Dr Matt Dempsey

I feel like I'm breaking some kind of fundamental law of reality by doing this in Blender. This would have been impossible without severe performance issues only a few years ago.

Alright Blender sculpt module, show me what you got (and please don't nuke my PC).

A little turnaround of the wrinkle pass of my Blender T. rex character sculpt before moving onto the fine details.

As for the current direction those details will be going, think Hydrosaurus.

Letterboxd people, follow me maybe. I started again from scratch, using the movies I've watched this year as a start, logging new movies and rewatches only as I go along.

letterboxd.com/sketchyrapto...

A little turnaround of the wrinkle pass of my Blender T. rex character sculpt before moving onto the fine details.

As for the current direction those details will be going, think Hydrosaurus.

The process so far...

I herald his beginning. I herald your end.

Short version: feathers vs. scales in dinosaurs is not an all-or-nothing scenario.

It appears that feathers or feather-like structures evolved in multiple groups, but not necessarily all.

It is also possible that some ancestrally fuzzy groups secondarily lost that fuzz, reverting to scaliness.

For the dinosaurs that lack direct preservation of skin (so, most of them), determining whether or not they were feathered, scaly, or both, is hypothetical inference from either where they fall in evolutionary trees relative to those with known skin fossils, or from other factors such as physiology.

No, not necessarily.

Not all dinosaurs were feathered. There is direct fossil evidence of feather/ feather-like structures in multiple dinosaur groups.

But we also know that many others were extensively (and probably entirely) scaly, not looking all that different from "traditional" depictions.

nope

Don't ask me why it's upside down.

Another good day of wrinkle pass progress, and Blender's sculpt module hasn't nuked itself yet. Really proud of where this sculpt is going, but also terrified of ruining it when it comes time for the scales/fine detailing pass.

Also -- the external surface is NOT the original rhamphothecal shape but an internal mould of it. The vertical columns were not exposed in life. And the original beak was even bigger.

This is also evident when you look at other hadrosaurs with partially preserved rhamphothecae, such as the Senckenberg Mummy. It's not a planar spade on only part of the front edge of the premaxilla - the keratin wraps around it like a spoon.

Photographs by Etemenanki3, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY.

Photographs by Dawn Pedersen via Wikimedia Commons/Flickr, CC BY.

Quick palaeoart PSA - there's this LACM Edmontosaurus skull with preserved rhamphotheca that's often circulated and used as direct reference for the beak shape. I've seen a fair amount of palaeoart only reference the right side, but a big chunk of the rhamthotheca is missing from that side.