Award Winning Paleoartist Franco Tempesta
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This episode is brought to you by Soros, the dino trick-taking puzzle game featuring beautiful mahjong-style tiles, paleo art-covered play mats, and custom dice and tokens. Get yours for just $40 at Kickstarter now. Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 539th episode...

We've got an interview with paleo artist Franco Tempesta. It's not our usual kind of interview. You'll see what we mean. Yes, we're going to answer the questions because it was a written interview. And we'll post the written interview on our website too with some beautiful art that he shared with us. Oh yeah, he is amazing.

We also have a bunch of news, including a new sauropodomorph dinosaur with a large skull, plus dinosaurs on trial verdicts from last week when we had our debates. We also have dinosaur of the day, Chelontisaurus, which is a large theropod. And we have a fun fact, which is that many birds have feathers that weigh more than their skeleton.

Weird. It's crazy. And it took me a really long time to verify that, even though that fact is often bandied about. But I'll talk more about it at the end. Quick reminder before we get into all that. We are...

switching over to being a bi-weekly show after this episode. And that is going to just give us a chance to create longer episodes. You might have noticed they've been on the shorter side recently. Either shorter or coming out way after Wednesday when we try to release them. Yes. But we will also be posting more bonus exclusive content as well as early access content on Patreon. So if you want a more weekly fix,

then make sure you're on our Patreon. Patreon.com slash dino dino. Yep. And speaking of our patrons, we have two new patrons to thank this week, and they are Nathan and Leilasaurus. Nice. And then rounding out our shout outs, we've got Pata, Tricerabeth, Elvie, Pamela, Michael, Mary Sorolophus, Adamontosaurus, and Fia. Amazing. Thank you so much for being a dino and all.

We hope you enjoy all the perks, including all that upcoming exclusive content. And there's hundreds of pieces of exclusive content already on our Patreon. So true. If you want to catch up with all of it.

You can join and get all of it. We heard we're fun to binge. We've heard. I don't know if I like binging us, but it's different when it's your own voice. It's hard to binge yourself. Yeah. Okay, jumping into the news, we've got a new sauropodomorph dinosaur, Sauron.

Li Shulong Wangai, and it had a large skull. This was published in PeerJ, it's open access. If you want to read it, we'll have the link in our show notes. And it was published by Qiannan Zhang and others. It was actually published at the end of 2024 in December. So yes, this is one of our many new dinosaurs that we're catching up on. It lived in the early Jurassic in what's now Yunnan province in China in the Lufeng Formation. And it was

And that formation is known for having a lot of early diverging sauropodomorphs. There's eight genera and 10 species that have been named there so far. Hmm.

So for this one, for this sauropodomorph, they found a partial skeleton, including the skull and jaws, and nine articulated neck bones, meaning they were all together. And this sauropodomorph has the largest skull compared to all the sauropodomorphs in the Lu Feng formation. Hmm. Big head. A big head, yeah. They should have named it bobblehead. Oh. Well, the skull did get a bit compressed during fossilization, but it's still a relatively large skull, and it's low and long.

It's estimated to be about 40 centimeters long or almost 16 inches. That doesn't seem that big, but I guess for the area. For early Jurassic? Oh, early Jurassic. Yeah, that's a long time ago. That's an early sauropod. Yeah. Sauropodomorph. Sauropodomorph, yeah. The next largest skull from that area is from Gingishanosaurus, and that's about 35 centimeters long or almost 14 inches. Okay, so like 10% smaller? Mm-hmm.

