Some quick concept doodles for a speculative type of marine pterosaur. The very earliest discoveries of pterosaurs were actually interpreted as being aquatic animals, and I wanted to play with that idea a bit while keeping the anatomy recognizable.
These guys are vaguely based on Pteranodon. They use their wing-flippers to cruise around like manta rays, with their crests serving as dorsal fins and their feet reduced to small fluke-like flippers for steering.
I imagine they’re probably capable of spectacular breaching and gliding short distances over the water’s surface to escape predators, similar to flying fish and squid.
[T]he crux of this project is based on the following premise, and not an altogether original one. The great dinosaur-killer, the Chicxulub asteroid, misses earth. However, the resulting world is not simply a long-lived cretaceous paradise – the Deccan Traps still flooded the sky with ash and changed the climate and atmosphere, killing off most, if not all, of the great dinosaurs. The survivors of such an event, however, are a handful of small therapods, mammals, birds, and even a few pterosaurs.
Do yourself a favour and read through the rigorous thinking that Simon Roy has put into conjuring the physiology and culture of his Dinosauroids. Amazing work.
It’s a real honor to see my labor of love from art school surface again! Post cretaceous dinosaurs to the max!
I love this because like 99% of this kind of paleoart is patriarchal Man
the Hunter type fantasies but these guys are just like “fuck it we’re
outta here”
The famous Romanian azhdarchid pterosaur has recently been reinterpreted as having a relatively short and robust neck instead of the usual giraffe-like neck most of its relatives are believed to have had. Here it is attacking some unfortunate heron-like theropod, inspired by the fragmentary remains of possible trodoontids and alvarezsaurids present on the ancient island of Hateg.
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