Hello there, gentle readers. As you may have gathered, I'm a dinosaur nut, the Terrible Lizards being the first thing I could draw reliably well. While I love drawing dinosaurs, I've found my technique getting a bit stale lately; it seems like I'm quite a bit behind the times in terms of dinosaur science and our understanding of these creatures. Much of this is cultural baggage left behind in the wake of Jurassic Park, but there's also a fair amount of aesthetic prejudice - that is, "I want my dinosaurs to look or act like this" - and God help any scientist who suggests otherwise.
It's the Cool Factor: we want our 'Raptors deadly intelligent, hyperfast, scaly, and able to disembowel a sauropod in minutes flat; our T rexes must roar triumphantly through elegant, shrink-wrapped faces; our Ceratopsians and other large herbivores must be essentially bison or rhinoceras-like. Anything else offends our sense of dino-propriety. What do you mean, Deinonychus was a big ground-hawk? What do you mean, Tyrannosaurus couldn't run and probably didn't roar? And as for Ceratopsians, Hadrosaurs, and Sauropods abandoning their young after egg-laying, forget it - they were as devoted of parents as modern mammals, dammit, and anyone who suggests otherwise is backwards-looking and probably a Creationist Republican! What next, some dinosaurs were cold-blooded?!
The problem is, we really have no contemporary framework for the way dinosaurs lived and interacted with one another. All of our mega-herbivores and -carnivores (what's left of them, anyway) are placental mammals. The last remnants of the dinosaurs are maniraptorian theropod derivatives, most no larger than a chicken, who have lost all their teeth, most of their tails, and the ability to use their forelimbs for anything but flying. Even the flightless ratites evolved from highly-adapted flying birds. Trying to reverse-engineer a Struthiomimus from an Ostrich still leaves a lot to be desired. All Paleo-documentaries, even the excellent Planet Dinosaur, sort of stage-manage their creatures so we only see two or three species on scene at once (for ease of explanation and rendering), arranged in set-piece battles with quick kills and little follow-up. The remaining activity is very familiar and safe, usually couched in a vague jungle setting. Thus, when scientists propose new theories that challenge our set notions of these creatures, our already-shaky rug of familiarity is pulled out from under us; we have no context for the new information, and so refuse to acknowledge it.
That's the theory, anyway.
In this muddle of the Third Dinosaur Renaissance (is it the Third one yet? Second?), amid a chaos of new information, I was still stuck trying to draw beasts whose appearance and ecology was continuing to undergo seismic shifts. My biggest sticking point was how to depict Deinonychus for an upcoming (sometime in the future, that is) comic, and I wanted to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Google kept turning up the same images of 'Raptors, flapping their big clawed hands like tennis rackets as they balanced, squawking on top of a confused rabbit or what have you. Out of frustration I typed, "Were Raptor hands useless?" Out of the results list tumbled a very strange image that looked like this:
I'm not saying it's a great image - in fact it looks like something an eighth grader would scribble in his notebook - but something about it grabbed my attention. Something visceral. The link headline read, "Antediluvian Salad: Making Dromaeosaurids Nasty Again..." As I followed the link and began to read, a weird light came on in my brain. This is something different, I thought. Whoever this is, knows his stuff...he's not just repeating the same things everybody else has said. Here was someone with, hold the phone, original ideas about dinosaurs, their appearance, and their lifestyles. Not just regurgitating what paleontologists theorize, but actually looking at the evidence, making parallels to known biology, and coming to new conclusions.
Now I'll be the first to tell you, I'm a scientific conservative when it comes to dinosaurs. I refused to accept Fuzzy T. rex for the longest time, simply because no Tyrannosaurus rex specimen had been found with feather impressions. At some point I huffed and puffed and decided to go along with things, especially since Yutyrannus had feathers, but to this day I'm a bit skeptical. Just because some dinosaurs had varying degrees of plumage doesn't mean we have to cover our dino toys in tar and upend our pillows over them; quill points on Maniraptor forearms don't necessarily indicate full wings past the finger bones (How can they grapple prey with huge friggin contour feathers on their fingers...? Okay, already blogged about it here...)