The paper describes Li Shulong as, quote, a new taxon that lies in the heart of the early sauropodomorph-sauropod transition. Hmm. So maybe it was a sauropod. They're calling it a sauropodomorph. Okay. Just to be safe. It's definitely a sauropodomorph because that includes both non-sauropod, sauropodish things, and the real sauropods. Yes. As a quick refresher, sauropods are...

the largest dinosaurs. They walked on four columnar legs and they had long necks and tails and they're the best. As a sauropodomorph, that's not a sauropod, I guess. Sometimes they're basal sauropodomorphs or early sauropodomorphs. Yes. Or non-

Neosauropods, there's all sorts of names for these. That's true. But usually when you say sauropodomorph, you're talking about... The earlier ones. Yeah, because otherwise you just say sauropod. And usually I think of the ones that walk on two legs, which is the case with Li Shuong. It walked on two legs, it had a long tail, a relatively long neck, and short arms. Relatively long for a sauropodomorph, but not for a real sauropod. Yeah. A true sauropod, maybe I should say.

It had unique features or details in the skull and neck bones. And Lishuang helps show the diversity of sauropodiforms in the Lufeng Formation. The genus name is from Lishu, which means chestnut tree. And that's the name of the locality, the spot where the fossils were found. And then Long means dragon. And the species name, Wangai, is in honor of Zheng Zhuguang, quote, for his great contributions to the early discoveries of vertebrate fossils from Lufeng.

And it's cool. This sauropodomorph is on display at the Museum of Lufong World Dinosaur Valley. If anyone's in the area and wants to check it out. Nice. Speaking of museums, I just want to do a quick mention.

You might have remembered a few episodes ago, we shared Brosis Girl's lovely review of the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in New Jersey. And I'm happy to give a quick update that she's posted a bunch of photos of the museum on Instagram and Facebook so you can check it out for yourself.

If you're not able to go anytime soon, or if you want to see what it looks like before deciding to go, which you should go. Yeah. Or you could also go to Instagram and go to Grecktor29 or Facebook. Look out for Gretchen.Rector. We'll have the links in our show notes, so you can go directly from there too. And you could just see so many great details of the museum in the photos.

It's almost as good as being there. I say that as someone who won't be able to visit for a long time. I really like the image, well, images of the Dryptosaurus with some feathers. And then, of course, you've got the sauropod Astrodon stomping on the Acrocanthosaurus. Go sauropods! You're making this a very sauropod-heavy episode, aren't you? Well, our dinosaur of the day is a theropod, so I'm trying to balance. Okay, good. So thank you, Brosis Girl, for sharing your review and also the photos with us.

We have the results of our polls from last week from our dinosaurs on trial segment. The first question that we posted was the same one that we debated first, which was if the ankylosaurus is guilty of cruelty in walking with dinosaurs for potentially mortally wounding a Tyrannosaurus mother. And I argued that no, it was not guilty because

Sabrina argued it was guilty. And I won. You did win. Guilty. Wish I had a gavel. I still don't understand why it's guilty entirely. I guess it's because the ankylosaurus approached the mom and the babies and not the other way around. But I don't know. It really seems like the ankylosaurus was just going about its business and the T-Rex tried to bite it.

I mean, in the comments, people point out that the Tyrannosaurus got too close. The Ankylosaurus was just holding its ground. The Ankylosaurus doesn't have much of a brain, so it was just defending itself, going off instinct. Yeah. But then some other comments that are interesting, and I think we left this out when we were arguing about it, is that ultimately, does it even matter because the asteroid hits?

Well, yeah, I guess if it was one of the very few ankylosaur-tyranosaurus interactions that happened exactly 66 million years ago.

Plus, you know, like the 100,052 days or whatever you need to be on that exact group that was wiped out by the asteroid. It wouldn't matter. But most of the Tyrannosaurs and Kylosaurs died of natural causes or by being eaten or something and not by the asteroid because there were a lot of generations before the asteroid.

Yes. Thousands. Actually, probably hundreds of thousands. It depends how long the generation is. But if we're going by what happened in Walking with Dinosaurs. Oh, I didn't remember that being in the same episode. That makes sense. Yes. Good point. That's how it ended. And as Dilophosaur Rob said, did the Ankylosaurus cunningly wait until this moment to commit the murder so that the impactor would destroy the evidence? There are a lot of great...

That is a good point. I should have found that and said, well, it wasn't cruelty because they didn't grow up without a parent because no dinosaurs grew up after that.

Missed that one. Maybe I would have won if I had found that. It was a narrow victory for you, 58 to 42. Not that narrow. It was pretty narrow as far as the other polls go. I guess. I really enjoyed reading all of the comments. It would take us too long to reread all of these, but if you are a patron, I encourage you to go. It continues the debate. The next debate that we had was if consignathids were guilty of falsifying data for pretending to exist.

And this one I won saying, no, they were not guilty. And by a much wider margin, I might add 78 to 22. That's interesting based on...

Because I was basically just debating a paper that we had talked about. Yes, but I think that paper is not widely accepted. Oh, yeah. Because I mean, I was being pretty honest in my criticism slash debate position there in saying that if compsignathids are baby tyrannosaurs, why are there no compsignathids past the midpoint of the Cretaceous when there are so many tyrannosaurids? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

You're not the only one. Yeah. Could be that there are some Compskinathids that are misidentified, but not the whole clade, I don't think. The next one was, did T-Rex in Jurassic Park 3 throw the fight with Spinosaurus?

As of now, we're tied one each for wins. And the answers favored my position that it lost on purpose. What? Yeah, 59 to 41. Why? There's a lot of good comments on this one as well. And Steve T-Rex made the argument that

The T-Rex didn't die. Rather, after the camera quickly panned away from her lying motionless on the ground and followed Spiney on her next adventure, T-Rex simply got up and left the movie scene. So that crunch and it was just playing dead after there was a big neck crunch. I guess it was just acting. It is a movie. Yeah. It stepped on some celery to make that crunch noise. There we go. And then flopped.

I mean, it did seem ridiculous that T-Rex would lose a fight to Spinosaurus. It doesn't really make any sense. So I can see why people sided with it lost on purpose. Yeah. The next one was whether or not Tyrannosaurus hunted Chasmosaurus using an F-14 based on the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. And this one very narrowly, the narrowest version.

of margins went to no t-rex did not hunt using f-14s but it was only 52 to 48 that's like a single vote away from a deadlock does that mean i won that one you did yeah all right so it's tied yes yeah two each all right which makes sense because obviously it didn't actually fight using f-14s i was just having fun in my debate position well we're going by the evidence in calvin and hobbes yeah

I liked Ryan, the biochemist, who pointed out that chronologically T-Rex using an F-14 is more accurate than T-Rex interacting with Stegosaurus. It's true. Fair point. And then our last debate, I think, was kind of low-hanging fruit for you as the defender of Oviraptor being an egg thief. Yeah. Because I debated that Oviraptor actually was an egg thief on the basis of

I don't even remember what the name. I like my odds that this is the tiebreaker. Yeah. So that one went 90-10. No, Oviraptor was not an egg thief. Yes. Which is an overwhelming scientific consensus. And like you pointed out, was even alluded to in the original paper. Plus the fact that it was thought to be eating ceratopsian eggs. And we know that this shape of egg was not from a ceratopsian and was from...

Some sort of over-raptorid. The only way that it made any sense was my take that maybe it was a cannibal or it was eating another species of over-raptorids. Maybe, or it could be like what Tyrant King says, that nothing would have prevented it from stealing eggs, but behavior doesn't fossilize. So he said, I don't think we can pass such judgment. Yeah.

So it's possible that maybe it happened one of these times, but it's extremely unlikely given that they match pretty well with their bodies. And most animals that are found near a nest that matches their own nest would be protecting their own eggs. So you won three to two. All right. Good. We'll have to keep this going because we've got a lot more dinosaurs to put on trial. Yeah. It sort of evens things out since I won the dino tools.

Oh, we're going to start doing that now? How many contests total? Yeah. The one I'm most surprised by is that the Ankylosaurus guilty of cruelty went to yes, it was guilty of cruelty. I'm not at all surprised. Who doesn't take the herbivore's side when it's getting attacked by a predator? I guess T-Rex is really popular. I think of the sauropods and the turtles, those murderous turtles, and yet...

Lots of people seem to think that it's the sauropods at fault. You know what, though? I'm going to save that because that's one of the dinosaurs going on trial. Yeah. Poor ankylosaurus. I think what that proves is that T-Rex is more popular than ankylosaurus. It might be the same case with T-Rex and Spinosaurus. But that's why it's seen as, yeah, T-Rex was definitely stronger and there's no way it could have actually lost. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know because going back to our dino duels...

T-Rex didn't win. T-Rex might be more popular than Spinosaurus and Ankylosaurus, but maybe Giraffatitan is more popular. I see. Seems unlikely, but maybe. All right. Stay tuned for more of these dinosaurs on trial in a future episode. And we'll get into our interview in just a moment. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break.

This episode is brought to you by a brand new game I just found on Kickstarter, Soros. I love dinosaur games, and this one's unlike any game I've seen before. The first thing I noticed is the beautiful artwork. Yeah, it's really cool. And that artwork is all over the five included neoprene playmats because the game ranges from two to five players, although there is a sixth player and playmat available if you need a sixth one. Mm-hmm. Game night. Yeah.

I also really like the custom black chunky tiles with the different Mesozoic creatures on them. They're just so cool looking. Yeah, they have suits like on cards. It's up there. Egg, bone, claw and footprint.

Suits like Mahjong, I guess, because they're like Mahjong tiles. I didn't realize there were suits in Mahjong. There's also custom dice and tokens for the game. The game is for ages 10 and up, and each game takes 30 to 60 minutes, which really is a sweet spot for us. Yeah, it looks like an amazing game. I cannot wait to try it. We're going to try it very soon.

If you want to get your copy, you can get it at Kickstarter by searching for Soros, spelled S-A-U-R-O-S. Or you can go to our show notes and use our referral link. And if you do that, then they'll know that we're the ones that told you about it. So we would appreciate that. Yes. And make sure to order yours now because the campaign ends soon.

This episode is brought to you by our patrons, especially our lovely patrons at the Tyrannosaurus tier and above. Yes, that's kind of our book tier, which is why we really wanted to celebrate our I Know Dino book coming out by offering a signed copy to everyone at the Tyrannosaurus tier and above if you join by the end of this month, May of 2025. Yeah, the book...

I think turned out fantastic. It has tons of dinosaur science history in it. It starts with Megalosaurus, of course, because we did them in order of their naming date. And it ends with Stegouros, the really cool new ankylosaur that everybody loves. Everybody, yes. But just before that is a sauropod.

Because everyone also loves sauropods, right? Behatosaurus. I think they are two popular groups. Sauropod's probably more popular, honestly. And it's the cool new version with sails like a margasaurus rather than the rebar spikes like the original idea just a couple years ago. Yeah. So yeah, if you would like a signed copy of our new I Know Dino book. I didn't do the exclamation mark quite right. I Know Dino. I Know Dino.

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And now on to our interview with Franco Tempesta, who, again, was the paleo artist for our book, I Know Dino. Yep. Available now. Yes. And like we mentioned at the beginning of the show, this interview is a little bit different because it's in written form. So...

Garrett will be reading what Franco sent to us. I'll be playing the part of Franco for this presentation. And if you want to read the interview for yourself, as well as see the amazing images that he sent to go along with it, then we will be posting a link on our website at inodino.com. And it'll also be in the show notes.

So I just want to give a quick intro first. So Franco Tempesta was born in Milan, Italy. Since he was a child, he loved drawing animals, dinosaurs, and dragons. Specializing in naturalistic illustration, in the last 20 years, he has focused his attention on the realization of realistic images of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals.

He's collaborated with national and foreign publishers such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Institute, Random House, ReaderLink, Firecrest Publishing, GeoWorld, Flourish, Mondadori, and other important publishers and advertising agencies in Italy. He loves his sons, nature, especially the sea, scuba diving,

his motorbike, and traveling. And we were very lucky, again, to have Franco illustrate our National Geographic Kids book. And he did an amazing job depicting how our understanding of dinosaurs has changed over the past 200 years. So that's why we wanted to highlight him and his work. And you can learn more about Franco Tempesta and his art at his website. That's francotempesta.eu. So our first question to him was, what's your favorite paleo art you've made and why?

