More than a decade ago I was at the entrails of the Instituto de Geologia Museum in Mexico City and René Hernández was laying on my lap an enormous and very heavy femur head of a gigantic hadrosaur. The size was so impressive that it could have been mistaken for an Apatosaurus! But no, it was yet another gigantic lambeosaur found by René’s team in the north of Mexico, land of army clashes with the cartel… even in those days. Scientists trying to excavate in Saltillo or Coahuila have to deal with the terrible scourge of that horrifying “war on drugs” that has been Mexico’s disease for so many years, to do their work.
Nevertheless… the search has continued unabated… I had to pay tribute to the Mexican palaeontological teams efforts and some of those immense lambosaurine hadrosaurs from Mexico… this time in the shape of of a herd of Magnapaulia being chased by some Albertosaurus … I have used a familiar scenario from another old project that never quite congealed in my eyes… so I modified the scenario and finished it thanks to the help (again) of Angel Ramírez (that was very specific about the kind of flowery, Magnolia semi tropical vegetation) and René Hernández himself, I have come to a final product that I am more or less satisfied with. There’s always room for improvement!
Note the crest of Magnapaulia (still mostly hypothetical, but based on the fragmentary remains we have) and the very tall hip spines, so characteristic of all these Mexican hadrosaurs. There are more murals to come in the next weeks…
Luis V. Rey Blog 