Therizinosaur Update

Look! Nothronychus! The only way I was able to make this animal look in any way reasonable, I took a few liberties with its design. First, it's got big legs. Why? Because when they were any slimmer, they ended up looking silly. Note also that he's got more sauropod-esque feet, what with those big dermal pads under the metatarsals. I've also given him a light covering of "quills" down the back. I imagine him flaring his quills to intimidate predators. If I have time today (I actually don't), I may draw Falcarius in a threat display.

Gonna color him later tonight, just in time for the Art Evolved show tomorrow!

Therizinosaur Advice

This is the part where I beg my readers for help, kind of like how I did back with Nyctosaurus and Dimorphodon. This time it's for therizinosaurs. I really appreciate all the comments in the previous post. But I now have plenty of other questions. Let's see what kind of answers I can get!

1) Plantigrade vs. Digigrade: Make your case(s), folks. Andrea Cau's post on the subject, and the supposed therizinosaurs footprints are very convincing. However, Qilong makes some good points, too. Honestly, I'm having a hard time drawing a plantigrade, standing therizinosaur. There's no "heel," for one thing. Plantigrade mammals have nice big heels, but dinosaurs didn't. And when you think about it, a giant, 40-foot, 3-ton, big-bellied herbivore walking around on two plantigrade feet makes about as much sense as that same animal walking around digigrade, forever risking toppling forward because the majority of its bulk is in front of its feet. I know that knuckle-walking isn't actually an option, but it almost seems like therizinosaurs should be quadrupeds somehow!

2) In all of your humble opinions, do you think the massive, grown-together pubis/ischium complex is indicative of a sitting habit, as is the case in chalicotheres?

3) Exactly how ridiculous should I make the back on a standing therizinosaurs? Many of the illustrations I've seen, including skeletals, show the dorsal vertebrae trending almost straight upwards in front of the pelvis. This is especially apparant in the most recent description of Nothronychus. It just doesn't look natural!

4) Given that therizinosaurs are basal maniraptors, do you think their arms and hands had the same amount of "folding" that, say, oviraptors and paravians demonstrate? Or better yet, did early representatives have that, like Falcarius, but later therizinosaurs lost it?

5) In more derived therizinosaurs, does the hallux actually contribute to the footprint? That is, are derived therizinosaurs actually four-toed?

6) The "feathers" of Beipaosaurus look a little bit like quills. Do you think that larger therizinosaurs would have retained some of these quill-like feathers, perhaps for intimidation? I can certainly see the advantages to ruffling up a bunch of quills and making yourself look larger and spiney!

That is all. Please post your thoughts in the comments! These animals have very strange skeletons!

In Preparation

I've missed out on some awesome Art Evolved shows over the last few months (understandably), so I'm getting back on ye olde bandwagon for the March therizinosaur-themed show. This is a draft of Therizinosaurus I whipped up today. A couple things worth mentioning:

1) Notice that it's got a plantigrade foot. Andrea Cau turned me on to an interesting paper (via his excellent post) that suggests, based on alleged therizinosaur footprints, that these big theropods had bear feet. It's certainly more plausible than the "knuckle-walking" strategy I suggested like two years ago on this humble blog. However, I do still endorse a chalicothere model, so this therizinosaur is comfortably sitting on his haunches.

2) If that center claw is three feet long, then the whole animal is between thirty and forty feet long. I've never been comfortable with uber-huge estimates for Therizinosaurus. The largest maniraptor known from good material s Gigantoraptor, and it's almost thirty feet long. What I've done to combat oversizing the animal is to shorten the neck and tail. If we're talking about an animal the size of Allosaurus, it can probably reach its leafy greens just fine without a sauropod-sized neck, thankyouverymuch.

3) Only the arms have feathers (right now), and even those may largely disappear. Giant animals with insulating feathers? Probably not. I may give it very sparse feathers along the back, flanks, and arms.

4) It will be to scale with the two other therizinosaurs that I'll be including, Falcarius and Nothronychus. I'll give you two guesses as to where I'm going with this...

That's Our Palin!

Hilarity herein. I am struggling, struggling, to understand how she made people love her, and moreover, how people continue to do so. The woman is like an idiot savant, by which I mean she's unnaturally good at being an idiot. A gigantic part of me believes that Palin is using her child's unfortunate condition as some kind of political platform. Genuine concern may be absent altogether. Rather, rants like this tend to get her on FOX News and the internets.

