
From everyone at Carnosauria!
Best,
Brett and Jess
The Brett Booth Dinosaur Blog, dealing with pointy teeth on bitey things.
Update: Thanks to Andrea Cau of Theropoda fame for figuring out my scambled ramblings. More when it's colored!
A few weeks ago after the horribly done Clash of the Dinosaurs over on the Discovery Channel they aired a show called Monster Revealed (or something similar I can't quite remember.) Anyways the special was about Spinosaurus. In general, it wasn't that horrible, they kept saying Spinosaurus was 60 feet but the animation clearly showed something with a head about 12 feet long (whick would put the animal around 80 feet or so.) It seriously dwarfed the Carcharodontosaurus they used along with the 30 foot Rugops (which it picked in it's mouth.)
This animal was announced over the summer, along with 2 large sauropods. Since it's the first good theropod remains from down under they named the beastie Autralovenator. I finally got around to drawing it, and a good thing I waited so long. Last week a new paper was published that finally (for now at least) sheds some light on a new group of theropods The Neovenatoridea. This appears to be a second group of allosaurs, the sister group of the Carchadontosaurs, and in this group is Australovenator and drum roll please.... Megaraptor.
So Megaraptor isn't a Spinosaur or a Carcharadontosaur but a really advanced allosaur. I'm still geeking about this!
Been a bit busy, so no time for anything major. Here's a hypothetical drawing of the hypothetical/mysterious Tyrannosaurus X. A possible gracile tyrannosaurus, that some believe is a separate species from the traditional Tyrannosaurus rex.
Sometimes the best stuff has already been dug up. Recently an old specimen (considered a sub species of Chilantaisaurus) has been re-examined and found to actually be a member of the carcharadontosaur family. So it's been renamed Shaochilong maortuensis.
Sorry it's not in color, but I just finally got it scanned! A Suchomimus catching a young plesiosaur.
A few months ago a new paper described a fossil impression of a sitting theropod. I had actually drawn a reconstruction of the beast months before, based on footprints from the area, known to some as the St George theropod. It's entirely speculative, but since there is no actual skeleton associated to the footprints, it's hard to say who the footprints actually belong to. It could actually be one of a number of known species but in this case nothing official has been named. So this is a hypothetical image of the track maker and below is a shot of the position it was in while sitting.

Originally thought to be a large dromeosaur, the claw turned out to actually be from the hand, as an almost complete forearm and hand were found. So that tosses this animal out of the 'raptor' clan (sorry Jurassic Park fans!) But were does it go now? That's the probem. I've seen several papers on it, but it appears to have anatomy similar to 2 lines of theropods. The spinosaurs and the carcharadontosaurs. When I was originally told about the change from foot to hand I was told it was, most likely, a spinosaur by several people inthe feild, it was also mentioned as a possible spinosaur in the Holtz/Rey dinosaur book called, simply enough, Dinosaurs (I completely forgot the name and had to google it, I feel like such a tool;). I liked the head design Rey used on his image so I kind of took that and modified it a bit, kind of a more robust Suchomimus.) But after I posted that image, I was told I was wrong...
I received several comments that a new paper would show that Megaraptor was, in fact, a late surviving carcharadontosaur. I actually read the paper, it still seemed up in the air to me, but not wanting to get even more comments telling me I was wrong I decided to draw it as a carchardontosaur for a book I'm working on (images seen here and some new ones with a few comic like scenes showing possible behaviours...)


Right now this is the oldest known abelisaur. It's possible that this animal had some sort of beak
Aerosteon, it appears to be a later surviving Allosaur, or something very closely related. It had a respiratory system similar to modern birds.
One new and the other old. A late cretaceous abelisaur from South America. There are actually skin impressions of the this animal so we have a good idea of what it actually looked like. Well, except for the color;)
This animal reached a length of 30 feet, and had one of the strangest heads on any theropod so far discovered. But the strangest thing would be the 4 fingered hands. Only 2 of which had claws. The fore arm bones have been greatly reduced to be virtully non existant.



The ever popular Spinosaurus. Originally found in the desert near Egypt (mid Cretaceous rocks) at the beginning of the 20th century, all the original material was lost during the bombing of Germany during WWII. We are lucky to have drawing of the material so all was not lost! The original material which consisted of the front part of the lower jaw, a few neck vertebrae, a few tail vertebrae, and most of the back vertebrae with the elongated neural spines. The original restoration was of a giant allosaur with a sail, like this drawing. The exact size of is hard to pinpoint. The original material appears to not have been fully grown. Sizes from 50 to 65 feet have been offered, but we'll have little to no idea until a new skeleton is found.
For a long time that was the restoration, until the 80's, when Baryonyx was found. It was quickly discovered that the 2 species were very similar, that gave us our first decent peek at what a spinosaur looked like. In this restoration I bulked up the skull a bit, the lower ends shortly after the tip, but the back of the jaw bone looks very robust. So I toyed with the idea that Spinosaurus was sort of returning to a more predatory dinosaur, Baryonyx was considered a fish eater (even though iguanadon bones were found in it's stomach contents, along with fish scales) so the skull was more delicate.
In 2003 it was suggested that Spinosaurus was actually a chimera (made up of more than on animal) since it was found in a bone bed with other animals. The jaw belonging to a spinosaur, the neck to a relative of Acrocanthosaurus. The back to a sauropod (all of the three major dinosaur branches produced a 'fin' back.) I actually like the idea (I suggested a hadrosaur for the backbone since the older adults bones seem to mimic theropods, something I didn't know until I saw Valley of the T. rex with Jack Horner. But a sauropod would explain the great size) I liked the idea of a chimera, the sail would be a great hindrance to an active predator. But science changes and moves on...
It was reported that a new skull was found earlier this decade, something that would have been around 8 feet long. Now there was/is a possible relative of Spinosaurus, or in this case a subspecies, also found in Africa, this was dubbed Spinosaurus marocannus. Only the front part of the upper jaw was found, it was very delicate. But this new skull, seemed to link the 2 species/subspecies together, the new skulls teeth matched the original lower jaws teeth so it appears that the more robust skull I drew was wrong, so this drawing was done.
A large early carcharadontosaur from South America. Not much is known about this animal yet. It's clearly large, around 40 feet, and the arms are very small (thus the name.)
Even though only a small amount of the animal is known, it's enough to give you a basic idea of what it looked like. Besides the small arms, it is also known to have a deep tail, so it's assumed that swimming would have been possible. Of course with all those horrors of the deep swimming around I don't think theropods would have ventured far into the water;)
A quick shot of a sub adult Albertosaurus attacking a Struthiomimus, both from Canada. Albertosaurus grew to around 30 feet and Struthiomimus got to around 15 feet. Paleontologists are still not sure what the orstich mimic dinosaurs ate, everything from filter feeders to omnivors have been proposed.
So this is an older shot of Suchomimus. As you can see I don't really like drawing backgrounds, since I don't actually get paid for doing these drawings, I tend to just concentrate on the animal.
Found in Africa, this animal is considered a close relative of Baryonyx (the first good specimen of a spinosaur found.) The skeleton that was found was of a sub adult and it was 36 feet long, so this animal might have gotten to the 40+ foot size range. There are teeth from this line of spinosaurs (Spinosaurus and Irritator are on a second branch, they have less teeth and a more pterosaur like head) from Europe, weather this is a third species is unknown right now.