Greetings, all. For those who regularly visit this website, you will know that this post has been a long time coming. Years ago, I mentioned that I was planning on re-doing my Allosaurus drawing so that it would be more accurate. However, that project always seemed to be shuffled onto the back-burner in place of other things that I was working on. Well not anymore. I recently completed a detailed drawing of an Allosaurus head (another one of the projects on my to-do list that I never seemed to get around to doing) which you can look at here, and I’m happy to state that after a long delay, I’ve finally completed my updated full-body Allosaurus.

Below is an Allosaurus drawing which I made in July of 2013 and which I posted to this website at that time. This portrays Allosaurus in a color scheme based upon that seen in the 1999 BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs. I must state that, as flawed as this illustration is, this piece was actually itself an updated version of a drawing that I had made a couple of years earlier. Even so, upon reflection, while it was an improvement on my previous work, it still needed more improvement.

And here is my revised Allosaurus drawing, made in July of 2020. This drawing was made in 1:20 scale, which is my preferred scale for illustrating prehistoric animals. From the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, this drawing measures precisely 21 inches long, which would make the real-life animal 35 feet long; this measurement is regularly given as the maximum size for Allosaurus fragilis. This drawing was made with No.2 pencil on printer paper.

Finally, here is a colorized version of the new drawing. Again, the color scheme is based upon that seen in Walking With Dinosaurs, but the coloration and the color patterns differ slightly from the original image seen at the top. The picture was colored using Crayola colored pencils and No.2 pencil for re-shading.

Nearly everything about my previous drawing was altered in order to make this present artwork. This includes:

1. The head was changed to be more accurate in appearance. Designing the head took most of the research time.
2. The shape of the eye’s pupil was changed from a sort of oval slit to being a circle.
3. The neck was made thicker, more muscular, and not as strongly S-curved.
4. The body was made deeper.
5. The arms were slightly enlarged and the hands were changed to be more anatomically accurate.
6. The legs were thickened to provide extra weight support.
7. The orientation of the hip bones was shifted.
8. The tail was thickened to provide better balance to the front of the body. The previous drawing was conspicuously front-heavy.
9. The tail was slightly elongated.

As you can see, one of the major changes to this drawing was the addition of dermal scutes along its back and sides. Unlike osteoderms, dermal scutes are scales which are enlarged and unusually thick compared to other scales on the rest of the body. There is evidence from preserved skin impressions from stegosaurs and ceratopsians that their skins possessed patterns of dermal scutes, sometimes arranged in lines, and it is therefore possible that theropods had such a feature to their outward appearance as well. It also gives this particular Allosaurus a distinctly reptilian look to it. I decided not to include any type of feathering or some other filamentous structures to the skin.

I also chose to portray this animal in a walking pose rather than running. I think that too many of my drawings of bipedal dinosaurs portray them running Gregory Paul-style, and I wanted to show something more natural. Also, unlike Scott Hartman’s illustrations, the legs are not splayed so widely apart from each other that they’re halfway to performing a split. Mostly, a normal walking stride is about three times the length of the foot. In fact, I actually practiced walking back and forth in front of a mirror, bending my legs theropod-style, in order to get a rough idea of how the leg position on this drawing ought to look.

Keep your pencils sharp, everyone.

Categories: Paleontology, Uncategorized

Tags: allosaurid, Allosaurus, America, art, dinosaur, Jurassic Period, Late Jurassic, Mesozoic, Morrison Formation, North America, paleo-art, paleontology, reptile, theropod