more on Styracosaurus

Further to my previous post, I've added on some background to my Styracosaurus sketch.

I drew in lots of generic plantlife. I've previously done some research into the Hell Creek flora as a consultant job for Be the Dinosaur. As it turned out, the Hell Creek flora was dominated by angiosperms (about 90%). A lot of that was lobe-leafed plants, and lots of modern families, including the Arecaceae (palm), Zingiberaceae (ginger family), Nelumbonaceae (family including lotus), Rosaceae (rose family), Fagaceae (beech), Urticaceae (nettle family), and Cannabaceae (the family including hops and canabis!). So I drew some random lobe-leaf plants and somethings that look like roses and marijuana...

Of couse, Styracosaurus ain't from the Hell Creek Formation, but who cares.

Comments

Zachary Miller said…

Ah, context for the animal. It is my biggest weakness. Trees? What are those? Doesn't this totallly stark, white background do it justice?

Nicely done, sir.

17 March, 2009 22:21

Paleo King said…

I've seen this drawing a lot of times but i just had to get a closer look at it. LOL imagine a cannabis-eating Styracosaurus! Wonder if there were actually plants back then that could get a multi-ton dinosaur stoned...

I like the conifers and especially the fallen log in the water. I never thought about that before... dead trees and logs add to the realism but they often get ignored because the dinosaurs are the main subject... I'm gonna have to stick some rivers/lakes and dead logs in my future dino-drawings.

29 May, 2009 00:06

The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

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Spinosaurus, the gigantic pangolin of the Cretaceous?

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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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