#Herbivorous Ceratopsian Dinosaur

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

THE MOST METAL-PUNK DINOSAUR OF THE ENTIRE LATE CRETACEOUS? -- STAY HEAVY!

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on Styracosaurus albertensis; Late Cretaceous (75.5–75 Ma); Marginocephalia (ceratopsian); Described by Lamb, c. 1913; Artwork by William Stout, featured in his deluxe art book, "William Stout: Prehistoric life Murals" (2008), published by Flesk.

PIC #2: Cover art to "Prehistoric Times" magazine #44, published October/November 2000, also utilizing the Styracosaurus painting for its cover art.

Sources: www.williamstout.com/news/journal/product/prehistoric-times-44 & Pinterest.

[actual-haise]

Quick drawing of Torosaurus inspired by the nonbinary flag for Pride Month

[tsukimoakid]

SO MANY REACTIONS OF MY FIRST POST, THANKS EVERYONE !

After reading all the ansers, I get the idea to publish every one of your favorites. At least, I'll try.

FIRST : TRICERATOPS. I saw this skeleton during my visit to Canadian Museum of Nature in 2013. It was my first time in front of a ''complete'' dinosaur specimen. Before that, I have only seen some eggs, T. rex skull, etc. (all false probably...). I was amazed by this museum and their collections. I really recommand ! I'll try to share more from this visit and other times (yeah, I have been there several times and I don't get tired of it).

MY QUESTION TO YOU : What's your favorite museum ?

[edgescience]

We all know our dinosaurs, right? There are the two-legged horrible carnivorous monsters and then everything else that chows down on plants. That’s how the world works, right? There are herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. Life has been governed by the same rules that it is governed by now, and by that, I mean there are no rules. The concept of herbivores and carnivores is to help out with organization but doesn’t really reflect the reality of the situation. Both herbivores and carnivores fall on a spectrum of greater or lesser herbivory or carnivory.

[heck-theo]

Okokokokok- ignore how rough and messy some of these redraws/sketches are - but it's apparently also dinosaur month?? (WHY did no one ever tell me it's Jurassic June? I love dinosaurs) And like. What if Rise but dinosaurs?!

I don't often post such loose sketches but I wanted to show these off cause I really like some of this.

Design choices and dino species + the reasons I picked them bellow (looking for potential Donnie dino suggestions):

Clothes: Without the shell they really need clothes. They'd all have pretty much the same pants to keep some unity, except maybe Mikey (I decided they should all have the same pants after I finished the Mikey sketches, not sure if I'll keep the shorts or change to pants). Accessories are a mix of pre and post finale.

Raph - I think would keep it simple and practical but would also wear nice jackets and stuff when in casual situations. I need to work on giving him an alternative outfit and tweak his accessories a bit.

Donnie - An oversized pull-over hoodie cause we already know he loves that shit. We see him wearing it all the time. Easy enough. He wears a comfortable singlet underneath so the straps of his battle sail don't rub. Nice soft fabric, tight fit so it doesn't move around, tucks it into his pants, etc. When he wears the battle sail he won't overheat so he can wear hoodies basically all year round.

Leo - He's in one of those shirts with obnoxiously large arm holes and make it cropped cause 1. I think he would 2. I want it to be different from Raph and Donnie's singlets. He usually wears the shoulder strap off his shoulder but pulls it up when he needs to. He has some of the black bandages over his mid drift atm but I might just make his pants super high waisted in the final version. He'd probably wear a bomber jacket (also cropped?) over the top for cool weather, but doesn't like to hide his feathers.

Mikey - I think he'd mostly wear hand me downs when he's younger. He definitely goes through a stage of rebelling and wanting to pick his own and would find a middle ground of appreciating sharing some of his brother's clothes and modifying them, as long as he has the choice of his own available. Not sure if that would be before or after this design. At the moment he's got Raph's old shorts (from a loooong time ago), Leo's old shirt, and Donnie's old zip up hoodie. He does have his own accessories though, including pins instead of stickers.

Dinosaurs: I kept them all as non-avian dinosaurs, AKA not including animals that are colloquially considered dinos but aren't (like pterosaurs). I wanted to keep an even split of herbivore vs carnivore just so one wasn't the odd one out. I wanted to keep most of their body structure, colours and distinguishing features the same as canon. Obviously I added tails cause, yeah, of course haha. I did want them to be recognisable as different species of dino using distinct characteristics that their species is known for. I did ignore a lot of differences though, like size and bipedal vs quadruped (although the quadrupeds might be more likely to go to all fours, especially when fighting or afraid). Leo and Donnie are carnivores so have sharper teeth and claws.

