Sometimes I think I rack my brain a bit too much trying to come up with something to write about on my blog, and I’ve realized not every post I write has to be a work of paleontological Shakespeare, so today I thought I’d just do a casual, “hey look, I drew a dinosaur” type of post.
I recently got a new multimedia sketchbook, so I can do pencil or paint or whatever in it. My latest drawing is of a male Tyrannosaurus rex, my personal favorite dinosaur. I drew it using pencil, colored pencils, and a variety of markers.
I had heard about a study on dinosaur color, which proposed that if T.rex had bright colors on its body, the areas more likely to be really colorful were the legs and feet, neck, chest, and face, and wanted to demonstrate that hypothesis in my illustration. Now, since T.rex was a predator, I argue against making the entire animal brightly colored, but it could still have had a splash of color here or there for display or something like that. Also, another part of my reasoning is that T.rex was related to modern birds, and many birds are really colorful, so perhaps some of their larger theropod cousins also sported some snazzy coloration (but again, in my opinion probably not the whole animal; theropods might have had brighter colors on structures likely used for display, such as crests and horns).
No feathers on this guy, he's a plucked T.rex. T.rex feathers have been going out of style lately, and in light of there really being no actual evidence outside of some earlier tyrannosaurs having feathers, I decided to keep him naked and scaly (nothing against feathered T,rexes, I just chose to go the "safer" direction with this drawing).
Is T.rex overrated? Some might think so. Does that make it any less awesome? Not in my opinion. Scientists are always learning cool new stuff about the tyrant lizard king, and that's part of why it's such an amazing dinosaur.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed, consider checking out some of the other posts here on my blog.