But I'm a sucker for a bold non-conformer, especially one with scientific know-how - and logic - to back up his wild claims. Ante' Salad's Duane Nash is that guy. When it comes to dinosaurs, he swings for the fences, and very often connects.
I'll give you an example: theropod "lips". This is burnt-over territory, with two basic camps: Lipless, and Lizard-Lipped. The Lipless faction has a champion in this study of a newly-found Daspletosaurus skull, which concluded that Tyrannosaurs at least had crocodile smiles. Crocodilian teeth are rooted directly into the tissue around the mouth, rather than having gum tissue flanked by separate, exterior curtains of skin. Since crocodilians are close relatives of dinosaurs, they argue, one can use them as an analogy for predatory dinosaur appearance; furthermore, the bone surrounding the mouth resembled that of alligators, which have hard keratinized tissues (the study calls them "scales", but they're more like cracked skin) around the edge of the jaw. The study further indicates that, like crocodilians, the Daspletosaurus' mouth edges were extremely sensitive.
The "Lizard-Lipped" camp counters by pointing out several problems with the study. First (and most importantly), dinosaurs and crocodiles have very different mouth architecture. Crocodilian teeth intermesh in a manner that forms a seal, while theropods have more of a "scissor-like" arrangement in which the upper dentition remains outside the lower when the jaw is clenched; the teeth don't mesh, meaning a seal cannot be formed without lips - problematic for a land-living animal. They point to the the Komodo Dragon, whose dentition more closely resembles that of theropods; the lips of these lizards help form a seal around their mouth to prevent water loss and assist in locking down on a prey item (admittedly lizards are only distantly related to dinosaurs, but that doesn't rule out convergent evolution in tissues). They further point out that crocodilians can't have lips due to feeding underwater: the prey needs to be trapped while allowing water to pour out of the mouth. According to the Lippers, it makes no logical or biological sense for the land-living and -feeding theropod dinosaurs not to have lips.
Duane Nash comes in out of left field with a third, much stronger proposal: theropods had neither croc mouths or lizard lips, but instead featured "jowls" (or "meat curtains", as he calls them...I prefer "jowls", even if it's technically incorrect). Essentially, he posits a scaleless, skin-covered theropod snout: the mouth-seal was formed not by rigid, scaly lips, but by loose folds and sheets of tissue. These tissues fulfilled the criteria of sensitive bite-assisting mouth organs while not violating the "Sneering Principle"*. Nash refers to bloodhounds, who not only do not bite their own jowls, but also utilize their many folds to trap scents and shepherd them toward the nostrils. He further argues that these curtains of flesh would cover the upper teeth, which in many illustrations hang out the sides of theropod mouths in a rather odd fashion (all right for crocs, but again: crocs are the exception). Draping the teeth in flesh keeps them sharp and out of the elements, where variations in temperature would cause pain or damage to the organs.
What at first seemed far-fetched and silly (compounded by his bizarre illustrations) slowly became undeniable as he unpacked his argument bit by bit. Look at birds, he said: sure they have beaks, but around the beaks they have areas of unfeathered flesh, especially in vultures and maribou storks. The claim that regular skin wouldn't be tough enough to withstand the dinosaur lifestyle is negated by the vulture lifestyle: bare heads exposed to monstrous sunlight and UV rays, then plunged headlong into carcasses while fighting off rivals to your spot at the dinner table. Scales are nice armor if you have them, but they aren't necessary. If that were the case, lions and wolves should have armored skulls. Furthermore, he argues, bird beaks arose because of these fleshy heads: scaly lips have never turned into beaks, since they are as inflexible as beaks themselves, and therefore negate the need for such organs. As small carnivores began to exploit smaller food sources, such as seeds and insects, they required a more precision tool, and the nonmovable "jowls" just weren't useful in that regard. The tips of their snouts became hardened and keratinized, then spread along the edge of the mouth as the architecture of the jaw itself became more pointed.
I'm sure I'm making a hash of his argument...you can read the whole thing here.