Raph - Some kind of Ceratopsian (likely Triceratops or something very similar) and he was the first idea I had for this and I'm really happy with it. I think it just suits him. Trike Raph just came to me in an unprecedented moment of genius. His spikey frill replicates his spikey shell. His sturdiness, protectiveness and willingness to kick ass when needed, all scream trike to me.

Donnie - Spinosaurus but looking for other species recommendations. More details below: So I wanted to figure out a way for him to have tech with a similar function to his battle shell (in the sense that it's something that helped him in day to day life) and so I went with spino cause one possible theory about a function of spinosaurus' sail is temperature regulation. So his battle sail has heating/cooling systems as well as other tech. A spino's sail was probably not fragile but the battle sail would also help protect it from being targeted during fights or crushed during extreme impacts. It was also thought to be used for display, and what's more of a display than a battle sail? The only problem I have with this is that it's lacking part of what makes Donnie's battle shell so great, which is that it is essentially a prosthetic. Not quite the same as how prosthetics are used in people of course, just in the sense that it is replicating the functionality of a body part that he doesn't have (I can't think of a better word). Well he does have a shell but it doesn't function in the same way that his brothers shells do, which leaves him with less defense than they have, hence a big reason for the battle shell (I hope I explained this well, it was hard to try and word properly). I can't think of a good way to do this with dinos. I was thinking of a carno or something with tiny arms, then Donnie could have tech enhanced arms but I'm pretty much ignoring body structure in the others so it would be weird to have just Donnie be affected by a difference in limb structure/functionality. I was thinking prosthetic tail but every non avian dinosaur had a pretty substantial tail. Except therizinosaurus but even they hade pretty obvious tails. I'm open to suggestions for this one if anyone has ideas. It does have to be an extinct non-avian dinosaur (anything not in Avialae), preferably carnivore but if someone suggests a really good herbivore or omnivore then I can try and swap Mikey for a carnivore. I want there to be an even split. I also wanted to give him something different on his face, like his brothers, and that could only be a little spino crest and it crowds the top of his head but I can't put it anywhere else...

Leo - A type of Dromaeosaur. I was tossing up between this and a dilophosaur where his red stripes were part of the dilo's crest, cause I wasn't sure about giving him feathers. But dilo Leo was so plain compared to the rest and the crests were hard to get looking right so I went back to raptor Leo. I can definitely imagine him literally and metaphorically preening his feathers too. You can't really see it but he does also have that big raptor claw. Raptors were smart, tactical and worked in packs so I think that suits him. I wasn't specifically referencing how some artists draw Leo's stripes coming off his face (I was just trying to replicate his stripes somehow, even though it doesn't make a huge amount of sense) but I realised afterwards that it kinda looks like that and might have been subconsciously inspired by it.

Mikey - Is an Ankylosaur. I'm pretty happy with the species but I need to work out the design of his armour plating so that it looks interesting, cool and protective but isn't too chunky, too pointy or super lumpy looking. I went with an anky cause Mikey is often hiding in his shell and he can't do the same here but he could curl up in a defensive ball. Plus I could imagine him using his tail club in his razzmatazz fighting style. A little like his kusari-fundo or nunchacku/nunchucks (not sure on proper wording).

[elbiotipo]

A real life Jurassic Park, leaving aside the fact that "cloning" dinosaurs is impossible, would be very interesting in the behavior of the dinosaurs. Which is I think where modern Jurassic Park slumps the most, even when not talking about anatomical differences (remember that the original Jurassic Park was very realistic for its time).

Suppose you got a perfect clone of a Tyrannosaurus or a Giganotosaurus. What were the sizes of the territories (if the concept applies) and social groups of these creatures? What would be the size of an exhibit for them? Interestingly I have the belief that they would be rather easy to please and contain. Big predators spend most of their time lazying around or in social activity, only going into short bursts of energy to hunt. They might be very territorial but they wouldn't go out the way to hunt you, that would be wasting time, they would warn you plenty if you got too close, but otherwise, unless you went your way to annoy them or mess with them, they wouldn't bother.

Sauropods, stegosaurs, CERATOPSIANS? I'm not saying that I know exactly how they behaved but just look at a hippo or a rhinoceros and you'll have an idea. Big herbivores have to be naturally skeptical of small creatures coming in group around them (i.e. humans).

Anyways I've said this already but I just had the wonderful mental image of a Spinosaurus lazying around in a giant pond under the tropical sun, his belly full and the place warm, and no matter what the "fans" want it to do, he's just sleeping.

