halfway through the jurassic and welp...here's my chance to really start drawing dinosaurs! check out more on my #perspectives tag!
"Kalligrammatid Effect" Tuojiangosaurus/Meioneurites Jurassic, 160 million years ago, Shaximiao Formation Tuojiangosaurus is a stegosaur known from multiple rather-complete skeletons, making it fairly well-known from a paleontological perspective. Some people portray it with big spikes on its shoulder, but a lot of skeletals and basically every museum mount don't seem to, so I went with spikeless for this guy. Like most stegosaurs, it ate low-lying vegetation - and this is just speculation on my part, but given the decline of stegosaurs with cycads, it might have preferred these types of plants. Like any good stegosaur, it had a thagomizer which it used to thagomize the hell out of its predators. The plates themselves were brittle and not effective defensively, despite the pain a human might feel when a dorito decides to stab the inside of their mouth at a poor angle. Meioneurites was a Jurassic kalligrammatid - not a butterfly, but a lacewing that looked and behaved much like a butterfly before butterflies existed. Many kalligrammatids have fossilized wings with preserved scales and pigmentation, and this lets us tell that Meioneurites's wings were opaque, much like a modern butterfly's. As lacewings, their resting position was likely different from a butterfly's - hence these guys are more spread-winged or sort of tented, like a moth, instead of folding up vertically.
