MortalKAkatsuki96

Look at something 20 feet away, then 10, then 5, then one, then if you can your nose.

Repeat twice, then again without glasses.

Face forward look out of the corner of your eye. As far as you can look. Slowly move to the other corner. Repeat twice.

Look down as far as you can. Slowly look up. Repeat twice.

Roll eyes twice.

Close eyes for five minutes.

Nasutoceratops

Ankylosaurus magniventris

Megaraptor

Utahraptor

Modern birds’ upper beaks are made up mostly from skull bones called the premaxilla, but the snouts of their earlier non-avian dinosaur ancestors were instead formed by large maxilla bones.

And Falcatakely forsterae here had a very unusual combination of these features.

Living in Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous, about 70-66 million years ago, it was around 40cm long (1'4") and was part of a diverse lineage of Mesozoic birds known as enantiornitheans. These birds had claws on their wings and usually had toothy snouts instead of beaks, and many species also had ribbon-like display feathers on their tails instead of lift-generating fans.

Falcatakely had a long tall snout very similar in shape to a modern toucan, unlike any other known Mesozoic bird, with the surface texture of the bones indicating it was also covered by a keratinous beak. But despite this very “modern” face shape the bone arrangement was still much more similar to other enantiornitheans – there was a huge toothless maxilla making up the majority of the beak, with a small tooth-bearing premaxilla at the tip.

This suggests that there was more than one potential way for early birds to evolve modern-style beaks, and there may have been much more diversity in these animals’ facial structures than previously thought.

———

“a eitilt” prints are in!

I have more prints coming in soon so keep an eye out!

And to finish off the dromaeosaur series: the obligatory size chart. I figured some of the poses would be misleading if I put them in a size chart… so I redrew everything 🙃. Neutral poses for the first one, and then my original poses for the second.

All the neutral poses were mostly traced from skeletals, by Scott Hartman (Austroraptor, Buitreraptor, Microraptor, Velociraptor, Deinonychus, Sinornithosaurus, Utahraptor, and Dromaeosaurus), M. Auditore (Halszkaraptor), Ashley Patch (Zhenyuanlong), Xing Xu and Zichuan Qin (Zhongjianosaurus), and Gunnar Bivens (Saurornitholestes). Changyuraptor had to be estimated based on the fossil slab as no one (except Peters of course) has made a skeletal of it yet.

~~~

And that’s it for my Dromaeosaur series (though I may draw more in the future of course.)