Catching Up With Draw Dinovember

I can't do much.  But I can draw cute dinosaurs for you.  Here are all the Draw Dinovember drawings I've drawn so far.



Election Day was my catch-up day and... Well, anyway, here's a patriotic sauropod.



I couldn't not draw Syntarsus and his amazing Mohawk.



An episode of "Reading Rainbow" once proposed "Pink with purple spots" as a possible dinosaur skin color. It stuck in my head.



Deinocheirus is just so happy to be here.



Amargasaurus looking kinda wild!



And a little Allosaurus skull study why not.



Kulindadromeus = Angry Fuzzball.



And a Blue Jay, the noblest Corvid.



After Election Day, I woke up thinking, "I need to draw something cute." So I did.



More cuteness care of my new little buddy, Rowlet.



A "Thank You" for Veteran's Day.



And a Birthday present for my favorite model, Cliff the Triceratops.

Now... here's where things take a weird turn. This post about the nasal anatomy of Ceratopsians debuted over at TetZoo, and caused a little stir over on Twitter. And to join the Inflatable Ceratops Face Party, I drew this:



The possibility of other inflatable display structures on horned dinosaurs was brought up and... oh, no...



Getting well away from inflatable dinosaurs for a while, here's a super-chill and extra-fluffy Therizinosaur.



Finally, to celebrate the release of the new "Pokemon" game, here's a folk art Pidgeot.

Let's Finish Reading the Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Animal Fact Finder!

Continuing our journey through the Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Animal Fact Finder written by Dr. Michael Benton and published by Kingfisher books in 1992. The color illustrations are by Jim Channell and David Holmes, and line illustrations are by Kevin Maddison and Ralph Orme.  As a few readers have mentioned, some of the illustrations were featured in Orbis Publishing's Dinosaurs magazine.  I've previously experienced one of the massive compilations of that magazine and boy was it an adventure.

Anyway, look at that Oviraptor! Look at it!



As I said before, Ornithopods come off very badly in this book. This ugly-ass Parasaurolophus is a low point.



While it's nice to have a (not horizontal but still) bipedal Prosauropod, this is all I can see:







Is it me or is Pliohippus here downright sinister-looking? Like something horsey and unpleasant from Celtic folklore.



There's something super cute about these overly beaky Protoceratopses.



I think I used that Freak Deer gif too soon...



I'll admit part of my inordinate love for Therizinosaurs (or Segnosaurs) is based on the fact that nobody had any idea what to make of these guys for years. Freaky fish-guy Segnosaurus is one of my favorite largely forgotten paleoart memes, but in this book it takes a back-seat to this family tree:



Ahahaha, oh wow.



A fairly jolly-looking Styracosaurus, though he seems to have been drawn by someone who had only a vague idea of what the beast looked like.



Ah, Supersaurus. Again, this page pretty much speaks for itself.



And the Syntarsus illustration that led to me finding this book again. What's up, old buddy?



And finally, we'll end our journey with these... less than majestic-looking Tyrannosauruses. Those limbs...

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Sketch of the Day! I've given it some thought, and I have realized that of all the "You really had to be there" moments I've ever experienced on the Internet, Twitch Plays Pokemon is at least in the top five "You REALLY had to be there"-est.  (We'll never forget you, Zexxy.)

Let's Read _Prehistoric World: Ceratosaurus_!

This is going to be a weird one.

Then again, Ceratosauria is a weird Infraorder of dinosaurs if you think about it. So let's start reading 2006's Ceratosaurus and Other Horned Dinosaurs.



By Bakker's beard, introducing Ceratosaurus as a "horned dinosaur" will never not be disconcerting as hell. It isn't *untrue*, technically, and that's essentially the translation of "Ceratosaurus" after all. But I'm conditioned to think "Horned Dinosaur" = Ceratopsians, so it's unshakably weird.

Anyway, did anyone in here order a shameless Greg Paul rip-off?



Oof. But at least this isn't as bad as this next picture, which, from the little thumbnail on my desktop, I would have sworn was from the Pachycephalosaurus book.

It's... not a pachycephalosaurus...



Hoo boy. Okay, so this is a rather fanciful restoration of "Majungatholus", who is now known as Majungasaurus. Giving the beast a full-on pachycephalosaurus-style dome is... an interesting choice. And we all know how big a "pumper truck" is, right?



Elaphrosaurus, who was considered a strange-looking ornithomimid in at least one other book, is here correctly included in Team Ceratosauria.



And finally, good old Syntarsus, this time with a fleshy or bony snout-Mohawk. In a book about ceratosaurids, even though he's a coelophysoid (E: Thanks to Albertonychus for the likely reasoning in the comments below.) And still being referred to as Syntarsus, even though this was apparently corrected to Megapnosaurus five years before this book was published. Yeah.

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Sketch of the Day! My go-to response to the "T. rex Trying" meme.

"No. Unless You Count Birds." - Let's Finish Reading _If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today_!

Ay-yi-yi, we're almost done!



Here's that other strange-looking Triceratops I promised way back in the beginning.

The whole final section of the book may actually be the most brain-hurting.  It purpotes to be a "Question and Answer" section that intends to show some genuine non-speculative science in this otherwise very silly book. Well...



