Sketchbook

More drawings! That's all for now...

A dinosaur could not drink from a straw!

Without lips, that is. So since dinosaurs could not drink from straws or even whistle to call a cab, there's no doubt that they could not have evolved into more intelligent species. What kind of a civilization could they have without swirly straws?! Okay back to topic.

Now cheeks. So I drew this wounded Triceratops for paleontologist Andy Farke:

It was a fun learning experience. I started with the bones (which were later modified). The wounded fossil lacked much of the skull, so I reconstructed the fossil cranium according to Andy's direction (i.e. which skull to base this skull off of) so you can see the chunk missing from the frill:
Among the many things I found out is that ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs like Triceratops) probably had ridges on their horns, like you see today on rams and such. These ridges grow on the sheath that covers the bony core of the horn, so they wouldn't be present in the fossil specimens. Here's an example from a modern ram:
The drawing itself illustrated the wound on the frill. A big chunk was missing and the edge of the bone showed regrowth and healing. Which is awesome.

There were other decisions about what the dinosaur should look like. These horned dinsoaurs have a long row of plant-chopping teeth that is a little inset from the edge of the jaw. If I can find an illustration of that, or the time to illustrate it, you'll see it soon. I wanted to know how Andy wanted the cheeks to look, so I sent him some sketches.

Sketch one is the classic cheeked look. Scientists long assumed that the tooth row was inset to make room for a cheek, which would keep the food from falling out of its mouth when eating:
This is a half-cheek; same great flesh, less cheeky:
The next sketch is a lipless, cheekless face. The lower jaw has an upward-projecting muscle attachment site (like the coronoid process on human jaws), which means a lipless, cheekless jaw would still end at that muscl-ey area:
This is a lizard-like lipped mouth closed:
And open, like a smile:
Now, the mouth would have occluded (I learned), so there would be no space between the upper and lower beaks.

The final choice was cheeks not because they were the most scientifically accurate, but because they are conventional and the focus is the frill, which is very rational. Here's the drawing in color:

So that was a little bit more about the choices that went into a scientific illustration...

Sketchbook

Dinosaur sketches! I'm biding my time as I prepare a post on cheeks in ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs). Here's a sketch of a chasmosaur:

And here's a Triceratops that I like. Notice the ridges on the horns? I'll talk about that soon. I like the way the texture and foreshortening worked out:
And lastly, a chasmosaur in a forest. This was fun:

T. rex is Cool the Third: Jaws!

Holy Lip Gloss, Batman! I haven't posted in a long time. This will be post three of four on the subject of dinosaur faces. For now, that is.

And soon I will share my thoughts and feelings concerning some amazing medieval manuscripts I've had the chance to ogle recently.

Remember Jurassic Park from waaay back in 1993? It affected dinosaur imagery in far-reaching ways. Not only did it help convince a lay audience that dinosaurs were active animals rather than sluggish monsters, but it brought scientific ideas to the popular perception of dinosaurs. Despite these steps, it was still a movie, and it's ultimate goal was entertainment. In the last post, I talked about the flesh covering the jaw attachment site. The JP T. rex design had a very idiosyncratic version of this anatomy. In the picture below, you can see the characteristic zig-zag JP jawline. You can also see that the actual lower jaw does not zig-zag:
This zagged jawline was proliferated due to the popularity of JP. It filtered into scientific publications as well. Here's a recent depiction of T. rex from, unfortunately, I don't know where: It has that same zigging and zagging lower jaw line. Why are they depicting it that way? Well, unlike most theropods (the lineage of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that now includes birds), T. rex has a thick tooth line and a particularly thick and prominent jugal bone:
This bone is part of what accounts for the wide, boxy cheeks of T. rex. These cheeks also turn T. rex eyes forward significantly, giving the animal a degree of stereoscopic vision: The wide jugal projects over the lower jaw in a remarkable way: The articulation and overlap of the upper jaw over the lower indicates how the flesh should appear. There is, generally speaking, a huge overlap of the upper jaw over the lower jaw in carnivorous dinosaurs: In at least one T. rex specimen, the overlap is so great, that teeth from the upper jaw actually project below the lower jaw. Here is another view, where the red is the amount of the overlap of the jaws: So what we have is osteological evidence for the appearance of the jaw attachment. The artists behind JP took this overlap line and made the lower jaw follow it. I suspect that this also had mechanical purposes: the animatronic dinosaur model had to close and articulate its jaws, and maybe different kinds of cheek were harder to pull off. But I've never felt that the JP design was either scientifically supported or aesthetically ideal. But that doesn't mean that I've always succeeded in my attempts, either.

In the drawing below, I made the cheek covering similar to the flesh covering the rest of the head. When shading the jaw, I think I understated the jugals projecting over the lower jaw.
The problem is that if this drawing were correct, the cheek flesh would have to extend over the jugals and down to the lower jaw thusly: Which is pretty far out there anatomically. What's next is to update the drawing and have both versions. If any of you have an opinion, let me know!

For now, here's Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex, with "her" particularly wide face: