#asilisaurus

asilisaurus kongwe for januaraptor!

they really do look like weird horses

So, in the midst of the thousand thousand other projects I have started, on this website and in life…I just wanna have some fun with art. Not the best artist, so forgive my trespasses here, especially with a dinosaur species I’ve, admittedly, never heard of! Neat one, though! This is a part of the #DrawDinosDaily challenge posted by @a-dinosaur-a-day, so I’ll try and do as many of these as I can this month (or…year?)!

So, middle Triassic dinosaur known from fossils in Tanzania, which is super neat! He’s kind of a weirdy, with longer front limbs, functional fifth toes, a toothless front of the mouth, and an unclear phylogenetic relationship to a primitive group of the dinosaurs, the silesaurids. I skimmed a few papers (unaccustomed to reading paleontological species description papers, so that was a lot of jargon), got some vibe of the guy, and put him to paper! Or iPad.

The potential inaccuracies in my depiction are the implications of feathers (no direct evidence, especially for a dinosaur this old, but there is some academic speculation that feathers may be this early), the way the feet are drawn (that was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but I think I got that functional fifth toe right in there), and the length of the front limbs (they ARE long, but I leant into some older interpretations of the species). So, to my fellow dinosaur lovers, sorry about that! Been a while since I’ve drawn a non-avian dinosaur, and certainly not in this style. Hopefully, sticking with this challenge helps me improve a bit! Next up, the Bearded Reedling (Panurus biarnicus)!

asilisaurus kongwe

I haven't gone to bed yet so it's still the first of the month, that's how that works right?

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, seven swans a swimming!