Raptor's Nest

Next in my line of old drawings is a non-palaeo one.  I always liked drawing cars but was never good at it.  So I'd doodle and try to practice from time to time.  Here, I've got a selection of cars; a Subaru Impreza, some Japanese pick-up truck, a sedan, and another Japanese-style truck with a kind of near-future Sci-Fi anime feel.  Incidentally, Smarty Pants is a product idea I had as a joke (though the technology isn't available to make it happen).

These are really old, from when I was doing my Masters; one of them is actually dated, 6 June 2004. I was really into spinosaurs back then and I would spend some evenings drawing spinosaurs. One particular evening, instead of drawing life restorations or skull reconstructions, I had decided to draw all the known fossil materials - well, whatever figured material I could find at that time. The above are my drawings of the preserved cranial and mandibular elements of Baryonyx walkeri and Suchomimus tenerensis that I could see from published figures. I based Baryonyx on a figure in Charig & Milner's chapter in the book Dinosaur Systematics: Approaches and Perspectives (Carpenter & Currie, eds) rather than the description, so the identification of the bones are according to that chapter. By that time I had already had a chance to observe the real Baryonyx material at the NHM, the "jugal" of which is accompanied by an updated label identifying it as an angu

Recently, I came across a stash of old drawings that I had completely forgotten about. I'll try and upload them in the next week or two. Some are palaeo, others are not, but still quite interesting nonetheless... Here is the first. I think it is an Allosaurus head. At least the skull looks like an Allosaurus and it has lacrimal horns like an Allosaurus , so it must be an Allosaurus . Nothing special I guess...

In a comment to a post on my paper , Andrea Cau suggested I use his reconstruction of Spinosaurus to run my analysis and compare it to the one I used in my paper (the reconstruction from Dal Sasso et al., 2005). So here is the result. The plot above shows all the mechanical advantages from my 41 taxa as grey dots. The black line is the Spinosaurus from Dal Sasso et al. (2005) while the red line is Andrea's reconstruction. There is an obvious difference, with Andrea's showing higher mechanical advantages overall. However, in the whole scheme of things, the difference is quite small. There isn't a drastic difference in the profile either. So all in all, this is good news, both to me and to those that reconstruct skulls.