[mindblowingscience]

Ceratopsians are most famous for the triceratops, but the beaked family of herbivorous dinosaurs also included numerous other relatives throughout the Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous Periods. Recently, however, a set of bone fragments revealed a totally new, much smaller primitive ceratopsian species—the most easternmost of its kind ever found in Asia. Given initial dating estimates, the dinosaur may also reinforce theories of how these unique animals migrated to modern-day North America roughly 110 million years ago. Sasayamagnomus saegusai is described in a September 2 study published by an international research team in the journal Papers in Palaeontology. Based on their analysis, they believe Sasayamagnomus helped form a distinct neoceratopsian clade—a phylogenetic group composed of a single ancestor and all its lineal descendants—along with North America’s Aquilops americanus and China’s Auroraceratops rugosus. With this new information, researchers argue for a revised evolutionary timeline that saw ceratopsian migration across continents occur during the late Aptian or early Albian age, somewhere between 113-110 million years ago.

Continue Reading.

[saritawolff]

A Patreon request for rome.and.stuff (Instagram) - Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum… that I went a bit overboard with lol. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to draw my favorite ceratopsian, and to digitally adapt my old Pachy marker drawing design.

So! Pachyrhinosaurus! As seen above, there were three known species of Pachyrhinosaurus, living in different locations and eras in Late Cretaceous North America.

The oldest, P. lakustai, was native to the Wapiti Formation of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. It’s known for the extra spikes it has at the center of its frill.

The slightly younger P. canadensis was native to the lower Horseshoe Canyon Formation and the St. Mary River Formation of Alberta and northwestern Montana. It was the largest of the three.

The youngest, P. perotorum, was native to the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska. As this ceratopsid seemingly stayed put during the long, dark, cold Alaskan Winters, it likely had adaptations for keeping warm.

The depiction of a “woolly” Pachyrhinosaurus was first popularized by Mark Witton as a speculative work, but the trope has prevailed. While many paleontologists find a heavy feather covering on a centrosaurine to be highly unlikely, and maintain that the animal’s size and homeothermy would have kept it warm enough, we still have no skin impressions to suggest that P. perotorum was fully scaly. So a feather coating is not completely out of the question (though it is unlikely). Still, I love the look of a woolly Pachyrhinosaurus and how it challenges our previous conceptions of non-avian dinosaurs. Stranger things exist in nature. I had to include a “woolly” option, especially since I already use the guy as my avatar on my paleo Instagram account, SaritaPaleo.

Pachyrhinosaurus was particularly unique in that it seemingly traded off something that had previously worked for other ceratopsians, horns, for a large nasal boss instead. For Pachyrhinosaurus, a battering ram worked better than a sword.

It was herbivorous, using its strong cheek teeth to chew tough, fibrous plants. Perhaps during the dark and cold Winters, P. perotorum would have also dug for roots or even scavenged carcasses. At any rate, from observations of their unusually conspicuous growth banding, it appears growth for P. perotorum would have been stunted during the harsh Winter, but was extremely rapid in the warmer months, an adaptation for the Alaskan climate.

The tundra of the Prince Creek Formation housed a surprising amount of diversity. Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum would have lived alongside smaller ceratopsians like Leptoceratopsids, as well as other ornithischians like the pachycephalosaurine Alaskacephale and the hadrosaurid Edmontosaurus. Theropods such as Dromaeosaurus and Saurornitholestes, as well as a yet unidentified giant Troodontid, lived here as well. P. perotorum’s main predator would have been the tyrannosaur Nanuqsaurus. Small mammals were also somewhat common here, such as Cimolodon, Gypsonictops, Sikuomys, Unnuakomys, and an indeterminate marsupial.

(Btw, the request tier for Patreon starts at only $5 a month. 😉 Link is pinned at the top of my blog.)

[unexpecteddinolesson]

Utahceratops

Utahceratops is a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of what is now Utah. It was a large-sized, robustly-built quadrupedal herbivore that could grow up to an estimated 5–7 m long. Utahceratops can be distinguished by the nasal horn’s placement, almost entirely behind external naris. The horns above the eyes are short and robust with a blunt tip. Typical of a chasmosaurine ceratopsian, Utahceratops had a large frill projecting from the back of its head.

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

do you have a favorite herbi and carni dinosaur? (specific genus or family group)

Favourite carnivorous dinosaur is easy, Sinosauropteryx prima!

It's been my favourite dinosaur of all time for ages, because it represents such an incredible leap forward in our scientific understanding of dinosaurs! It was the first dinosaur described with fossilised feathers (that wasn't considered basically a bird already)!

