth disc. (Apparently @bogleech had a similar idea.)

- The eyes are shaped like the Hebrew letter “ל,” which is used in the Hebrew spelling of “Leviathan.”

- The sail and tail fin are based on the crested newt.

- The markings on his belly and back are countershading, a form of camouflage often seen in marine life.

- The biggest influences on this design are depictions of prehistoric marine reptiles in early paleoart. Inaccurate though they may be, you can’t deny that they have an appeal to them!

- When running bipedally, I imagine him moving like a basilisk lizard, which is known for its ability to run on the surface of water. It does look a little goofy when the lizard does it, but it’s probably a lot less funny when it’s an endbringer charging at you with murderous intent.

[ravewing]

sick and tired of inaccurate anomalocaris paleoart ,, decided to take matters into my own hands