Saskia de Klerk

Tag: dinosaurs

  • Drawing Dinosaurs

    Triceratops skeleton drawing

    I’ve been part of the Potato Painters Discord for over a year now, but I never attended one of their events. Until now!

    Potato Painters is a Discord server for artists who like to draw and paint on location. Having become such a plein air enthousiast the past years, this seemed like the perfect community for me. Unfortunately, most gatherings have been organised during weekdays or weekends I already had made plans for. When the idea came around to draw at Naturalis’ new Triceratops exhibition in a week I already had off, I took my chance.

    It turned out there were only three of us drawing that day, but it didn’t bother me – a smal group means you get to know each other better. After all, I like to visit these events for meeting new artists just as much as creating an appointment for myself so I have to show up and draw.

    Stegosaurus skeleton drawing

    I had never drawn dinosaur skeletons from life before, and it was just as much as a challenge as I imagined. On the other hand, it isn’t very different from drawing anything else – the same rules apply: simplyfying the general shapes, getting proportion right first, and so on. I got Terryl Withlatch’ The Science of Creature Design for Christmas, so I had already spend some time studying anatomy. It helped recognising some bones, as vertebrates (specifically tetrapods) have a very similar basic skeletal structure. Still, the shape and proportions of each bone vary greatly!

    One museum worker was so kind to point out that the Stegosaurus on display is an older copy, having the tail mounted low as if it would drag over the ground. Nowadays, scientific consensus holds that dinosaurs held their tails up in the air, which inspired me to take my Stegosaur sketch and update it more recent insights.

    The actual muscluature and volume is speculation, I’m no trained paleoartist – but it is fun to try and understand such a creature this way!

  • The Representation of Dinosaurs

    Dragons look different all over the world, but dinosaurs looked also very different in the past.

    When Gideon Mantell found the remains of what later became known as Iguanodon in 1820, he first thought of a crocodile. When he took a closer look, it became clear that he had found among other bones the teeth of an ancient reptillian herbivore. Other naturalists first dismissed them as either fish teeth or those of a rinoceros, until they noticed similarity with the teeth of iguana. Mantle gave the creature therefore the name Iguanodon (Iguana-tooth in Greek). In 1834 another incomplete fossil of the animal was found, which lead to the first artistic renderings of Iguanodon. A well-known mistake Mantell made was intrepretent the thumb-claw as a horn, placed on the nose.

    image

    In 1878 coal mine workers in Belgium found what is still the largest Iguanodon finding to date. With 38 individual animals found researchers were now able to construct an almost complete skeleton of the animal. Though, Louis Dollo took wallabies for reference and mounted the skeleton upright as he thought the smaller forearms wouldn’t help to support the weight. In the artistic renderings of that time, one can still very well see the reference to crocodiles.

    It wasn’t until the 1960 that Iguanodon was researched more and researchers now concluded that there was no way that the dinosaur would have walked around like a kangaroo. Its tail just couldn’t bend like that without breaking. Iguanodon was a tetrapod herbivore which could stand for a short period on it’s hind legs, but had to walk on four.

    It was also around that time that other dinosaurs got an ‘update’, for example the widely known Tyrannosaurus was also thought to walk upright when it was found in the early 20th century. In the 1970s researchers concluded that Tyrannosaurus wouldn’t be able to balance its weight when walking upright, and that the tail would be held upright as counterbalance to the enormous head.