How to reconstruct a dinosaur | Natural History Museum

Find out how palaeoartist Robert Nicholls produced his highly accurate reconstructions of the Museum’s Stegosaurus specimen.

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[IndriidaeNT]

I love Stegosaurus. It is my favorite dinosaur from the Jurassic Period and this is a cool reconstruction.

[godzilloid]

A new idea about the Stegosaurus spikes was that they were on the sides of the tail, not the top. This way, they could simply swing the tail back and forth.

[julial]

Anyone know what program was used to illustrate the dinosaur?

[thegek]

pfffft I play the isle all I do is watch stego on the holidays xDD

[paulgtuckwin]

Beautiful!!! You should do some ice age mammals

[eldelosdinosaurios]

what has someone to do to work as a paleoartist? sending the portfolio to museums?

[ink]

"One of the most accurate reconstructions of stegosaurus ever"... teeth shouldn't be so far forwards and cheeks should extend further

[claychance]

To be honest what if the plates were connected by fatty tissues and etc.

[broderp]

Not quite accurate in 2020. I was also disappointed nothing was shown about actually making the image.

[trvths]

Recently i had a bit of a debate with a famous youtube paleo artist [Mario Lanzas], he has a lot of great works, it is usually exaggerated in color but that was not the point of our debate, he made a ceratopsian video where the ornithischians had no cheeks at all, his defense was that because no living dinosaurs have cheeks and we have no fossil evidence then it is still a controversial idea that the ornithischians had cheeks.
Of course my point was that we only have beaked theropods today, and that no chewing animal even known to us has had no cheeks, and on top of that ceratopsian fossils all have massive petruding cheek bones, but the lack of fossilized cheeks is obviously because it was soft tissue which almost never fossilizes.

[XaeeD]

"Probably one of the most accurate reconstructions of Stegosaurus ever"

The fact that reconstructions can become out of date fairly quickly, and that some elements of the reconstruction are off, doesn't bother me that much. What bothers me about the statement is that he's talking about his own work. It's fine when other people say that about your artwork, but when you make the claim yourself, it kinda makes you sound like a bit of an asshole. And the piece isn't that great anyway, I've seen better works of paleoart on deviantart.. like; today. I mean, it's certainly not bad, but it's not super amazing either. The fact that he's cutting, pasting and moving the Stegosaurus image around kinda takes away from the art as well. Something about an old-fashion true hand-painted/drawn image that isn't easily achieved with a digital approach. And how do you know that this is the best reconstruction of a Stegosaurus ever made? Have you ever seen a Stegosaurus? It's like taking the skeleton of a chicken, without ever having seen a living chicken, and drawing meat and muscles around the bones, and then claiming it's the most accurate reconstruction of a chicken ever made. Meanwhile, the thing probably looks nothing like a real chicken, because a chicken cannot be reconstructed by the use of the skeleton alone, if you've never seen a live chicken before. What you draw over the bones won't even come close to what a real chicken looks like.

"Probably one of the most accurate reconstructions of Stegosaurus that I ever made" - would've sounded a lot better

[nordimejia]

This video offends me... As I identify as a tail dragging stegosaurus.

[Jayy]

His art is pretty poor to be frank. There are far better paleoartists out there... and I find that most of them are what would be considered to be amateur, rather than these "professionals".