Dyno-nychus
10:28 am
Halloween week seems like a good time to show off this Deinonychus skull I drew up a few months back. My coworker David Baccadutre was looking for a stylized skull (similar to the Titanophoneus in the HMNH logo) for a graphic to put on the side of his Mini Cooper, and after thinking about it for a bit, he decided a speedy little dromaeosaur would fit the bill. I did a couple sketches of the skull in 3/4 view, worked up the final drawing in Adobe Illustrator, and passed the artwork along to him.
He worked up the final graphic, “Dino’d by Matt Celeskey,” and had it printed up as a magnetic decal. A picture of the graphic in situ is shown below:
And here’s David with his spiffy new ride:
What’s the floating eye ring sort of thing? Is that bone? How does it fit in with the eye and the underlying tissues?
Holy crap! Awesome! That should be the new site logo skull, Matt.
Ian, that’s the sclerotic ring. The ring is “cupped,” and the eyeball sits atop it. It’s purpose is (in modern birds, at least) to focus the eye. While mammals focus the eye with muscular action, archosaurs seem to do things the old-fashioned way: muscles are attached to the ring, not the eye, and collapsing or expanding the ring focuses the eye.
At least, that’s how it was explained to me.
Thanks for the info. I vaguely remember hearing about the sclerotic ring, now, but I don’t think I ever knew what it did.
It looks incredibly fragile. Have dinosaurian examples really been recovered?
It IS incredibly fragile. It also seems to have disappeared in several archosaur groups. It’s usually found among theropods, but a few basal ornithopod rings have been recovered, and Psittacosaurus had ‘em. I think one of Cope’s articulated “Monoclonius” skeletons had a sclerotic ring, but I’m too lazy to dig through my archives right now. I’m not sure whether pachycephalosaurs and thyreophorans had rings, though. Modern crocodiles have lost the sclerotic ring, but lots of ancient crurotarsians had them.
Of course, due to their fragility, there’s likely a strong preservation bias against them, so they may be more widespread than I let on.
Great job Matt (as allways)! You should consider putting this up for sale in the Paleo pop-shop, as I for one would pay big money to put this on my car!
Great graphic! I’d love to see more 3/4 skulls in this graphic style. Perhaps serving as a basis for site organization/navigation. I’ve been investigating ways to use this kind of visual grouping in my undergraduate dinosaur class to organize semester topics.