#theropods

[mugene-art]

meet my new son!

giving him body dysmorphia

microraptor plush by @Tetsuya_Inugami (Twitter) microraptor artwork by @pangur-and-grim

[ultrabean]

Seasons greasons!

[fishsfailureson]

Urvogel

(First art of 2024 yippee)

[orange-circuits]

Utahraptor Ostrommaysorum is my second favorite dinosaur i think

i made these bc im obsessed with dinosaur horror and im still angry at jwd for not giving us shit like this

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

artwork by @drawingwithdinosaurs

[joitiks]

an anomaly in the everglades

[pansylair]

boy’s night! a bachelor party of tyrannosaurus rex practice and bond through gentle face holds to ready themselves for another season of competitive and territorial face biting  

[makairodonx]

A Solar Eclipse is coming! How will the dinosaurs react to it?

[sherkathyy]

dromaeosauridae. Bunch of cuties

on insta

[teratart]

August 7th was a big day for me. Finally. After 5 years of participating in fieldworks, I found a skeleton of a theropod!

Well, this is actually not a full skeleton, but! For all the years of research on the Shestakovo location since 1953, only single bones of various theropods have been found here. And in general, all previously found here articulated skeletons belong only to psittacosaurs... So... this is really something new.

The wet sandstone was very brittle and crumbled at the touch of fingers exposing the fossil.

However, finding something is only half the case. You have to take it with you somehow and not break it. The fossil was encased in a single piece of sandstone weighing at least a third of a ton, lying on the bank of the Kiya River and half submerged in water. A high sheer cliff overhangs the shore, and the surface below is littered with cobblestones, on which no one truck can pass. The only way to take the fossil is to float it down to the gentle shore.

But there was a small problem... We had no boat or something. Fortunately, a local resident agreed to transport the block with the fossil on his own rubber boat. This was a small two-person rubber boat that can barely withstand the weight of the rock block. In addition, it turned out that the tightness of the air chamber of the boat is broken, so it needed to be continuously pumped up, otherwise the boat would have just sunk. x') But after a couple of hard hours, the fossil was finally loaded into the car... which couldn't move because it got stuck in the mud.

In parallel with all these events, I fought for the safety of the fragile bone, which was in a piece that broke off from the monolith. Its transportation took another day.

Location: Shestakovo-1 «Malyi Yar», Kiya River, Western Siberia. 08/08/2023

Now the fossil is in the camp. After drying and removing excess rock, it will be sent to the city for tomography. And maybe after that we will find out the taxonomic affiliation of the found prehistoric animal.

[dinodorks]

[ Artistic reconstruction of three abelisaurids recently discovered in Morocco, illustrated by Andrey Atuchin. ]

"Fossils of two newly discovered carnivorous dinosaurs have been found in Morocco. The animals lived at the end of the Cretaceous period just before the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, and show dinosaurs were diverse in Africa before going extinct. Both predators belong to a primitive family known as abelisaurids. These dinosaurs were bipedal theropods with very short, vestigial arms (even shorter than Tyrannosaurus rex) and short bulldog-like snouts. Among the most famous abelisaurids is the two-horned Carnotaurus which would have been about 8 metres in length. While North America and east Asia were dominated by tyrannosaurine giant predators like T. rex and Tarbosaurus, abelisaurids were widespread across Africa, south Asia, Madagascar and South America. One of the new Moroccan abelisaurids was found in Sidi Chennane, just outside Casablanca. It is known from a fossilised shin bone which suggests a medium-sized carnivore about 5 metres long. The other was found at Sidi Daoui, also near Casablanca, but would have been much smaller at about 2.6 metres in length. Both are described in a paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research."

Read more: "T. rex cousins discovered in Morocco shed light on last dinosaurs in Africa" by Evrim Yazgin.

[antiqueanimals]

Tyrannosaurus Rex perishing from poisonous gasses released from the earth's crust in Animal Ghosts. Edited by Claudia Clow. Illustrated by Walt Disney Productions. 1971.

Internet Archive

[saritawolff]

Patreon request for Magno/rome.and.stuff - Ichthyovenator laosensis!

Icthyovenator is a Spinosaurid from the Early Cretaceous of Laos. Known only from fragmentary material, it seems to be unique among Spinosaurids for the strange divot in its spine. (In this depiction, I’ve also added another small divot further up the back; however, we don’t have that much of the spine, so this is purely speculative.) This strange sail could have been used for display or species recognition. Like other spinosaurines, Icthyovenator was likely adapted for a semi-aquatic lifestyle, hunting aquatic prey like fish, amphibians, and small dinosaurs. Like Spinosaurus, it had unusually tall vertebral spines on its tail which likely aided in swimming.

While it certainly wasn’t snacking on sauropods (except possibly via scavenging), it lived alongside large ones like Tangvayosaurus. Trackways in the Grès Supérieurs Formation belong to sauropods, iguanodontians, and neoceratopsians, though fish and turtles make up the majority of this ancient habitat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was a nice warmup for Archovember, and it’s also good to have another Spinosaurid under my belt. I should redraw Baryonyx and give it a size chart. Maybe someday I’ll have enough to make a full spinosaurid comparison chart. 🤔

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

[fishsfailureson]

A Tyrannomimus goes on a walk

This took like, five days, mostly because I was travelling.

[orange-circuits]

baby spinos, for fun, based on baby pelicans

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Remember: Feathers and Scales are plastic traits, and not mutually exclusive! It seems very likely that most dinosaurs had some form of feathered integument somewhere, even if it is minor or for display only. Living birds, no matter the size, do not completely lose their feathers! And, in fact, many birds have both feathers and scales in the same tissue location! So, while many of these do not have direct evidence either way in terms of their integument, we can be fairly sure (based on ecology and proximity to modern birds) that these friends all had floof ^_^