Yes… they continue to be my favourites, but this time everything you see in this mural is based on real skeleton mounts in museums! The new Triceratops mount(s) that I’m basing these new ones in are supposedly very complete… and the head proportions are just really outlandish. Yes indeed they are big headed animals, even more so compared to their body… we have been used to the old Triceratops models and reconstructions with small heads… but I have seen this trend of increasing the head proportions of ceratopsians with respect of their bodies ever since I was surprised by the gigantic head of Pentaceratops compared with a rather small body… and now we also have the recently auctioned Triceratops “Big John”.

This might be the case only for the bigger headed ceratopsians, but still it is intriguing. So first thing I did was start doodling a sketch for each ceratopsian and finish them in colour accordingly.

You might remember my beaked T. rex from a previous blog post. Yes I like to create first my protagonists and they use them in different scenarios. He was also based on a real T. rex mount,. Skeletal mounts (with some modifications) are my own fact check these days… and this time the resulting insertion in the mural is a rather freak composition with dramatic posturing for all participants and a wild surrealist perspective.

I’d like to say, the best compliment I got for my new version of T. rex from someone in the net was “what’s that?”… yes I had to clarify that it was indeed based on a real picture of a skeleton mounted in a museum… Careful… familiar takes on such and such animal can induce laziness to the imagination and incite us to be less daring!