I often visit joelsartore.com for references of the outsides of animals if you’re in need of that (sending this ask again because Tumblr is being Tumblr sorry if you receive it twice)

Thanks for making me aware of joelsartore.com, because those high quality photos will definitely come in art handy.

So for anatomical references I’ve got a lot of ways.

First off is my own digital backlog. If I see anything remotely useful I save it, so on my tablet I have a photo album of over 2,500 pictures of skulls, skeletals, muscle systems, and organs. I also collect a few bones myself irl. I’ve got a ball python, snapping turtle, bird, and bison skulls. Some snake vertebrae and ribs, an anole that petrified in the sun and is a mummy, a turtle shell, most of a dear skull, and a few diaphonized specimens.

For looking for stuff online, first off I avoid pterosaur heresies and reptile evolution because David Peters is a big source of misinformation. I think I used something of his for reference once because there truly was nothing else available.

When determining what references I need I usually try to determine what I personally think a creature is phylogenetically and see what relatives I can pull anatomy stuff from as well as any other relevant animals. For cranial anatomy I usually google “____ skull labeled” or “____ skull anatomy” and usually there’s something with sutures showing or labeled stuff. But sometimes there isn’t and so things get tricky, and this is especially bad for poorly researched or understood groups of animals like primitive mammals or various fish. So there has been a few times when I spent hours with a list of bones something should have and trying to sketch out an educated guess as to where sutures go.

For skulls and skeletals of mammals and dinosaurs it’s actually pretty easy to find most of what you need, although a lot of dinosaur skeletal diagrams don’t include the braincase so I have to search the skull separately.

Keep in mind that often times I have to look for images in research papers.

I actually prefer 3d models above all else if available. Manuel F. Cedeño on Artstation made an in depth labeled Tyrannosaurus skull which is a godsend. Blackburn Lab on sketchfab is a godsend too since they have almost 350 models of ct scanned animals and a few labeled skulls. Ivanbel on deviantart has a bunch of skeletals and skull models of non-mammalian synapsids and other pre-Mesozoic animals.

Of course if I make enough stuff for a group of creatures then I can just use my own art as reference (and I’m cool with people using a lot of my more modern stuff too as reference as long as I’m credited). For instance my tigrex, akantor, and khezu skulls give me a good enough idea of how I should do flying wyvern anatomy that I can just use them. Similar situation with elder dragons. For flying and bird wyverns, since I believe they’re paraves I primarily used deinonychus for their cranial anatomy along with a little T. rex for robustness, and velociraptor and utahraptor for skeletals.

For elders I actually have a “basic ancestral Polypterygian elder” skull I use as reference, which is itself based off a labeled coelacanth skull from a research paper studying their mouth gape and how the intracranial joint affects that. Uth Duna specifically was made using the same references I do for elders, so that aforementioned basal skull I made. I only used arapaima for texture reference and various other fish for how the gills are set up.

Of course it’s nice to know how things move as well, and at least for prehistoric creatures the YouTube channel Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong illustrates this wonderfully with a fun scrapbook art style. It’s also just a fun show that’s very informative on the anatomy and history of study on various dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

the deal is that perhaps usually, it’s a sexually dimorphic elder where each sex uses a different element for some reason. I’m not sure what circumstances would lead to that adaptation and I don’t think it’s that important here. But maybe at some point, a lone half-and-half gynandromorphic individual (which is an actual thing but very VERY rare) was spotted and eventually successfully slain and processed, and from there the rumor spread that this was its own species and now the original, fairly tame (by elder dragon standards) creature has been largely forgotten about. I don’t know you kinda have to grasp at straws to come up with any explanation for this design that won’t get you laughed out of the room but it’s *something* I guess

I mean the headcanon of Mezeporta hunters exaggerating things is what we work off of here so don’t worry you don’t sound stupid.

I’ve got a few ideas for what it could be. Some kind of heavily derived reptilimorph, or maybe some kind of synapsid.

I have another theory that’s parallel to my parave wyvern theory that’s also more inclusive and canon compliant. Instead of pseudophalanges I just double down on polydactyly, and considering the most primitive and earliest appearing wyverns are bird wyverns which have flight feathers, then all wyverns would just be one big monophyletic family of weird paraves in that scenario. If we follow that then Gasura is just a brute wyvern with polydactyly, and a parave dinosaur.

I noticed that Mi Ru's and Unknown's entries omit possibly the most significant feature about them, which to be fair isn't something you'd really notice viewing footage in isolation without knowing the often-drastic ways in which Frontier changes the movesets of existing monsters (exotic Nargacuga is unholy). They're asset flips. I couldn't tell you exactly what moves come from where, but these two borrow their moves from other monsters on the same animation rig. It's late where I live and I don't feel like checking exactly which moves come from where (other than Unknown taking a VERY distinctive move from Doragyuros) but yeah, that's the reason they're so dark and edgy and mysterious and stuff. Designs are dumb as hell but at least Unknown is a great fight. Hope this info kinda clears things up on that front!

First off, I got this 4 hours after posting the doc so wow you read that fast. Also thank you very much!