HOME | DD

Description
After being told by a few in the Paleoart community that my 'Portrait of a Deinonychus' was nowhere near scientifically accurate enough to belong to their exclusive little group, I came to the important realization that the reason I had made the head so bony to start with, was definitely because I had planned to turn it into a zombie all along.

A few notes - this MAY be based on an inaccurate skull. Few people know this, but there actually is not a complete Deinonychus skull in human possession yet, so there is some speculation that the creature might have had a longer, more slender snout without the curve you often see in older art. So when I used a photograph of a skull from Chicago's Field Museum for reference, I actually wasn't using a skull at all, but somebody's (John Ostrom to be precise) reconstruction of the Deinonychus skull fragments. So if you see a slightly different version of this picture in the future with a different shaped head, it is because I went ahead and made an 'updated' version based on a skull reconstruction by Greg Paul. All of this has fascinating implications for Paleoart - for I think I sometimes take for granted that a skeleton is complete, when it has actually been carefully filled in using much study of similar animals, and some imagination.

Description
After being told by a few in the Paleoart community that my 'Portrait of a Deinonychus' was nowhere near scientifically accurate enough to belong to their exclusive little group, I came to the important realization that the reason I had made the head so bony to start with, was definitely because I had planned to turn it into a zombie all along.

A few notes - this MAY be based on an inaccurate skull. Few people know this, but there actually is not a complete Deinonychus skull in human possession yet, so there is some speculation that the creature might have had a longer, more slender snout without the curve you often see in older art. So when I used a photograph of a skull from Chicago's Field Museum for reference, I actually wasn't using a skull at all, but somebody's (John Ostrom to be precise) reconstruction of the Deinonychus skull fragments. So if you see a slightly different version of this picture in the future with a different shaped head, it is because I went ahead and made an 'updated' version based on a skull reconstruction by Greg Paul. All of this has fascinating implications for Paleoart - for I think I sometimes take for granted that a skeleton is complete, when it has actually been carefully filled in using much study of similar animals, and some imagination.