A bunch of years ago I carefully planned out how to do more short-form content for this blog, and one of those ideas was for a series of You’re Doing it Wrong… posts highlighting common errors in documentaries, art and museum mounts. Maybe I’ll still do some of those at some point, but I think it’s more interesting to highlight my own mistakes, and today we have one that I think is a doozy…

Hello world!

I will be resuscitating the Skeletal Drawing blog again in the coming days (and hopefully weeks and months). Part of that will be trying to post short-form content more often, like small anatomical details that get overlooked…

Without further ado, here is my updated Spinosaurus skeletal. It does not look much like the popularized Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park 3, nor does it much resemble my prior version from 2012. While I am not following the proportions of FSAC-KK 11888, the result of investigations by Ibrahim and coauthors, Evers and coauthors, Andrea Cau, and others have indeed changed the face of Spinosaurus…

In order to produce an updated skeletal reconstruction of Spinosaurus you have to be able to settle on its proportions. I have previously mentioned that FSAC-KK 11888 is the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to this challenge, and the reduced hind legs of the FSAC specimen are the proverbial….bigger elephant? Woolly mammoth in the room? What I’m saying is someone is going to be unhappy with my conclusions no matter what I find, so I’m going to walk through my reasoning on the subject here in some detail…

When trying to restore the proportions of Spinosaurus, the elephant in the room is obviously FSAC-KK 11888, the proposed neotype specimen. When described in 2014 it was purported to resolve most of the mysteries in understanding the proportions and ecology of Spinosaurus, with it shifting from a large, terrestrial bipedal carnivore with a rounded sail to a knuckle-walking aquatic pursuit fish eater with a sigmoid sail (or one with two peaks). Of course there’s been some controversy about each of those claims, and I will weigh in on them in due course. But for today, I want explore sail shape…

No, you didn’t miss Part 1 of this series. Nor did you miss a follow-up to The Lip Post (it’s coming eventually!). Going back to the end of 2018 I had intended to do a two-part post about tails, limb-retractor muscle function, and posture. Part 1 was supposed to be about hadrosaurs (as a follow up to the hadrosaur repose from the same time period), and part 2 was going to be about sauropods…

I’ve seen many questions raised about our recent publication of the Lori specimen, so here are some responses to the most common queries:

What is this about?

It is my pleasure to introduce Hesperornithoides miessleri, a small paravian theropod from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of Wyoming.

Where’s the paper? Gimme, gimme!

You can find the scientific publication here: Peerj …

It’s been a long time coming, but on behalf of my coauthors it is my pleasure to introduce the world to a new dinosaur, Hesperornithoides miessleri…

Well here we go. If you follow me on social media you’ve seen this teased, but I’m putting lips on all my non-beaked non-avian theropod skeletal reconstructions. So much for burying the lede, eh? Ah, but some of you may be wondering why I think they had lips? And what anatomical features I’m using for adding lips and other extra-oral tissues to my skeletal reconstructions? And why I’m doing it now? Let’s dig in to that…