We've had a lot of fun with outdated depictions of deinonychids over the years, but this book sports some of the most incredibly unpretty depictions of our favorite maniraptors I have ever seen:
Oh my... These guys look like they'd be happier menacing Gelflings. And, er, that's an unfortunate angle on the rightmost 'raptor.
Then again, you have the fellow in the lower-right here:
Granted, everyone's proportions are very very wrong. We've seen worse -much worse- deinonychusaurs to be fair, but these guys are pretty bad. To be fair, they do all look better than this bizarre Sinosauropteryx:
The Velociraptor book also includes an illustration of two really ugly, almost bulldog-looking Deinonychuses, which is recycled here in Archaeopteryx and Other Flying Dinosaurs from 2004:
Archaeopteryx is certainly the strangest book in the collection, seeing as we didn't have the vast galloping herds of very birdlike dinosaurs we all know today. We kick things off with a really ugly Mononychus:
And before the ride is over, we get a detour from the dinosaurs to look at a very strange Pteronodon. That beak...:
But we also get a very nice painting of the Enantiornithine Gobipteryx:
I have no idea how accurate this is, but this is just the kind of paleoart I love. It's gorgeous, and would not look one bit out of place in a field guide for modern-day theropods.
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Art of the Day!
Magnemites are cool. World Showcase is cool. And the "Magnemigration" is very cool:
