The Penguin

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, Deinonychu...

So as you may know, I am partly obsessed with dinosaurs. Scratch that - there's a small lobe of my brain devoted to dinosaurs. I love em, God help me. I even have a super-double-plus-top-secret dinosaur comic maybe in the works...but you didn't hear it from me. Anywho... Part of my problem is in the reconstruction of said prehistoric beasties, namely those icons of American dino-obsession, Deinonychus ( Velociraptor  to you Jurassic Park  aficionados...it's not just a Hollywood bastardization, there's a complicated story behind it which I covered in this old post ). Now, we all know what Deinonychus looked like: wolf-size, sleek, toothsome head balanced by a long tail, grasping front claws and of course the eponymous "terrible claw" on its hind foot. The shape is burned into our collective unconscious; you could construct the most fantastic amalgam of different bits and pieces, but as long as you include the sickle-claw, you're golden. The devil, of...