First off, that's a metaphysical question I never thought I'd see. Secondly, "Mammals are only here because there are no dinosaurs.  In the Age of Dinosaurs mammals were small... new meat-eating animals evolved -- first into giant flightless birds, and then carnivorous mammals."

So much wrong in one little rectangle of text, it boggles the mind.  And here is another unsuspecting human who looks like he was blissfully unaware of what they were going to use his photo for.



But then the answer is "Yes" isn't it? Anyway, at least Dixon is nice enough to elaborate on this. Kinda:



Yeah.



That's downright philosophical.  And what do people have against chickens anyway?



"I've always wanted to ride a Chocobo!"



Yeah, so who else has ever heard of this "Vivaporous Pachycephalosaurs" theory? I've only ever heard of live-birthing sauropods and that was long enough ago to feel like a childhood fever dream. Elsewhere, Dixon notes that since their eggs are always in pairs, a female Troodon must have had a pair of "egg tubes" in her body where modern birds only have one, which, if true, is news to me.

And then, there's this:



I feel Dixon stopped just short of screaming, "'Jurassic Park 3' is stupid, stop even acknowledging it!"  This is part of a brief listing of science fiction involving dinosaurs in modern times that mentions "Jurassic Park", of course, and The Lost World and Journey to the Center of the Earth and Pellucidar...  but NOT The New Dinosaurs.  Huh.

Anyway, it's time to touch base with an old friend:



Syntarsus sans Mohawk! Man, he looks strange without it.

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Sketch of the Day!

We Are Finally Finished With _The Humongous Book of Dinosaurs_! Forever...

It's almost over! It's almost over!

Thus far in my reviews of old dinosaur books (click the Hilariously Outdated Paleoart tag below), we have seen naked therizinosaurs, godless killing machine therizinosaurs, and Team Prosauropod therizinosaurs.



The Humongous Book of Dinosaurs gives us the rare and beautiful "WTF even IS this thing" Fish-eating swimmer therizinosaur (Segnosaurus, to be more precise). Love those psychedelic colors!







In the early 90's there was absolutely no question that the Oviraptors were gutless egg-thieves and baby eaters. There's even a comic depicting the assumed story behind the crushed-skull specimen of Oviraptor found on a nest. (Turns out that was her own nest, go figure.)

Anyway, we've got an odd-looking Ingenia and a couple of Citipati who manage to be Sparkleraptors without a single plume. Heck, the one in the middle could be in a Patrick Nagel painting. All things considered, Oviraptors fair a teeny little bit better than most of the other maniraptors in this book.





I said a teeny little bit. Ye Gods.

I've got more than just maniraptors to cover, though. Been saving a few images for last. First, what was all that about an old friend?



Holy hadrosaurs, it's our old Major Award winning buddy, Syntarsus! Love that hardly-elaborated on "curious crest" bit in the text.



The weirdest thing about Syntarsus and his Mohawk here is the fact that he's the only animal I saw in the HBoD who is totally consistent. As usual, he's the only theropod aside from Archaeopteryx (and remember birds is birds here) who gets to have feathers...

At least until this strange portion very near the end of the book:





The discovery of Sinornis and Mononychus put a gigantic spanner in the Birds is Birds mentality for those who were still 100% subscribing to it in the mid-1990's. The poor HBoD doesn't seem to know what to do, giving us exactly two feathered generic-looking little theropods and stressing that Mononychus "may have been a dinosaur or a bird", whatever that means.

Quick tangent: If you are a bird, you haven't somehow stopped being a dinosaur any more than a dolphin has stopped being a mammal. (That's the best analogy I can think of. Please get it, please get it, please get it...)



And then there's Avimimus, which was very poorly understood at the time and is here shown as some kind of anachronistic predecessor to Archaeopteryx. With a lizard face and little stubby hands.

I've saved a very special pair of strange images for last. They concern a small bipedal ornithschian. They're pretty much a culmination of everything crazy in all the illustrations we've seen on this long, long adventure.

Brace yourself, cause here comes nightmare fuel.



AAAAAHHH!!!



AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

That fanglorious little bastard with the horrifying old lady hands is meant to be Heterodontosaurus. Clearly, this isn't the cute little fang-having fluffy runner we are familiar with now. And good lord, that snake-faced Coelophysis!

(Wait, the book's done? The book's done! It's really done!

Ah, crap, what do I write about now?)

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Before I decide on that, here's the finale to "Living With Dinosaurs"! What do you think? Will Dominic accept his father? Will we find out if the baby was born okay? Will Dog (seriously) reunite with his family? Will they explain, come to mention it, what was going on in that cave? Will Dom's cousin and uncle stop being total dicks? Will we ever learn why Dom hates all fish?!?

And the answers for those various questions (though to avoid spoilers, I will not specify which ones) are, "Eh... kind of," and "Fffft-hahaha! No."

Fun fact: the only time this film aired on American television was during that brief, strange period when Jim Henson productions were shown on Nick Jr. Oh what fun that must have been for the kiddies.

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Sketch of the Day! Hey, I've hit the final page of this Sketchbook!