#thyreosaurus

Here, again, my idea for Thyreosaurus. I had a lot of fun speculating about the appearance of this one. It has some crazy osteoderms that aren't like anything we see in stegosaur otherwise.

The big questions were: how were these positioned? Were they homologous to the plates? If not, did these replace them or did they have a complete different position and function?

One of the most interesting feature for me is that these plates seem to be concave, so they likely formed shallow depressions on the animal; a fun idea. Here my first impression sketch, just an hour after the paper came out.

The version I did on the stream differs slightly, with a more fluent transition from hip to tail plates. The partial skeletal reconstruction by @SlvrHwk_paleo (on Twitter) helped a lot.

I should say that this interpretation of the animal is totally subjective, it could be way more conventional or way weirder. I hope people continue to experiment with it and I hope more excavations will bring more of this material to light. Don't take my work as gospel.

here are today's #Paleostream sketches!!!

today we drew Altispinax, Thyreosaurus, Ornithoprion, and Mapusaurus

flocking drawings!!

Young Altispinax preparing to do a mating display

Thyreosaurus slaying a Theropod

Ornithoprion just swimming round