Very Quick Announcement

The Ebay auction for the Pink Dinosaur Sketchbook and the two custom Fairy Tails ends tonight at 8:00 PM EST! If you're interested, click the link and place a bid. Good luck!

EDIT: The Sketchbook itself has been sold. The Fairy Tails are still up!

Little Pink Dinosaurs for You and Me.

I did it? I actually did it!



I just filled a sketchbook for Art Evolved's Pink Dinosaur Project, which ran through the month of October. You can see all the images I created in this Flickr set.

I'm so proud and touched by my fellow Art Evolved-ers. So far this project has been a real life Crowning Moment of Heartwarming (the second one in a month for us!) Having hit 182 pink creatures of the Ornithodiran* persuasion by Halloween, Peter Bond announced that we'll keep the effort going until this coming Wednesday (November 10). So draw your favorite dinosaur, paint the sucker pink, and send it in please!

You could even go crazy like I did and try to create a three-dimensional pink dinosaur...



That's where these lovely ladies fit in. These are former Fairy Tails. Fairy Tails were an unusual toy line that appeared in the wake of My Little Pony circa 1987. Unlike most toys of the era meant to ride the Pony wave, Fairy Tails were made by Hasbro themselves. This may be the main reason why they are often mistakenly thought of as a part of the My Little Pony line, rather than a different toy line entirely.

These little doves had long hair that you could comb and style growing from their tails and heads. They also had symbols painted on to help identify them -- just like My Little Ponies do. And they came with perches to sit on. Their feet were designed like little clamps, and you were supposed to have them perch on your fingers as you styled their hair. That's one for the great annals of badly-thought-out toy designs. The fact that actually clamping one of these birds to your finger hurts like hell may be the main reason why this toy line failed.

Another, more obvious possible reason is the fact that birds with hair = freaky.

These two Fairy Tails lost their head-hair, had their tails cut, and had other flaws. I had no luck auctioning them off on eBay, so I decided, since they were pretty pinkish to start with, to have a go at customizing them.

I learned very quickly why you almost never see anyone customize "Fairy Tails"...



Nonetheless, these two turned out better than I expected. I am deeply indebted to this tutorial and I enjoy finally seeing Fairy Tails with actual feathers. These two will be auctioned for charity probably around the same time as the Pink Dinosaur Sketchbook. I plan on putting everything up on eBay possibly the weekend after next, so look out for an announcement.

In the meantime, shirts! And different shirts! And hats! And somewhat less successful hats!

* - There's a good vocabulary word to add to your daily usage. It literally means "birdlike neck" and includes all dinosaurs biologically defined as such -- AND Pterosaurs. See how useful that is?

Let's Read _Dinosaurs in Your Backyard_

Back to the lecture at hand. I had another very lucrative day finding old dinosaur books at the library. This one's Dinosaurs in Your Backyard, written and illustrated by William Mannetti in 1982, published by Atheneum. The front cover is what made me bring this home from the library. I love the incredibly derpy-looking Tyrannosaurus. Also, more proof that Archeopteryx was the original "Sparkleraptor". The illustrations are kind of odd, but some of the ideas he presents were well ahead of their time. He comes right out the gate saying birds are dinosaurs, for example. Note the Funny Aneurysm here (I apologize for the wonky edits in the text scans):





So yeah, duh, there were dinosaurs in your backyard. It's almost time to start placating them with food again, come to mention it.



Now, most of Mannetti's dinosaurs tend to be oddly proportioned. His Tyrannosaurs don't look any better than the one on the cover, and his sauropods all look very strange. The animal in the picture above is meant to be Thecodontosaurus, which, it turns out, looks almost nothing like this. 

And which is also, as a quick check of Wikipedia reveals, now named "Pantydraco".

Pantydraco.



On the List of Unfair Animal Names, I'm going to put Pantydraco up there with Woodcock and Bushtit.

Speaking of the unfair things humans do to our animal friends, here is a gem from page 99:




Well, you hear that dolphins, corvids, parrots, squids, ect? If you want our respect, you'd better start writing books and/or building machines. And they better be great machines. And start thinking deep thoughts, whatever that means. Maybe you should think about inventing money and jobs and other unnatural things to worry about while you're at it. And then we will treat you as equals. Maybe. We will at least think about it.

The madness continues. One reason why I am very happy to have found this book is that it finally provides solid proof of some very strange old dinosaur theories. They are admittedly pretty tame compared to some of the other theories we have seen, but it's still nice to have proof of what we were convinced those "puny" little T.rex arms were for:



Yep, that's it. (Where are his feet in the first drawing?)
I was also very happy to see this theory illustrated, and it's almost as strange as McLoughlin's Buttheadceratops:



This book is a goldmine for Weird Old Theories I Am Glad I Didn't Hallucinate. More information about this particularly odd reconstruction of Brachiosaurus can be found at good old Tetrapod Zoology (go buy Darren Nash's book while you're there). It's also mentioned in Dr. Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies and illustrated in The New Dinosaurs.

And now, for my favorite-ever Weird Old Theory I Am Glad I Didn't Hallucinate. It really boggles my mind that anyone, at any point in history, could have ever taken it seriously:



I apologize for the text cut off here. I like how Mannetti is swift to call this theory a load of baloney. Finally, here is some proof that, at one point in the history of paleontology, there was an accepted theory that mammals caused the dinosaur extinction by eating all the dinosaur eggs.
...
...
...Take a minute. Let it sink in.
...
Yes, essentially this old theory holds that WE did it! WE killed the Dinosaurs. (And of course, by "we", I mean mammals; the vaguely anthropocentric nature of this theory shows some brass balls.) We ate all the dinosaur eggs in the world. At the same time. And we didn't eat any eggs from crocodilians or testudines or certain kinds of birds. Or, for that matter, the eggs of other mammals. But apparently we ate all the pterosaur and plesiosaur eggs too (but note the comments, where Albertonychus has helpfully noted something that makes this theory even more disturbing: plesiosaurs probably didn't lay eggs). And then, I guess, we stopped. And we never again started eating all the eggs in the world of a certain kind of animal.
.....
.....
.....
Ba-hahahaha! Oh, WOW!

I can't top that. So I will leave you with this drawing of a pair of Pteronodons with wings that have heard of these things called "anatomy" and "physics" and want nothing to do with them. (OK, really I am glad I am not the only person who gets hopelessly confused when drawing folded pterosaur wings. Poor pterosaurs; there are no animals around now that we can really compare them to and model our drawings after.)



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Pink Dinosaur of the day!


Based off one of the aforementioned oddly-proportioned brachiosaurs.
Next up, we pause on the retro paleoart for some shameless self-indulgence.

The Pink Dinosaur Project and a Self-Imposed Challenge

By now you know about the Pink Dinosaur Project, Art Evolved's massive cancer research charity fundraiser. All you have to do to support the project is draw a pink dinosaur and send it in to artevolved(at)gmail(dot)com. And if you are under the delusion that you can't draw, you may donate directly here.

I've had this project on my mind for several days now.



I've also had this little Artist and Craftsman Supply watercolor sketchpad for a long time. I decided it was time to do something special with it. It's not very big, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do my first themed Sketchbook.



Here's the book in the middle of modification...



And here she is after modification. Dealing with the spiral binding itself wasn't as hard as I expected -- except for those tiny holes.



So what's my goal here? I want to draw one pink dinosaur per day. I'm not stopping until the book is full. Full of pastel-colored archosaurian goodness.

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Sketch Pink Dinosaur of the Day!