Lauren Helton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dino_a_day) wrote2014-06-01 04:00 pm
dino_a_day) wrote2014-06-01 04:00 pm
Caudipteryx - Day 24
No fancy title or background on this one today, I'm afraid - I'd like to do more with these guys at some point, though, because what an unusual dinosaur. This is Caudipteryx zhoui, an early Cretaceous oviraptorid. The outward similarity these dinosaurs shared with later chickens and pheasants is a little bit baffling. They had a very chicken-like body shape, with a birdlike short fanned tail. Strangely, no fossils found so far preserve any secondary feathers (the long feathers attached to the arm, as opposed to the hand feathers, which are the primaries) - either they didn't have them, or somehow they simply weren't fossilized, it's difficult to say. They did have teeth inside that beaked mouth, but they may have been vestigial, for as herbivores, they really only needed that beak and the stones they swallowed into their crop to tear up and break down plant matter. Despite this dinosaur looking an awful lot like a bird, they weren't as closely related to them as some of the other small theropods, like the dromaeosaurs - but maybe that doesn't matter so much, given how blurry that dinosaur-bird line is, already.
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I'd like to ask– do you like the mysteries attached to many of these beasties, or do they bother you at all? (I'm a writer and find certain kinds of mysteries inspiring, but I know that some of the what-ifs in this world bug many in the scientific community)
Thanks again :)
–Nici
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As for scientific mysteries, they're what drive most of us to keep exploring and researching, so I love them too - but of course I also really enjoy the process of working them out and solving them. There's always another mystery right around the corner, after all, and adding to the collective human knowledge is something I aspire to do in my own work.
From an artistic standpoint, dinosaurs particularly are both exciting and frustrating because of what we don't know. It means I get to use my imagination to speculate on colors and adaptations (like, for example, we have no indication that Caudipteryx had a fleshy wattle like a turkey, but we also have no indication that it didn't, so why not see what it looks like with one?) but it's also really satisfying when we learn details about if a dinosaur had feathers and where/what shape/what color, or things like skin texture and limb morphology, because I do want my illustrations to be at least mostly accurate. But since most of my art previous to this project has focused on extant birds, and since we know exactly what they look like, speculating about dinosaur appearances is sort of refreshing.
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I think that's especially true of paleontology, and then who knows? Maybe a new bird species will be discovered tomorrow delighting ornithologists the world over. Those surprises seem to always arrive just when we (collective, science boffins and ordinary Joes and Jills alike) think, "Well, that has to be *all* of them now." But, announced just today, a new lizard species. Wait, that silly little period is wrong: !New!Lizard!Species! And paleontologists never know what they'll find when they split that next chunk of rock– just this year that "humongosaurus" was discovered in Patagonia (40m long, almost half the length of a regulation soccer field *mind boggles*). I'm like a kid in a candy store when it comes to that stuff.
I look at your drawings, and often I feel like I'm 5 or 6, all over again. The dinos themselves are responsible, partly, but your fresh take on what they might've looked like? That adds some magic :)
Hope you have a good evening.