Allosaurus fragilis 3

So it has been a while...and for my rehabilitation, I give you, tah-dah... Allosaurus again! Well, it could be any non-descript tetanuran theropod...from this angle anyway. Again, this is one of my series(?) of practice drawings, and for that, who else but Allosaurus? I have attempted this angle before but never as "good" as this one turned out to be - at least I think it looks good enough.

Anyway, I had a bit of a problem with my scanner when trying to upload this - it always came up with some weird faint line across the middle. I tested all sorts of different papers and book covers to see what the cause was. It came out fine on really strong colours and backgrounds with multiple colours so I determined it was something to do with white so I thought it might need some adjustments or something. And I found the callibration button! Woohoo! Such a simple thing and it takes a postgrad student nearly half an hour to figure out...

Comments

Zach said…

Good angle! Also, I like the new site layout. Much easier to read now. I have a lot of trouble scanning pencil drawings, because they come out so faint. I have to darken the scan and increase the...something. You've probably seen some of the obviously penciled drawings on my blog. The finished scan is almost yellow, which bugs me, but I don't have time to ink EVERYTHING! :-)

12 June, 2008 00:13

Raptor's Nest (old) said…

As always, thanks for your comments Zach!

Yeah, I got fed up with that long and narrow text box format...I liked the colour scheme but made it difficult to layout around pictures.

And I get what you're talking about with scanning pencil drawings...the scanner picks up any faint smudges or even the colour of the papers - so I try and get as white a paper as I can.

12 June, 2008 01:43

The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

A quick divergence from my usual dinosaurs, and I shall talk about big cats today. This is because to my greatest delight, I had discovered today a wonderful book. It is called The Felidæ of Rancho La Brea (Merriam and Stock 1932, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication, no. 422). As the title suggests it goes into details of felids from the Rancho La Brea, in particular Smilodon californicus (probably synonymous with S. fatalis ), but also the American Cave Lion, Panthera atrox . The book is full of detailed descriptions, numerous measurements and beautiful figures. However, what really got me excited was, in their description and comparative anatomy of P. atrox , Merriam and Stock (1932) provide identification criteria for the Lion and Tiger, a translation of the one devised by the French palaeontologist Marcelin Boule in 1906. I have forever been looking for a set of rules for identifying lions and tigers and ultimately had to come up with a set of my own with a lot of help...

Spinosaurus, the gigantic pangolin of the Cretaceous?

I was made aware of this not long ago - it kind of looks creepy, but it gave me an idea: Did Spinosaurus walk like a pangolin? That is, with it's hands low to the ground but not touching the ground - so no knuckle walking - and maintaining balance as a biped... This pangolin seems to maintain balance on its hind legs even though, on cursory glance, its centre of mass seems too far forward for that. Spinosaurus is supposed to have had a dense femur, so maybe its centre of gravity was farther back than you'd think from overall proportions. Maybe the sail helped tip the scale back? ...or maybe it was a giant ant-eater? Those giant claws look particularly suited to breaking open termite mounds? Who knows. This is me being silly, but thought it was hilarious enough to share...

Top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head)

I thought I'd do a fun post for once. And since list based articles are the norm for fun on the internet, I thought I'd do one on dinosaurs, but given that I know most about theropods, I've decided to restrict my list to theropods (...maybe in a future post, I'll do other clades). My ranking is based mostly on scientific importance so it may not reflect awesomeness, and it is obviously subjective as to how I rank importance to science. For instance, interesting discoveries or unique palaeobiology are ranked relatively low compared to wealth of information and data or completely revolutionising our understanding of the evolution of theropods. So here are my top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head) 10. Megalosaurus Being the first dinosaur to be named, Megalosaurus automatically deserves a spot on this list, but given the fragmentary nature of known fossil specimens, and being mostly useless as a meaningful source ...

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