If that wasn't enough, years later it's one of the only extinct dinosaurs whose colours are almost entirely known! It was an earthy red-brown, with white stripes on its tail and a black "bandit mask" on its face. So, basically an Early Cretaceous red panda.

(art by Gabriel Ugueto)

As for herbivorous dinosaurs, I don't really have a definitive favourite. There's such a huge variety of them, but personally I am always very fond of ceratopsians and sauropods, which I think are just absolutely beautiful creatures.

Out of the ceratopsians I love the chasmosaurini, with their enormous frills and horns and such, and am specifically very fond of Anchiceratops for its apparently weirdly long neck.

But there's a bunch of ceratopsians that I really love, like Pentaceratops, Einiosaurus, Zuniceratops, Udanoceratops, and Styracosaurus.

As for sauropods, the ones I love to see the most are titanosaurs because I find their long upward-sloping backs and necks especially graceful, and it amazes me that The Largest Animals ever walk on land also held themselves with such poise and elegance.

(Dreadnoughtus by Mark Witton)

One thing I notice going through my list of favourite dinosaurs, is how few of them I've actually drawn! Aside from Anchiceratops the art here isn't mine, and it's weird that I haven't drawn much of these guys who I find so beautiful to look at!

Also, feel free to add on to this with your own favourite dinosaurs! Can be carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, whatever!

[ifuckinglovedinosaurssomuchjesus]

Chaos Theory Thoughts:

Episode 1

I like the intro, a recreation of a deleted Dominion scene where Rexy disrupts traffic. Surely she'll appear in the show proper at some point? Wouldn't be surprised if they're contractually obligated to put her in every Jurassic World product.

I cannot stress enough that this is just the ideal aesthetic. Dinosaur footprints creating potholes in an asphalt road that a truck has to avoid. This kind of casual urban anachronistic prehistory is my entire jam, I want to live in a world where Sauropods block traffic.

I like that Pachyrhinosaurus gets the obligatory "wow" moment this time around. It's a fine if unremarkable design, but it's really nice to see in the flesh after the little screen in Fallen Kingdom name dropped it as one of the species taken off the island.

One thing I already prefer about Chaos Theory over Camp Cretaceous is that everyone is a fully fledged adult. It tugs on the heart strings to see them grow and I always just feel a bit more comfortable connecting with characters around my age. Darius worked with the DPW in that four year gap between the end of CC and now. Is it bad that I wish we got to see that instead? The "getting wrapped up in illegal trafficking" plot is nice and all but I desperately just want an episodic series of the DPW dealing with dinos.

Kinda hate this scene, not gonna lie. The franchise's dead-set insistence on treating every herbivore as a harmless cow is a teeth grinding pet peeve. Yeah, go up to a wild agitated elephant and pull a thorn out of its foot, you absolutely won't get popped like a grape.

Allosaurus vs Pachyrhinosaurus. I like that the Allo is pretty outmatched, and it runs away after taking a couple smacks to the ribs. The franchise can forget that carnivores have survival instincts at times. Plus we get to up the score to 3-0 for Ceratopsians against Theropods!

A fun twist on a franchise trope, now it's the car chasing the dinosaur!

I like the themes of drifting away from old friends and the loss of relationships over time. The writers understood that it's a big time jump, the characters have grown up, to use that to drive the emotion is... surprisingly mature.

I adore this scene, as Ben's antics and rant in the dead of the night begin to illuminate the danger they're in before he's vindicated by an ominous shadow in the window, gives me chills.

Enter the Atrociraptor. Unfortunately they don't quite live up to the tension, the attack in the cabin is just a bit too contrived. They're loud and smash into everything like they're half blind, victims of falling bookshelves and railing on stairs. Very clumsy assassins.

[chaoskirin]

Extinct Animal Art: POST 1

I've been creating some assets for @palearaptor's Twitch streams. From time to time she has daily dino segments so I made some arts for them. <3 Here's the ones released so far.

ANCHIORNIS:

A winged dinosaur from the late Jurassic. We know its colors! Dark grey to black body with some white striping and flight feathers. It had a red crest.

ANUROGNATHUS:

Not a dinosaur! This little critter was a pterosaur from the later Jurassic. There were a few species, but this art is based on the holotype Anurognathus ammoni.

HETERODONTOSAURUS:

An early Jurassic dinosaur whose name means "different tooth." This is an herbivore, but probably used those sharp teeth for defense and display.

MIRAGAIA:

A stegosaurid dinosaur with the longest neck of all stegosaurs so far. Like all stegosauridae, it lived during the Jurassic period. There's some debate on how its spines were arranged, but this is the most accepted so far. It did NOT have shoulder spines like kentrosaurus.

