Description
New year's eve work. Tyrannosaurus rex. In this work, I wanted to show my current views on the appearance of this somewhat overrated (although still interesting and, for me - aesthetically beautiful) dinosaur.
A large part of this T. rex is covered with a fine-grained reticula, which is known from the samples of the skin with a "scaly" texture. These samples are very small, but they come from different parts of the animal's body, so it would be reasonable to assume that it was covered by such structures almost entirely. However, the nature of these extremely small "scales" is still unclear, so we do not know whether it excludes the presence of any other cover structures or not. In this case, I drew a small and almost unnoticeable filamentous protofeathers on the back. Finally, the third type of integument the filaments on the bottom side of the neck. I was inspired by modern-day Meleagris gallopavo turkeys, which have bunches of "hair" hanging from their chests ("turkey beard"). These are not feathers, but a very different type of integument, growing differently from feathers (Sawyer et al. 2003). The discovery that this "beard" is not a tuft of feathers, significantly expands our understanding of the diversity of integumentary structures in archosaurs, along with a description of basal neornithischian Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus. I'm not saying that theropods besides turkeys had this filaments, this is purely speculative detail, designed to make the image more interesting.
Finally, the facial Integument. I'm aware that Thomas Carr's conclusions are controversial, so my version is a little different from his version. In general, I don't want to write much, because the debate about the presence/absence of "lips" would not be solved until the "mummy" of tyrannosaurid/carcharodontosaurid/other large theropod head will be found. In any case, here you see highly keratinized skin as a mixture of crocodile and bird traits. I like how these mechanoreceptors turned out.
Black gel ink pen and ballpoint pen, 2018.