When You Neglect Your Emotions Because Youre Too Busy With Science.

When you neglect your emotions because you’re too busy with science.

On nomenclature.

According to academia, “modern” means “the 1920s”, “new” means “circa 1996”, and the “future” is what people sixty years ago thought the year 2000 would look like. What word can I use to describe stuff that’s happening now?

Space Jam (via vernacularraptor)

You're thinking of scansion. Scalia is the white of the eye.

I have no idea who Scalia was. Isn’t that the thing that people call themselves when they are furries but with reptiles?

Reblog if you want a pun in your inbox

What are some common mistakes paleoartists tend to make in modern reconstructions? I wanna know what to avoid when drawing dinos.

Not to intimidate you out of paleoartor anything, but there are so many.  It’snot necessarily the artists’ fault; new discoveries about dinosaurs are madeevery day, and many pieces of paleoart are quickly rendered obsolete by theinexorable march of science.  However, somecommon mistakes are totally the artists’ fault, and that’s the kind I’m goingto cover here.

Here are the three big ones that always bother me the most.

“Shrink wrapping”: The practice of reconstructing dinosaur as little more than skeletons wrapped in skin, creating terrifying dino-mummies that - while quite nicely showing off the artist’s grasp of skeletal anatomy - do not accurately depict what the animals would have looked like in life.  (Compare that shrink-wrapped Apatosaurus to this shrink-wrapped depiction of a cow, if you’re not convinced of how silly this is.)

Problematic depictions of feathers.  Whenever a dinosaur is discovered with feathers, paleoartists will oftentimes reconstruct it with those feathers and those feathers alone, not bothering to speculate as to what the animal might really have looked like fully-feathered, while creating pitiful-looking animals that look like partially plucked chickens.  Still other times, artist fully feather the animal, but keep the face scaly and bare, just so we can all remember that dinosaurs were reptiles (and not birds, you guys).

“Monsterizing.”  The reconstruction of Velociraptor linked above is pretty infamous.  In reality, feathered dinosaurs were probably not scuzzy movie monsters; they probably looked like this, and were potentially even more birdlike than this reconstruction.  Another example of this is Microraptor, the infamous “four-winged dinosaur”, commonly depicted zooming past the viewer with all four limbs spread like some kind of prehistoric dragon monster, when in reality it was probably just a bird.

What do all these mistakes have in common?  They depict the artist’s preconceptions of dinosaurs, rather than creative speculations on how these animals actually would have lived.  A lot of dinosaur enthusiasts are in it for the wrong reasons; they see dinosaurs as rampaging creatures of myth, rather than what they were - animals.  They depict dinosaurs as roaring behemoths and scuzzy-feathered killing machines, rather than biologically sound, real, once-living creatures that were as beautiful and graceful as any modern animal.

How can you avoid this?  Do your research, and use your imagination.  Keep up-to-date on the latest theories about dinosaur musculature and soft tissue, and develop your own well-informed opinions to inform your paleoart.  At the same time, compare dinosaurs to animal living today.  Not just reptiles and birds; compare them to large mammals that fill formerly dinosaurian ecological niches.  What features do modern animals have that dinosaurs might have as well, but that we rarely see represented in art, due to lack of direct fossil evidence?  What adaptations might dinosaurs have evolved, to excel in the same way as modern animals?

Here’s some good modern paleoartists to get you some potential inspiration:

John Conway

C.M. Kosemen

Julius T. Csotonyi

Luis V. Rey