It'll blow your mind. I was so impressed by the post, I went ahead and scared up an image of the Jurassic Park T. rex head and augmented it according to his ideas:
Now I definitely chickened out (no pun intended) in showing Nash's "Bloodhound rex"...that'll take some getting used to; I also wanted to keep the general contours of the JP Rex head for comparison. But you can see how much jowlier my augmentation is. The skin is from a turkey vulture, the ligament and head ornaments patterned off a bald eagle's face, the feathers based on a Southern cassowary. The upturn in the jowls toward the back of the mouth is not a powered mouth movement, like a sneer, but rather an attachment point for the jowls into the skull; in my conservative interpretation, the flesh-flaps follow the contours of the upper dentition, which dips down in the middle and rises at both ends of the maxillary. On the mandible, the flesh sags a bit, like that of a large mammalian predator. The lining of the mouth is light in color, which would make an aggressive gape even more noticeable and intimidating (Tyrannosaurus rex probably didn't roar like in Jurassic Park, roaring being a trait mostly associated with mammals; but croclike hisses and bellows, and birdlike booms and croaks, would have been plenty loud and terrifying). The sagginess of his flesh continues into the neck, which would probably have been a lot bulkier than we're used to depicting. I'd go so far as to speculate that the overmuscled, "flabby" rex of pre-80's illustrations may have been closer to the truth, at least in terms of soft tissues, than Gregory S. Paul's elegant, slimline predator. (I arrived at this conclusion independently, but sure enough Mr. Nash had already beat me to it...and how!)
You may also note that this bizarre creature has "eyelashes" and "whiskers". This will no doubt be a "bridge too far" for many, but at least hear me out: many birds do have "eyelashes", especially those that live on the ground. Ostriches, ground hornbills, and secretary birds all sport hairlike feathers around the eyes that keep dust and debris from damaging their peepers. "Whiskers" are a more subtle feature of many birds, since they only occur as "rictal bristles" around the fleshy edges of the beak: kakapo, nightjar, some owls, and many flycatchers all sport these sensory appendages. Since predatory dinosaurs were known to have especially sensitive snouts, it stands to reason they would double down on this feature with bristles extending from their faces. Birds don't have bristles on the front of their faces because keratinized beaks proclude the growth of filaments, but in fleshy-faced dinosaurs there was no obstacle to growing such sensory organs.
I'm going to say this right off the bat: my interpretation doesn't go nearly far enough. Duane has me beat in all aspects of T. rex. It's going to take me a while to digest and interpret his ideas in an artistic manner. Like it or not, I'm still a slave to aesthetics - I like at least some of my dinosaurs to look pretty or elegant - and Mr. Nash is the first to admit that aspects of his theories may be too Out There. But his science is sound. The natural world has a certain aesthetic nature to it - i.e., elegance, sleekness, and symmetry often equal physical fitness - but we also have to admit that some of the critters we share Earth with are ugly as sin, and there's strong evidence that dinosaurs followed suit. We're handicapped in our understanding of dinosaurs by only having fragmentary, fossilized skeletons to work with, along with some soft tissue impressions; but that doesn't mean we can't use our brains to make some educated guesses about the lives and ecosystems of ancient creatures.
I think the final thing that really sets Duane apart, is that he makes dinosaurs cool again. Not cool in the sense of "popular", but cool in the sense of "HOLY SHIT". His dinosaurs are hideous, messy, slobbery things that feel at once more realistic than our current elegant depictions, and at the same time returns them to their rightful place as ancient monsters, rather than just Mesozoic placeholders for the mammalian megafauna we're familiar with. Sauropods were not elephants; hadrosaurs were not cows; ceratopsians were not rhinos. The Mesozoic world managed to be as alien to our own as physics, physiology, and evolution will allow, and I feel like Duane Nash is the vanguard of a new paleontological exploration into what, exactly, these creatures were. The only bad thing about Antediluvian Salad is that, sadly, Mr. Nash stopped blogging a while back. Still, there's plenty of amazing stuff to drool over.
In conclusion: Click Here. Start reading anywhere. You'll be mystified and scandalized, but never disappointed.
Rick Out.
*That is, no tetrapods except mammals have the ability to pull back their lips or perform complex movements with them. Such movements, he argues, are related to suckling, where an infant mammal must have the musculature to latch onto the teat and form an effective seal; since no other tetrapods have milk-bearing teats, it stands to reason that lip musculature in dinosaurs was nonexistent.
