This is so weird. I don't even know if the artist was clear on what a hadrosaur even is. Except the Ouranosaurus (technically an Iguanodon, but still) to the left of this thing is pretty good.
It's hard to tell is the almost-single row of plates on this Stegosaurus is because (a) of good old text/illustration dissonance, (b) the illustrator found painting the stegosaurus plates way too hard and kind of fudged it, or (c) the really, really wonky perspective. (Or (d), Zach's theory in the comments.)
HMoD is pretty vehement that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs (because, remember, "dinosaurs can't fly". That's another issue for next week.) However, they do discuss them and include some atypically excellent for HBoD paintings. Two of them are worth highlighting here for being a bit odd in hindsight.
Above, we have a pterosaur mother feeding her baby. Now, Mrs. T. is the only fossil that gives us any real insight into pterosaur parenting, if I am not mistaken, and it appears as though parental care wasn't a big thing for pteros.
This painting might just be outdated. This next one is just weird:
You don't see hanging, batlike pterosaurs often nowadays but this used to be a pretty common paleoart meme. It was especially common back when the description of pterosaurs in books focused on a seemingly endless list of what the poor creatures *couldn't* do: They couldn't really fly, they couldn't flap their wings, they couldn't stand up because their ankles were so weak (meaning they had to hang around as shown by their... weak ankles), they couldn't even move on the ground, and they basically had to hang around in high places waiting for a favorable wind to get anywhere. In short, up until relatively recently, pterosaurs came across as nature's cruelest mistake.
Back to the dinosaurs. Here's another strange-looking hadrosaur who, it just so happens, really looks like she and her babies walked right off the cover of the well-loved January 1993 issue of National Geographic.
Speaking of crested hadrosaurs, here's the HBoD bending over backwards in an attempt to explain the two very different-looking Parasaurolophi by
Finally, one of my favorite strange old theories/paleomemes: little ornithopods lived in trees! I'm still not quite sure what the reasoning behind this was aside from the fact that my books as a child always compared Hypsilophodon and company to Tree Kangaroos, but note that it appears in the original printed-page Jurassic Park.
Speaking of, next week, two -yes, two- posts full of strange maniraptors! And I think we just might run into an old friend...
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Hey, it's time for another episode of "Living With Dinosaurs" (see the last post)! In the first episode, we met Dom, and learned that he suffers from very severe asthma, is constantly tormented by his bullying cousin and condescending uncle, and he hates fish because... I don't even know. We learn that he refers to his unborn baby sibling as "The Bulge" because of course he does (though to be fair, so does the rest of his family), and that he'd both cause his mother to miscarry and also impulsively obliterate the entire food chain of the planet out of spite ("ALL fish!") if he ever found a Death Note. But surely those of you who came in late correctly assumed all of this from the title "Living With Dinosaurs".
Truly this is the second most morose and upsetting film involving Jim Henson creatures. Let's see what horrors await our sensitive inner children in today's installment!
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Sketch of the Day!
More feathers and birds!