The fact that this woman has managed to stay in the limelight for so long says terrible things about the American people (who put up with her), the Republican party (who give her the stage), or both. She is the enemy of intellect, though to be honest, our American society seems to be going through some sort of anti-intellect phase right now. Palin is the face of that movement, willingly, and for that I loath her.

Scanning Electronic Microscopes for All!

A few of my fellow bloggers have already picked this story up, but ASPEX is giving all of you out there in Readerland the opportunity to send something to them and have it photographed using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). If my gecko ever sheds again (before she dies...*sigh*), I intend to send them a sample of her skin. Check out their contest at "Send Us Your Sample." A word of caution, however: be mindful that whatever you send to them, they will not send back. So don't send things like wedding rings or rare fossils.

Here's how to do it: First, print out this submission form. Fill that sucker out and mail it along with your sample to:
ASPEX Corporation
Free Sample Submissions
175 Sheffield Drive
Delmont, PA 156256

It takes about two weeks to get your sample onto the website. ASPEX will notify you via email once it's been posted.

You can see some of their awesome work here. It really is pretty cool. I love SEM pictures. Also of interest, a video showing you how to demo a desktop SEM.

Big PS3 DLC Drop Tomorrow

Fans of Capcom's excellent Resident Evil 5 will get their first big taste of DLC tomorrow with the addition of a new campaign mode chapter called "Lost in Nightmares" and a revised version of The Mercenaries with a few new characters. I've never been a huge fan of Mercenaries just because I don't like memorizing map layouts, but it is good practice for Versus games. I'm excited about the campaign chapter, which lets you play out the game's prequel storyline, where Chris and Jill explore Ozwell Spencer's mansion before Jill and Wesker take a spill out a window. I predict it will be a fanservice recreation of RE1. Any excuse to jump back into the game, after all. I have plenty more gun upgrades to buy.

Also, the final chapter in Assassin's Creed 2 comes out tomorrow. This is pretty impressive, considering that the 12th chapter came out like last week, and chapter 13 completes the story. I still haven't beaten the game, as I was waiting for all the missing chapters to drop before I experienced the ending. I do feel like it's a rip-off that actual parts of the story were held back for DLC, though one wonders how important those two chapters are overall. I certainly don't know yet.

I have no idea how much all this DLC will cost, but I've got plenty of unspent PSN gift card money. If you folks out there in Readerland also have RE5 and want to get your co-op on, my PSN name is "Sillysaur." Join me--we'll rock it!

Weekend Sketches

After over a month of not really producing any new art, I finally forced myself to come up with some material for a book I'd like to write that I'll talk about later. I'd talk about it now, but I have two podcasts to listen to before bed, one of which I'm on. Anyway, The Missus and I spent the weekend in an isolated cabin in Soldotna, which gave me plenty of quiet time to sketch. I took Richard Ellis' excellent Sea Dragons with me and let inspiration take its course...



This is, as handily scrawled above, Utatsusaurus, one of the basalmost known ichthyosaurs. The general outline is basically lifted straight from Ellis' excellent pen-and-ink representation, though I opened the mouth, switched up the colors (I think it looks rather like a penguin here) and added the "back" flippers. For being so basal, I think Utatsusaurus is very much an ichthyosaur. Are there more basal ichthyosaurs known now? I know that Grippia and Cymbospondylus are supposed to be pretty low on the ichthyosaur family tree, but I've never been all that educated on the phylogeny of the group.



Here is a rather cartoony Nothosaurus. I know, the proportions are all wrong, but I like how intent he looks. I think that nothosaurs and pachypleurosaurs are interesting in that they're essentially pre-plesiosaur sauropterygians, but all three groups co-existed at one point, so they were all doing different things. And they all mix and match body parts, too. Definately some modular evolution going on in that group. It's also interesting that while placodonts are sauropterygians, they look NOTHING like plesiosaurs and their allies.

Actually, if one of you in Readerland is an expert on plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, I've got a quick question: at one point, I know that the two groups were considered separate, but I remember reading somewhere that, in fact, some former pliosaurs are actually plesiosaurs, and some former plesiosaurs are actually pliosaurs, and that the separation between "plesiosaur" and "pliosaur" is actually very superficial and does not adequately reflect the phylogeny of either group. Is that true?

