Hi Everyone!! I have started the Kickstarter for my Dinosaur Skull Pins project!! It’s all here, for any questions shoot me a msg! You’re free to back however much you want, and share around!
Signed, high-quality giclée art prints, drawn for the officially licensed 30th anniversary edition of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel, published by Folio Society (foliosociety.com).
Dilophosaurus, with a design inspired by Southern Cassowaries. I was thinking out loud about a theropod to draw, and my very dear friend suggested I do dilophosaurus, his favourite. I know he loves cassowaries too, so I mixed the two together. It was a lot of fun, and for sure the most detailed dinosaur I’ve drawn so far.
I’m sure like a lot of people, I’m hoping this bad boy shows up in JW3. That and Spino. They’re both super cool but they keep getting only alluded to/ending up in deleted scenes.
I don’t know if the JW movies put people off the term “hybrid”, but I felt like mashing up two dinos today and this ended up being a cool pair to do it.
Deinonychus and Dilophosaurus are really similar when you think about it. This almost seems like some primitive dromaeosaur whose fossils would turn up in the next few years.
I got some new brushes recently and was able to work through this one pretty quickly compared to the others. Which is great since I haven’t gotten to the really good ones yet.
Dilophosaurus got a bit of an update recently! First Spinosaurus, and now this? Well, I’m certainly not complaining about it!
The big things that changed about Dilophosaurus are the shape of it’s crests, and it’s snout shape and overall build. It’s now definetly a hypercarnivore. Now, this individuals right hand is a bit screwed. It’s missing a finger, the thumb is curved inward and the third finger is all crooked. The cause of the injury is unknown for this one, but it goes to show that being a predator is a tough job. Especially when you are tackling dangerous game, and your rivals are more then eager to fight for territory.
There is also an interesting paper about one particularly unfortunate Dilophosaurus, with a record number of injuries on their forelimbs. This work is partially based on that. It’s free access too, so head on over to https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149140 to read it!
This <TINY> scene from Jurassic Park stayed with me for a long time. In 1993 I was 9 years old. I knew about most “mainstream” dinosaurs, but things like “Metriacanthosaurus” were at a different, completely esoteric level of palaeontology. Its name sounded like a Mephistophelean demon. Internet was non-existent, and books were hard to reach. So I spent weeks, months, dreaming what sort of arcane, Delphic beast “Metriacanthosaurus” could have been - and dreamt that perhaps in five, ten years, Spielberg would film a JP sequel in which it would actually APPEAR.
So, there’s some new stuff going on with Dilophosaurus! The new paper has some pretty cool implications for the relationships of early theropods, and we’ve got some confirmation that Two Crests is not enough to make a clade out of. The star of the show, however, has been the updates to Dilo’s cranial structure, with quite a different, deeper skull that shares more similarities with early neotheropods, and most excitingly for me the suggestion that Dilo’s two crests may have been a support for a much larger structure than previously thought.
Since all of this super-cool stuff has recently come out, and was accompanied by a very nice skull reconstruction by Brian Engh, I decided to do a quick, rough sketch of the New Dilo.
Then uh,,, this happened instead. RIP my hand after drawing all those scales, artists who make hyper-detailed palaeoart have more strength than I ever could.
I’ve had a bit of fun with integumentary structures on this one, mostly inspired by the idea of Dilophosaurus using its head for display, which seems fairly likely. Long quills and facial caruncles accentuate the large, round crest, and the skin would probably be brightly coloured if this wasn’t, y’know, black and white. Maybe I’ll put together a colour version later, but for now I am very happy with how this turned out and also very tired of working on it!