It's the Cool Factor: we want our 'Raptors deadly intelligent, hyperfast, scaly, and able to disembowel a sauropod in minutes flat; our T rexes must roar triumphantly through elegant, shrink-wrapped faces; our Ceratopsians and other large herbivores must be essentially bison or rhinoceras-like. Anything else offends our sense of dino-propriety. What do you mean, Deinonychus was a big ground-hawk? What do you mean, Tyrannosaurus couldn't run and probably didn't roar? And as for Ceratopsians, Hadrosaurs, and Sauropods abandoning their young after egg-laying, forget it - they were as devoted of parents as modern mammals, dammit, and anyone who suggests otherwise is backwards-looking and probably a Creationist Republican! What next, some dinosaurs were cold-blooded?!
The problem is, we really have no contemporary framework for the way dinosaurs lived and interacted with one another. All of our mega-herbivores and -carnivores (what's left of them, anyway) are placental mammals. The last remnants of the dinosaurs are maniraptorian theropod derivatives, most no larger than a chicken, who have lost all their teeth, most of their tails, and the ability to use their forelimbs for anything but flying. Even the flightless ratites evolved from highly-adapted flying birds. Trying to reverse-engineer a Struthiomimus from an Ostrich still leaves a lot to be desired. All Paleo-documentaries, even the excellent Planet Dinosaur, sort of stage-manage their creatures so we only see two or three species on scene at once (for ease of explanation and rendering), arranged in set-piece battles with quick kills and little follow-up. The remaining activity is very familiar and safe, usually couched in a vague jungle setting. Thus, when scientists propose new theories that challenge our set notions of these creatures, our already-shaky rug of familiarity is pulled out from under us; we have no context for the new information, and so refuse to acknowledge it.
That's the theory, anyway.
In this muddle of the Third Dinosaur Renaissance (is it the Third one yet? Second?), amid a chaos of new information, I was still stuck trying to draw beasts whose appearance and ecology was continuing to undergo seismic shifts. My biggest sticking point was how to depict Deinonychus for an upcoming (sometime in the future, that is) comic, and I wanted to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Google kept turning up the same images of 'Raptors, flapping their big clawed hands like tennis rackets as they balanced, squawking on top of a confused rabbit or what have you. Out of frustration I typed, "Were Raptor hands useless?" Out of the results list tumbled a very strange image that looked like this:
 |
| Credit: (c) Duane Nash/Antediluvian Salad |
I'm not saying it's a great image - in fact it looks like something an eighth grader would scribble in his notebook - but something about it grabbed my attention. Something visceral. The link headline read, "Antediluvian Salad: Making Dromaeosaurids Nasty Again..." As I followed the link and began to read, a weird light came on in my brain. This is something different, I thought. Whoever this is, knows his stuff...he's not just repeating the same things everybody else has said. Here was someone with, hold the phone, original ideas about dinosaurs, their appearance, and their lifestyles. Not just regurgitating what paleontologists theorize, but actually looking at the evidence, making parallels to known biology, and coming to new conclusions.
Now I'll be the first to tell you, I'm a scientific conservative when it comes to dinosaurs. I refused to accept Fuzzy T. rex for the longest time, simply because no Tyrannosaurus rex specimen had been found with feather impressions. At some point I huffed and puffed and decided to go along with things, especially since Yutyrannus had feathers, but to this day I'm a bit skeptical. Just because some dinosaurs had varying degrees of plumage doesn't mean we have to cover our dino toys in tar and upend our pillows over them; quill points on Maniraptor forearms don't necessarily indicate full wings past the finger bones (How can they grapple prey with huge friggin contour feathers on their fingers...? Okay, already blogged about it here...)
But I'm a sucker for a bold non-conformer, especially one with scientific know-how - and logic - to back up his wild claims. Ante' Salad's Duane Nash is that guy. When it comes to dinosaurs, he swings for the fences, and very often connects.
