The Book of Skulls

As many of you probably know (if you're a dedicated WPF reader), I've been brainstorming a book for the past 18-odd months. I really want it to be about dinosaurs, and I want it to show off my artistic abilities as well as my writing skulls. This last summer, I began to take that hypothetical book in a direction which I'm still fascinated with today: The Book of Skulls. The book would basically be full of dinosaur skulls (and possibly other archosaur skulls for comparison), both colored and B&W (facing pages). What excited me the most, though, is the color plan: each bone would be the same color in each skull. That is, the maxilla would be orange, no matter what animal is being illustrated. That way, readers could see how the same bone changes over time and because of dietary needs. The maxilla of Eoraptor (above) is a lot different than that of Lesothosaurus or Camarasaurus.
I have already completed over a dozen skulls, some in need of color, and I plan on representing every major dinosaur group. Some skulls are much more difficult than others. Ankylosaurs, for example, have skulls as wide (if not wider) as they are long, making a profile view of Euplocephalus something of a puzzle. Other skulls are known from fragmentary remains. When I drew Silesaurus' skull, I was having trouble deciding how to portray missing bones. My solution was to keep the missing sections white, while coloring in the known portions. In doing so, I realized just how little was known of Silesaurus' skull, although the outline is clearly there.


Other animals were a challenge because so many restorations exist for them. Archaeopteryx proved irritating because almost every paper I have, and every book that describes it, features an illustration by a different artist or author. In the end, I used Greg Paul, but simplified the texturing so that the colors would better stand out. Interior skulls bones, where known, were once colored dark blue, but I eventually settled on light gray, as dark blue took the focus away from the exterior bones, which are my focus.

A good majority of my restorations have been based on three main sources: The Dinosauria, 2nd Edition, Dinosaurs of the Air, and Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. I have also used, whenever possible, the actual descriptions (or updated redescriptions) of animals in question. Amurosaurus (above), Monolophosaurus, Nemegtosaurus, and Silesaurus, among others, got the "straight from the description" treatment. I haven't done any dromaeosaurs yet, but I Velociraptor will be based on my own skull cast, and Dromaeosaurus will come from Currie's most recent reappraisal. By the way, check out Amurosaurus up there. How do they know it had a crest like that, if all they found of a crest was that tiny piece of prefrontal? I found a lot of that as I was restoring skulls. That is, conjecture of overall skull shape, which bothered me. I've blogged before (over at the original WPF) about how I greatly dislike restoring animals known from shabby remains. The example I used back then was Masiakosaurus, who is still no better known, yet there it is, on a poster I have. The thing could've had crests, horns, etc. What did its upper jaw do to cope with the strange mandible? We don't know!
I also just learned a lot about cranial bones while I was engorged by this project. I learned, for example, that Guanlong (above) actually has a lot in common with Monolophosaurus (below), and I like the idea that the two may be conspecifics, the former being a juvenile of the latter. I've talked about this before, and Darren told me a little bit about it in the comments, but I'm still fuzzy on the details. The two skulls look surprisingly similar.

Now, I should mention that all of these skulls, as well as the ones I'm not posting here (there are way too many) are all in beta form. The color scheme is far from finalized, and I'm a bit shakey on some of the exact bone colors. Guanlong's formal description is where I got its skull, but the delineations between bones in the accompanying illustration were far from precise.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this idea, folks. I think this book would make for an interesting reference text, or just a fun dinosaur book. Each skull would have a brief explaination of the animal portrayed as well as specific comments relating to specialties of the skull's construction. And if anyone has a better Guanlong illustration, please send it to me!