i-draws-dinosaurs:WWD2020: Plateosaurus engelhardti Welcome back to WWD202 everyone! I’m cha
i-draws-dinosaurs: WWD2020: Plateosaurus engelhardti Welcome back to WWD202 everyone! I’m changing up the formatting of the posts a bit to keep them a little more structured and hopefully easier to read, so let me know what you think of the change, is it helpful? Following on from Postosuchus we’re looking at another quadruped-turned-biped, Plateosaurus from Episode 1: New Blood! General: In terms of design upgrades, Plateosaurus has received the most radical changes so far. WWD portrays Plateosaurus as a huge, lumbering ancestor of sauropods, drawing parallels between these and the giant herbivores that would come later. However, while Plateosaurus and its relatives were related to the ancestors of sauropod, they themselves died out at the end of the Triassic. Plateosaurus was in reality a much slimmer and likely more energetic animal, with a body plan more reminiscent of mid-sized theropods than sauropods. Anatomy: Some specific anatomical critiques of the WWD version include the ever-present pronated hands, the rather generic smooth heads instead of the distinctively boxy skull of the real Plateosaurus, and interestingly, massively chunky thighs. It’s a pretty consistent rule that the muscle of an animal’s legs are only as thick as the bone at the top of the hip that they attach to, the ilium. As in many early dinosaurs, Plateosaurus has a rather small ilium, resulting in surprisingly narrow thighs for an animal its size: Compared to the size of the WWD Plateosaurus’ thigh (red), the actual muscle mass of Plateosaurus (green) anchored to the ilium (yellow) looks almost scrawny. Another major difference between the WWD and modern Plateosaurus is posture: WWD shows Plateosaurus as a quadruped, which was the accepted theory in the 90s. However, subsequent studies have shown, like with Postosuchus, that the hands of Plateosaurus just were not capable of being used for walking, making it another obligate biped. They also have a rather small arm-to-leg length ratio, which would be extremely awkward and inefficient to use for quadrupedal walking. Skin/Colour: I’ve also given my Plateosaurus a light sprinkling of fuzz, as fuzzy filaments were potentially ancestral to Dinosauria but Plateosaurus, as a large animal, likely would have begun losing them the same way the large mammals today lost most of their fur. I really love the colour scheme of these Plateosaurus, and I went with the dark-headed more high contrast version from the show itself rather than the plainer design on promotional pictures like the first one in this post because I just think it’s neat. Geographical/Temporal Weirdness Alert! Okay, here’s a new one! WWD tends to pull species from all over the world and time period and slap them all together in an ecosystem, even if those animals likely never met. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to stick with redesigning the species that appear in the show, but when something doesn’t belong I’ll do a quick breakdown of where it should be and any species that I think could potentially replace it in the story. Postosuchus and Coelophysis would have coexisted at least for a short period of time in Late Triassic North America. Plateosaurus, on the other hand, comes from the same time in Germany. Although all the continents were joined together in the Triassic, they were still pretty far away, and continents today don’t even have the same animals all over, so it’s pretty unlikely that Plateosaurus ever would have encountered any of the other species we’ve covered so far. There are no known North American Triassic sauropodomorphs, and the closest potential replacement I could find was Unaysaurus, a close relative from Brazil, which on this map (modified from the Palaeobiology Database) puts it at about the exact same distance from the others as Plateosaurus. Everything else is either further away or also in Germany. So, it seems that this time we are unfortunately without a proper analogue. And that’s Plateosaurus done! I can’t believe we’re halfway through the Triassic already, thank you again to everyone for your enthusiasm! (Drawn in Krita, using skeletal references by Scott Hartman) -- source link
#dinosaur