I'll give you an example: theropod "lips". This is burnt-over territory, with two basic camps: Lipless, and Lizard-Lipped. The Lipless faction has a champion in this study of a newly-found Daspletosaurus skull, which concluded that Tyrannosaurs at least had crocodile smiles. Crocodilian teeth are rooted directly into the tissue around the mouth, rather than having gum tissue flanked by separate, exterior curtains of skin. Since crocodilians are close relatives of dinosaurs, they argue, one can use them as an analogy for predatory dinosaur appearance; furthermore, the bone surrounding the mouth resembled that of alligators, which have hard keratinized tissues (the study calls them "scales", but they're more like cracked skin) around the edge of the jaw. The study further indicates that, like crocodilians, the Daspletosaurus' mouth edges were extremely sensitive.
The "Lizard-Lipped" camp counters by pointing out several problems with the study. First (and most importantly), dinosaurs and crocodiles have very different mouth architecture. Crocodilian teeth intermesh in a manner that forms a seal, while theropods have more of a "scissor-like" arrangement in which the upper dentition remains outside the lower when the jaw is clenched; the teeth don't mesh, meaning a seal cannot be formed without lips - problematic for a land-living animal. They point to the the Komodo Dragon, whose dentition more closely resembles that of theropods; the lips of these lizards help form a seal around their mouth to prevent water loss and assist in locking down on a prey item (admittedly lizards are only distantly related to dinosaurs, but that doesn't rule out convergent evolution in tissues). They further point out that crocodilians can't have lips due to feeding underwater: the prey needs to be trapped while allowing water to pour out of the mouth. According to the Lippers, it makes no logical or biological sense for the land-living and -feeding theropod dinosaurs not to have lips.
Duane Nash comes in out of left field with a third, much stronger proposal: theropods had neither croc mouths or lizard lips, but instead featured "jowls" (or "meat curtains", as he calls them...I prefer "jowls", even if it's technically incorrect). Essentially, he posits a scaleless, skin-covered theropod snout: the mouth-seal was formed not by rigid, scaly lips, but by loose folds and sheets of tissue. These tissues fulfilled the criteria of sensitive bite-assisting mouth organs while not violating the "Sneering Principle"*. Nash refers to bloodhounds, who not only do not bite their own jowls, but also utilize their many folds to trap scents and shepherd them toward the nostrils. He further argues that these curtains of flesh would cover the upper teeth, which in many illustrations hang out the sides of theropod mouths in a rather odd fashion (all right for crocs, but again: crocs are the exception). Draping the teeth in flesh keeps them sharp and out of the elements, where variations in temperature would cause pain or damage to the organs.
What at first seemed far-fetched and silly (compounded by his bizarre illustrations) slowly became undeniable as he unpacked his argument bit by bit. Look at birds, he said: sure they have beaks, but around the beaks they have areas of unfeathered flesh, especially in vultures and maribou storks. The claim that regular skin wouldn't be tough enough to withstand the dinosaur lifestyle is negated by the vulture lifestyle: bare heads exposed to monstrous sunlight and UV rays, then plunged headlong into carcasses while fighting off rivals to your spot at the dinner table. Scales are nice armor if you have them, but they aren't necessary. If that were the case, lions and wolves should have armored skulls. Furthermore, he argues, bird beaks arose because of these fleshy heads: scaly lips have never turned into beaks, since they are as inflexible as beaks themselves, and therefore negate the need for such organs. As small carnivores began to exploit smaller food sources, such as seeds and insects, they required a more precision tool, and the nonmovable "jowls" just weren't useful in that regard. The tips of their snouts became hardened and keratinized, then spread along the edge of the mouth as the architecture of the jaw itself became more pointed.
I'm sure I'm making a hash of his argument...you can read the whole thing here.
