I’ve become quite familiar with Cretaceous plants from researching the previous two dinosaurs. Africa had a lot of wetlands and marshes so I looked at some aquatic plants like duckweed. I’ve also included cycads around the water.

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There is some debate around how good of a swimmer Spinosaurus was and whether swimming was a big part of their hunting strategy. I like to think of it like a very large heron. Standing in the water and waiting for a fish to get in range of its long snout.

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I based the colouring on a crested chameleon as it has a back sail like Spinosaurus. I gave it the short legs, wide basilisk tail, and rectangular sail of modern depictions of Spinosaurus. Some people call the up to date version of spinosaurus a nerf, but I really like how it looks!

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I researched the plant life in Cretaceous North America and found that it was quite similar to my research of Cretaceous Mongolia. I decided to add some kind of flower this time as flowers appeared somewhere around 130-90 million years ago and Styracosaurus would’ve been alive then.

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I based the baby on specimens of a baby Triceratops as we have a good idea of how triceratops changed as it grew. The horn and frill spikes are shorter and the face is stubbier. Even though triceratops is a chasmosaurine, the anatomical changes would probably be similar for centrosaurines

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I represented sexual dimorphism by giving this male Styracosaurus bright colours on the head and down the back. As birds are members of dinosauria I decided to make the baby have less colouring like baby birds do. The colouring will develop as it grows older.

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We have no evidence of Deinocheirus’ colouring so I chose a light brown colour. Deinocheirus could grow to 36ft long and weigh up to 6.5 tonnes. It was the largest member of Ornithomimosauria and was part of its own family called Deinocheiridae. 3/3

I looked into native plants to Cretaceous Mongolia to make sure they were accurate too. I chose horsetails and ferns as they can grow near water which would fit with the concept. I also chose a ginkgo to have draping down the top of the illustration. 2/3

I used this illustration that I made last year as a starting point because I liked the concept. I researched the anatomy of Deinocheirus so I could make sure it was correct to the real animal. The two biggest changes I made were positioning the arms lower down the body and altering the hump. 1/3

For reference, here’s a deinocheirus I drew last year to show the sort of style they’ll be in. 6/6 #illustration #paleoart #deinocheirus

But it’s something to do. I’ll be posting facts and sketches of each animal before posting the finished illustration. The first one will be one of my favourites…

Deinocheirus!!

I don’t know how often I’ll post as life is a lot at the moment but we’ll see! 5/??

‘The Mesozoic Project’ a series of illustrations of Mesozoic animals. I will be researching the most up to date information and creating a single illustration for each animal until I’ve covered every single one. Yes I know that’s a lot and I’ll probably give up or die before I finish them all. 4/??

So I thought I’d just do something simple. I like illustration. One of my special interests are dinosaurs (Mesozoic fauna in general). Let’s just put the two together and create a little project for myself. Introducing… 3/??

All this AI stuff just makes me feel like what is the point? I’m also used to my current job so I don’t know how I’d handle leaving considering my autistic need for familiarity. There’s been this feeling though. A feeling of needing to create but not knowing what. 2/??