The Joy of customising models!

Yes, you saw it as “blank slate” in the previous blog.  Here’s my own version of Hector Munive‘s fine Centrosaurus model (hoping to do more collaborations with him and Aldebaran Catañeda very soon).  According to the skin preserved together with a Centrosaurus skeleton, it is pretty accurate… but I have seen the incredible Triceratops skin material that is still unpublished and it’s currently obsessing me!  The look  and preservation of the fossil is so vivid, so real and (I would dare to say) “primitive”! … please forget soft ceratopsian skin… they were rough, almost as armoured   as an ankylosaur and the hedgehog-like spiky features would have made them look even weirder (no quite like it but almost like this very old painting from Charles R. Knight of  “Agathaumas sylvestris“). Most incredible is the fact that the  back’s really big, fist-sized mosaic scutes  (alternated and surrounding the spiky  ones) were hexagonal while the scales around the neck  were square in pattern almost at crocodile level! All this new information should be taken in account when doing the next illustration or model!

Héctor also gave me this handsome miniature of Velafrons, the Mexican hadrosaur similar to Corythosaurus that I also customised. But my latest customising venture took me to do an “update”  of a landmark toy model by Collecta: Deinocheirus. I felt frustrated that (for such rare, winsome toy of an even rarer dinosaur) they >just< missed on the latest information. Since I had the model I felt I needed to do something!… obviously it is >still< not completely right, but something is better than nothing… al hail to the new “Camel” Deinocheirus!