It'll blow your mind. I was so impressed by the post, I went ahead and scared up an image of the Jurassic Park T. rex head and augmented it according to his ideas:
 |
| Original Jurassic Park T. rex head image from iCollector.com; Also Universal Studios, of course. Bottom image augmentation (c)2018 Rick Schlaack |
Now I definitely chickened out (no pun intended) in showing Nash's "Bloodhound rex"...that'll take some getting used to; I also wanted to keep the general contours of the JP Rex head for comparison. But you can see how much jowlier my augmentation is. The skin is from a turkey vulture, the ligament and head ornaments patterned off a bald eagle's face, the feathers based on a Southern cassowary. The upturn in the jowls toward the back of the mouth is not a powered mouth movement, like a sneer, but rather an attachment point for the jowls into the skull; in my conservative interpretation, the flesh-flaps follow the contours of the upper dentition, which dips down in the middle and rises at both ends of the maxillary. On the mandible, the flesh sags a bit, like that of a large mammalian predator. The lining of the mouth is light in color, which would make an aggressive gape even more noticeable and intimidating (Tyrannosaurus rex probably didn't roar like in Jurassic Park, roaring being a trait mostly associated with mammals; but croclike hisses and bellows, and birdlike booms and croaks, would have been plenty loud and terrifying). The sagginess of his flesh continues into the neck, which would probably have been a lot bulkier than we're used to depicting. I'd go so far as to speculate that the overmuscled, "flabby" rex of pre-80's illustrations may have been closer to the truth, at least in terms of soft tissues, than Gregory S. Paul's elegant, slimline predator. (I arrived at this conclusion independently, but sure enough Mr. Nash had already beat me to it...and how!)
You may also note that this bizarre creature has "eyelashes" and "whiskers". This will no doubt be a "bridge too far" for many, but at least hear me out: many birds do have "eyelashes", especially those that live on the ground. Ostriches, ground hornbills, and secretary birds all sport hairlike feathers around the eyes that keep dust and debris from damaging their peepers. "Whiskers" are a more subtle feature of many birds, since they only occur as "rictal bristles" around the fleshy edges of the beak: kakapo, nightjar, some owls, and many flycatchers all sport these sensory appendages. Since predatory dinosaurs were known to have especially sensitive snouts, it stands to reason they would double down on this feature with bristles extending from their faces. Birds don't have bristles on the front of their faces because keratinized beaks proclude the growth of filaments, but in fleshy-faced dinosaurs there was no obstacle to growing such sensory organs.
I'm going to say this right off the bat: my interpretation doesn't go nearly far enough. Duane has me beat in all aspects of T. rex. It's going to take me a while to digest and interpret his ideas in an artistic manner. Like it or not, I'm still a slave to aesthetics - I like at least some of my dinosaurs to look pretty or elegant - and Mr. Nash is the first to admit that aspects of his theories may be too Out There. But his science is sound. The natural world has a certain aesthetic nature to it - i.e., elegance, sleekness, and symmetry often equal physical fitness - but we also have to admit that some of the critters we share Earth with are ugly as sin, and there's strong evidence that dinosaurs followed suit. We're handicapped in our understanding of dinosaurs by only having fragmentary, fossilized skeletons to work with, along with some soft tissue impressions; but that doesn't mean we can't use our brains to make some educated guesses about the lives and ecosystems of ancient creatures.
I think the final thing that really sets Duane apart, is that he makes dinosaurs cool again. Not cool in the sense of "popular", but cool in the sense of "HOLY SHIT". His dinosaurs are hideous, messy, slobbery things that feel at once more realistic than our current elegant depictions, and at the same time returns them to their rightful place as ancient monsters, rather than just Mesozoic placeholders for the mammalian megafauna we're familiar with. Sauropods were not elephants; hadrosaurs were not cows; ceratopsians were not rhinos. The Mesozoic world managed to be as alien to our own as physics, physiology, and evolution will allow, and I feel like Duane Nash is the vanguard of a new paleontological exploration into what, exactly, these creatures were. The only bad thing about Antediluvian Salad is that, sadly, Mr. Nash stopped blogging a while back. Still, there's plenty of amazing stuff to drool over.
In conclusion: Click Here. Start reading anywhere. You'll be mystified and scandalized, but never disappointed.
Rick Out.
*That is, no tetrapods except mammals have the ability to pull back their lips or perform complex movements with them. Such movements, he argues, are related to suckling, where an infant mammal must have the musculature to latch onto the teat and form an effective seal; since no other tetrapods have milk-bearing teats, it stands to reason that lip musculature in dinosaurs was nonexistent.
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