Dinovember Day Two: Coelophysis bauri

Hoo boy. Hooooo boy. I was going for sparse, sort of bristly protofeathers on this one, starting with a sort of spiky-looking tuft at the back of the head, in honor of the old “Syntarsus” debacle. I’m not sure what I think of the result in that regard, but I am kind of amused that the pose here was, on an otherwise blank page, so boring that I had to add in a background.

That has to be so frustrating :( do you use plays.tv?

U nasty as hell :/

Syntarsus, William Stout, 1976

He knows how to hold a snake. It writhes and bends, squirming angrily, little tongue flickering from the silent, open mouth, but it’s held in such a way, pinched at the tip of the dinosaur’s jaws, that it cannot bite its captor back. 

He knows the woods, too, how to thread between the conifers to elude a hungry rauisuchian, where the streams are too deep to cross, sites of fallen trees, amphibian spawning pools, phytosaur congregations, and where his territory runs against another’s. He sings a two line whistle—“teet-za-lo, tzeet-a-lee”—in the glade where dragonflies zoom.

His plumage, protofeathers and extended quills, iridesces sea green on his flanks and tail and burns orange up his throat. In the spring he displays his crown with nod-filled dances. It’s an odd form of seduction, Triassic tarantella, Ghost Ranch gavotte, with much fluffing and wagging, while the object of his affection stares, analyzes, and judges motionlessly as to not give any hint of her evaluation. He won’t know if his intentions are welcome until the dance is over and she makes herself receptive, lustfully inclined, hindquarters high, or stalks away, tail tip twitching rejection into the forest.

Coelophysis rhodesiensis. Usually identified in cheap 80s and 90s dino books as 'Syntarsus', almost every illustration of this dinosaur depicts it with a mohawk-like feathery crest in a weird sort of paleoart meme. There's just two problems with that -- one, there was no direct evidence for the presence of feathers at the time, and two, the name Syntarsus already belonged to a type of bark beetle.

Since it couldn't use a preoccupied genus name, 'Syntarsus' was eventually renamed to Megapnosaurus (a brilliant name which translates to "big dead dinosaur"). More recently it's been reclassified as a species of Coelophysis, but a cursory Google image search shows that it's still being frequently misidentified as 'Syntarsus' to this day. To add to the confusion, there are also depictions with small dilophosaur-like nasal crests based on the related species C. kayentakatae, which was initially classified as 'Syntarsus' when it was first described in the 1980s.

All the feathery depictions seem to originate from a single source -- Bob Bakker's 1975 Scientific American article, "Dinosaur Renaissance", which featured an illustration of a speculatively feathered 'Syntarsus' with a prominent crest. Later artists seem to have simply copied the idea, leading to 'Syntarsus' being one of the first non-avian dinosaurs to be depicted with feathers as standard. By accident.