PROTOCERATOPS:

Protoceratops, a dinosaur from the late Cretaceous. Although its name means "first horned face," it actually came AFTER some of the more popular ceratopsians like Diablo ceratops. It is still considered an "early" ceratopsian. It was famously tangled in a life-and-death struggle with a velociraptor where both animals died and were fossilized together.

[harpagornis]

Speculative Evolution: Masticating Waterfowl

Birds can’t chew; that is why they have gizzards. After all, you can’t do much with a beak, which doesn’t have teeth and lets the bolus fall off. Older non-avian dinosaurs like hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and even some therizinosaurs could process food with their teeth, but birds cannot, and this has been used as the main reasoning as to why modern ecosystems have a distinct lack of giant herbivorous birds, while herbivorous mammals are abundant (neverminding that ostriches, rheas, elephant birds, eogruiids and dromornithids have co-existed throught the Cenozoic with large herbivorous mammals, and that tortoises and other non-masticating critters have been able to effectively compete with mammals as well).

Except that’s not really the case. Some birds, like hoatzins and cuckoos, seemingly can engage in some rudimentary form of mastication, using their bills to triturate food before consuming it (Korzun LP et al. (2003) Biomechanical features of the bill and and jaw apparatus of cuckoos, turacos and the hoatzin in relation to food acquisition and processing. Ostrich 74: 48-57.). The main counter argument against mastication in birds, that the bolus would fall off without lips of any sort, has been counter argued before, and many birds developed tooth-like structures in their bills. So, birds with the capacity to masticate, to chew effectively, is definitely a possibility, provided the right set of circumstances occurs.

Which brings me to the most likely candidate for such an evolutionary path, anatids. Anseriformes are notable for their bizarre tooth-like serrations, the lamellae/pecten. Pecten are present in all waterfowl, and seemingly evolved for filter feeding, but they have since been refined for a variety of purposes, such as the fish-grabbing, truly tooth-like merganser pecten:

In herbivorous waterfowl like geese and swans, the pecten serve mostly to help the animal rip out plant material, much like the grooves in the beaks of other herbivores like tortoises, or the teeth of non-masticating herbivorous animals like iguanas. Jumping from simply ripping to trituration would be easy; it’d just start as additional bites before consumption, then progress into full blown mastication. Some adjustments would be necessary, mainly in changing the shape or orientation of the pecten in order for them to be useful in trituration, but as seen before they are plastic enough for this to be possible.

More interestingly, waterfowl mastication could be facilitated due to another characteristic: cranial kinesis. Like many other birds, Anseriformes can flex their upper jaw, largely thanks to an articulation that seperates it from the rest of the skull. In a controlled form, this could help to progress the development of mastication a lot, as all the bird would have to do would be to move the upper jaw – or sections of it – as the mouth closes, making the pecten slide against each other, instantly pulverising any plant matter in the beak. This method of mastication would be very similar to that practised by hadrosaurian dinosaurs, which engaged in a more controlled form of maxillary kinesis:

Doing this would mean a very efficient form of chewing with minimal changes to the pecten’s orientation or shape.

Furthermore, remember the aforementioned lack of necessity for lips? Waterfowl “beaks” are largely just composed of keratin-reinforced skin, with the rhamptheothecae limited to the “nails” at the tip of the jaws. As you can see in the above pictures, “lips” of a sort already exist, so if there was an actual need for lips, it’d be solved rather quickly.

[paleostock]

Einiosaurus Fighting

Having a distinctive curved forward nasal horn, supraorbital horns, and two spikes at the rear edge of the skull, Einiosaurus was an herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous.

License this stock resource at: https://paleostock.com/resource/Einiosaurus-fighting-stock-photo

Illustration by Mohamad Haghani

[mascula-sappho]

Let's start a reblog chain game! reblog and add your favorite (I'll do mine first) :

small dinosaur: sinosauropteryx

large predatory theropod: carnotaurus and t.rex

herbivore: pachycephalosaurus

pterosaur: hatzegopteryx

non mesozoic prehistoric animal: orthoceras

Raptor: utahraptor

least favorite dinosaur: don't really like a lot of ceratopsians

and sauropod: amargasaurus

[liviingmemory]

I don't see a lot of Dinaurian characters with battle forms based on herbivorous dinosaurs! So I wanted to make one.

Nothing too crazy with Peroto. She is, as her reference says, "just your everyday Fossil Fighter." She is taking part in my FF world's battle tournament, and has a team of ceratopsian Vivosaurs. She needs a bit more development beyond that, admittedly!