Sweet Employment, & Other News

It's been awhile since I've posted anything, and Will Baird asked me if I'd gotten a job yet, so I realized that few of you out there in readerland might know if I'm back on my feet or not. So this post will be a general update post on things that have going on in Zach World.

1. I got a job: I'm back to my legal assistant roots, this time at a trust and estate firm. This is a whole new skill set, and virtually none of my previous experience (contract law, risk management, etc.) carries over to here. My employer says it takes about a year for new people before the whole thing "clicks," and I believe it. I thought I'd be taking a significant pay cut, but I got my W-2 from my previous job and found out that--hey, look--they chopped my pay by about 8K without telling me. So that was great. So it's not the pay cut I thought it was! I really enjoy the people, and I have my own office and parking space. Unfortunately, I am really tied to an 8-hour day, and that wasn't the case at my previous two jobs. But I've been there for about a week and a half now, and I like it.

2. Gecko Death Watch: I'm down to one lizard (Solid) and she's obvious got some kind of infection. It started about two or three weeks ago. She's not eating, but bizarrely, she's just as active and is otherwise acting completely normal. Aside from the loss of appetite, I know she's sick because she's pooping out white blobs of...gross. And it requires effort to do so--I've watched her push one out, and it looks taxing. I took her to the vet, they did some Xrays to see if she had impacted eggs, but she didn't, so they gave her an enema and some antibiotics. I think she needs another enema, and it's clear that didn't solve the problem. Unfortunately, it's not really worth the cost to take her back there ($220? The lizard cost $20!) so if the problem doesn't go away on its own and she starts spiraling, I'll be down to NO lizards. It's so strange that all of my geckos have become infected with different things in this last year.



3. Dark Void Zero:This is the first DSiWare game I've bought voluntarily. It's really, really good, and from what I've read, better than the PS3/360 game. This is hilarious because Dark Void Zero is essentially an 8-bit NES game with chiptunes that was developed at Capcom as a joke while the main team was working on the PS3/360 game. It's fantastic, and brings to mind games like Bionic Commando, but replace the bionic arm with a bitchin' jetpack. It's very short, but it's also only $5, and there are three difficulties to conquer. If you have a DSi, I can't recommend this highly enough. So far, it's DSiWare's one killer app.

4. Spider-Man: Reign: You can also call this The Web-Slinger Returns, as it's essentially a Spider-Man version of The Dark Knight Returns. Even the art style is similar. It's not as long or fleshed out, but it's still fun. I got it at Barnes & Nobel on sale for like $6, which is about right. There's a lot of sobbing over MJ's death, and Doc Oc's appearance isn't explained very well, but it's an interesting departure from the usual Spider-Man silliness. I would really like to see one of these "far in the future" superhero books illustrated by somebody whose art I like, though.

5. I still haven't seen Avatar: I didn't have a job for awhile, so money was tight. I'm not real interested in blowing like $16 on the 3D version, but everybody tells me that's the way to see it, so...yeah. Just to be clear: I don't give two craps about the storyline or even the blue cat people, I'm only in this for the xenobiology and plant life. I will see it in theaters, and I will enjoy it, but it's taken much longer than I thought it would.

6. Paleontology is Awesome: I know I've been remiss in posting about two very awesome stories, and it might be awhile until I really get around to it, so I urge you to read David Hone's rundown of the new basal alvarezsauroid, Haplocheirus sollers. I've been working on draft drawing. Someday I'll post it here. For the other big news, Ed Yong has you covered as to the colorful story about Anchiornis. I've encouraged Scott and Raven to join me in producing a trio of Anchiornis drawings to show off the colors.

7. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is Also Awesome: If you liked Smash Bros., this is the next-best thing. Leave your friend code in the comments. We'll rock it. My friend code is 3867-9477-7677. I am an expert with Morrigan and Frank West. I haven't messed with the Tatsunoko characters much, but that's because I'm trying to unlock Zero first. My strategy with fighting games has generally been this: Favor the female character with the largest breasts or most revealing outfit, then practice enough to get very, very skilled with her. Thus, I am deadly with Ivy in Soul Calibur IV. Well, probably not anymore, because I haven't touched that game in like six months.

I also got Excitebots for a song. It's a great online game. If you have it, leave your friend code and add me: 2837-1198-4749.

And for you PS3 fans, my PSN name is Sillysaur and I play a lot of Little Big Planet and Modern Warfare 2.