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Description
Poster here as well: [link]

Hexinlusaurus multidens is the name given to a skeleton of a not-quite fully mature animal from the famous Dashanpu dinosaur quarry in Zigong City, in the Ziliujing District of Sichuan Province, China. The animal was originally given the name Yandusaurus multidens, but later transfered to Agilisaurus as Agilisaurus multidens because it was determined to be \"not that similiar\". Later, the same treatment was given in regard to Agilisaurus, and it was transfered to a new name, Hexinlusaurus, to honor one of the species\' original descriptors, Dr. He Xin-lu.

This is the animal that forms the basis of my monicker (via some confusion) and I really need to get the skeleton redone. It is remarkable to me how \"modern\" it still looks in regards to the various revisions others of my skeletons have gone through, and I find I will not modify it by much. I have lost the original digital file, so in preparing the integument version of this skeleton for Phylo Pic -- [link] -- I had to deal with a relatively low-quality image, but the result is largely the same, and it didn\'t come out too bad.

Bizarrely, I’ve added a lot of soft tissue around the neck on this animal, which isn’t comprised of filaments or “dinofuzz,” but rather of extra tissues or subdermal ligaments of the like suggested to comprise the “humps” seen in some of Greg Paul’s more recent hadrosaurid skeletons (some of which are available for viewing at his website, here). Such a “hump” seems elegant in the least, largely due to the ornithopod ventroflexion of the anterior dorsal vertebrae (where the vertebrae as a series begin to sharply turn downward), a feature that seems to resist even opisthotonic distortion in preserved skeletons. It is quite likely, rather, that as in mammals and birds with highly flexed posterior necks, rising sharply from the dorsal series, deep and superficial ligaments forming the natural architecture of the next would cross nearly the entire gap between anterior dorsals and anterior neck, and thus essentially “shorten” the neck by half. I’ve not made this assumption here as the neck anatomy of basal ornithopods such as Hexinlusaurus multidens has yet to be investigated.

Note that two modifications to the skeleton at top have been made in the spread below it, the first being the removal of the fleshy, nonmuscular “cheek”. This is done due to the complete lack of positive data regarding the presence of such a structure in any non-mammalian, non-psittaciform animal (yes, I have to consider that parrots, like mammals, actually have a fleshy, muscular “cheek,” although it’s not homologous, the muscles involved are unique to parrots). The second is that I tended in my art, when I drew the skeleton, to omit large sections of unknown material from the black outline, so that the tail is missing. Here, I have reconstructed the tail to be about 50% of the animal’s total length. It may have been quite a bit longer. The skeleton is also not modified in the original from its original “Paulian” design, and does not correspond to my modern “kicking off” posture as demonstrated here. Hopefully, at some point, I will get around ti redoing these, but they do take time and I will attempt them in finer detail.

Description
Poster here as well: [link]

Hexinlusaurus multidens is the name given to a skeleton of a not-quite fully mature animal from the famous Dashanpu dinosaur quarry in Zigong City, in the Ziliujing District of Sichuan Province, China. The animal was originally given the name Yandusaurus multidens, but later transfered to Agilisaurus as Agilisaurus multidens because it was determined to be \"not that similiar\". Later, the same treatment was given in regard to Agilisaurus, and it was transfered to a new name, Hexinlusaurus, to honor one of the species\' original descriptors, Dr. He Xin-lu.

This is the animal that forms the basis of my monicker (via some confusion) and I really need to get the skeleton redone. It is remarkable to me how \"modern\" it still looks in regards to the various revisions others of my skeletons have gone through, and I find I will not modify it by much. I have lost the original digital file, so in preparing the integument version of this skeleton for Phylo Pic -- [link] -- I had to deal with a relatively low-quality image, but the result is largely the same, and it didn\'t come out too bad.

Bizarrely, I’ve added a lot of soft tissue around the neck on this animal, which isn’t comprised of filaments or “dinofuzz,” but rather of extra tissues or subdermal ligaments of the like suggested to comprise the “humps” seen in some of Greg Paul’s more recent hadrosaurid skeletons (some of which are available for viewing at his website, here). Such a “hump” seems elegant in the least, largely due to the ornithopod ventroflexion of the anterior dorsal vertebrae (where the vertebrae as a series begin to sharply turn downward), a feature that seems to resist even opisthotonic distortion in preserved skeletons. It is quite likely, rather, that as in mammals and birds with highly flexed posterior necks, rising sharply from the dorsal series, deep and superficial ligaments forming the natural architecture of the next would cross nearly the entire gap between anterior dorsals and anterior neck, and thus essentially “shorten” the neck by half. I’ve not made this assumption here as the neck anatomy of basal ornithopods such as Hexinlusaurus multidens has yet to be investigated.

Note that two modifications to the skeleton at top have been made in the spread below it, the first being the removal of the fleshy, nonmuscular “cheek”. This is done due to the complete lack of positive data regarding the presence of such a structure in any non-mammalian, non-psittaciform animal (yes, I have to consider that parrots, like mammals, actually have a fleshy, muscular “cheek,” although it’s not homologous, the muscles involved are unique to parrots). The second is that I tended in my art, when I drew the skeleton, to omit large sections of unknown material from the black outline, so that the tail is missing. Here, I have reconstructed the tail to be about 50% of the animal’s total length. It may have been quite a bit longer. The skeleton is also not modified in the original from its original “Paulian” design, and does not correspond to my modern “kicking off” posture as demonstrated here. Hopefully, at some point, I will get around ti redoing these, but they do take time and I will attempt them in finer detail.