Tyrannosaurus rex skull

A while ago, I created some line drawings of several theropods for a talk I was giving. One of those drawings was a Tyrannosaurus rex based on Stan, BHI-3033. It's a simple drawing so I haven't bothered with drawing out all the individual bones, but what I did do was to push the teeth into the sockets so that only the crowns are exposed. It's evident that a lot of the teeth have shot out of the sockets after the animal had died so that much of the roots are exposed. Presumably, this version should be closer to what the tooth row would have been like in life; I don't suppose roots would be exposed too much in life... The result is rather stunning in that the teeth are not as long as you typically see in T. rex skull restorations. And of course, the tips of the teeth form a more uniform and even biting surface. Perhaps I pushed them in too much and maybe the teeth were poking out a bit more, but it shows how much of a difference it makes.

Comments

Roger Close said…

Nice. Did you basically trace over a photograph in Illustrator?

07 October, 2011 01:12

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...

Old drawings: Allosaurus

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...

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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