Saturday, November 23, 2013

Acheroraptor

Here's my rendition of the new Hell Creek velociraptorine dromaeosaur. It's known only from the maxilla and dentary, so I decided to only draw the business end of the animal (that, and I didn't really have the time for a full reconstruction). It's depicted staring at a hispine beetle, of which there is abundance evidence (Johnson et al 2000) from Hell Creek ichnofossils.

The animal has been known from teeth for many years, and was only recently finally given a name, Acheroraptor temertyorum, after the underworld Acheron of Greek mythology (Hell Creek reference and so on). Phylogenetic analysis recovers it as a velociraptorine, the most basal member of the group containing Velociraptor, Adasaurus and Tsaagan.


I had a bit of consternation on whether or not to depict the animal with lips: the original version lacked full lips, and I drew the upper teeth overlapping the dentary. Ultimately I decided to add lips and the result is the above image. The original can be seen to the right.

Evidence for lips on theropods is still debated, but it seems to be mounting over time. I've been wishy-washy about lips: my preferred state of depicting dromaeosaurs, at least, was with a sort of "in-betweenish" lip situation, where lips covered around half the vertical distance of the upper teeth, but the upper teeth still overlapped the dentary somewhat. Jaime Headden has a great post on the complexities of dinosaur lips and why some options aren't really satisfactory without more information.

Photoshop CS4, ~2-3 hours

4 comments:

  1. God DAMN, Emily, you keep getting better! I thought this was a photo at first because of the rendering of individual fuzz-feathers on her head and the reflection in her eye of the earth, horizon, and sky—which have tiny details and are all distorted exactly the way they should be fi reflecting off a spherical eye.

    ♥,

    -faye

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Faye! Good to hear from you again. <3 I love that you interpret the animal as a 'she', too - I always try to put some sense of individuality and personality into the animals I illustrate.

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  2. I wish I could have a replica dinosaur model based off your artwork. :(
    Very beautiful and realistic work, keep it up!

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