Styracosaurus albertensis

I sent this in over to the Ceratopsian Gallery at ART Evolved: Life's Time Capsule but I thought I'd repost it here with a bit of my commentary...

I'm sure everyone's seen an image of Styracosaurus albertensis before. It is readily distinguishable from other ceratopsians by the presence of elongated horns on the back of the frill...I don't have much to comment on the dinosaur itself so I will comment on my drawing.

With this one, I didn't bother with skeletal reconstructions. Instead, I reverted to my good ol' habit of drawing from the outline in; I imagine what a live Styracosaurus would look like and draw out the outlines and fill in the details. I guess it's more intuitive and I draw something that I think looks right to me; a very unscientific methodology, I must admit. But this way of drawing is more comfortable for me; it reminds me of when I used to doodle on the back of ads that came with our newspaper.

Anyway, the original is a small sketch on an A5 size sketchbook

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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...

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R for beginners and intermediate users 3: plotting with colours

For my third post on my R tutorials for beginners and intermediate users, I shall finally touch on the subject matter that prompted me to start these tutorials - plotting with group structures in colour. If you are familiar with R, then you may have noticed that assigning group structure is not all that straightforward. You can have a dataset that may have a column specifically for group structure such as this: B0 B1 B2 Family Acrocanthosaurus 0.308 -0.00329 3.28E-05 Allosauroidea Allosaurus 0.302 -0.00285 2.04E-05 Allosauroidea Archaeopteryx 0.142 -0.000871 2.98E-06 Aves Bambiraptor 0.182 -0.00161 1.10E-05 Dromaeosauridae Baryonychid 0.189 -0.00238 2.20E-05 Basal_Tetanurae Carcharodontosaurus 0.369 -0.00502 5.82E-05 Allosauroidea Carnotaurus 0.312 -0.00324 2.94E-05 Neoceratosauria Ceratosaurus 0.377 -0.00522 6.07E-05 Neoceratosauria Citipati 0.278 -0.00119 5.08E-06 Ovir...

Raptor's Nest

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