And again, Garrett is playing the part of Franco. Yeah, so Franco said, my favorite is a black and white illustration, The Great Battle. It depicts the attack by a group of adult and subadult Allosaurus fragilis against a huge Berosaurus lentus. We are in the Jurassic Morrison formation.

This image was inspired by an incredible diorama seen during one of my visits to the Salt Lake City Natural History Museum in 2016. There were all these skeletons of Allosaurus of different ages surrounding and attacking the skeleton of a huge Berosaurus.

I had just won the Lassendorf National Geographic Prize for paleo art and trying to put that incredible scene at the museum into art excited me so much to the point that I started throwing ideas on paper already during the flight back to Italy. Sounds like some inspiration. It does. And we were at that SVP where he won that award. I think that was our first SVP. It was. When he won that award. And it is a really cool piece of art. So in a way, the first amazing...

paleo art that we ever saw in a professional setting was Franco's art. That's true. And not long before he was at that museum, we were also at that museum. And we love a different Allosaurus display. At the Salt Lake City Natural History Museum, they have a whole thing on the Cleveland Lloyd Quarry. Oh, yeah. I remember that. It's a giant assemblage of different Allosaurus that all are together in one big death form.

Blob. Death blob. I guess bone bed is the more technical term. Yeah. Death blob, bone bed. Yeah. Same thing. I don't remember the Berosaurus being attacked by Allosaurus, but I wonder if it's inspired by the same thing. Could be. There are a lot of Allosaurus to go around in Utah. Yes.

But back to our interview with Franco. Yeah. So our next question was, speaking of the Lazendorf Prize, can you tell us about your piece that won the John J. Lazendorf National Geographic Paleo Prize for 2D art in 2016, Tyrannosaurus Rex Couple versus Dakota Raptor Pack? What inspired it? How long did it take to create? Is there anything about the process of creating it that stood out?

Tyrannosaurus rex were the super predators of the Cretaceous period, at the top of the food chain, like lions on the African savannah today. Probably like lions, who often have to defend their hunting booty from hyenas who try to steal it from them by relying on their strength of a pack, tyrannosaurs could also find themselves in trouble when faced with a large group of fearsome Dakota raptor, huge, ferocious raptors well-armed with sharp teeth and claws up to 20 centimeters long.

which is about eight inches, in case you're wondering. I am very attached to this work, not only because of the recognition it received with the Lassendorf, but also because of the research work and study it involved. Yes, and he shared with us a preparatory sketch, as well as the finalized version, which you can see on the blog post. And oh man, that sketch is better

Better than I can do. My finalized versions. Yeah. Yeah. He is extremely talented. And like we said, we saw this final version at our first SVP and we're really impressed by it. And it's got Dakota Raptor, which is such a cool animal, possibly a chimera now, unfortunately, but still a beautiful piece of art. And the point stands that

And tyrannosaurs or other large predators may have had to deal with this sort of situation where raptors in a group or another sort of predator might try to outnumber them in a group and get strength in numbers versus one huge imposing figure. So it's cool to imagine that scene and seeing it in art is really neat. Yeah. Well, our next question for him was, what is your process for creating paleo art? What sort of research do you do?

Let's say it depends whether we are talking about a commission or my own personal research work, at least in terms of finding the subject and type of scene I want to realize. In the case of a commission for a book, I Know Dino, for example, after reading the brief and the publisher's indications, I start from a simple rough or sketch on paper. Having found the right idea, I carry out research on the internet. When the publisher does not provide me with references directly,

to try to get as much information as possible on a species of dinosaurs to be illustrated, both anatomical and evidence of behavior in life. Once I am convinced of the idea, I carry out a detailed sketch to show the editorial team. And once approved, I proceed with digital coloring on a computer or tablet. There are things I want to add here, but it actually makes more sense if I wait a few questions. Okay. So our next question to him was, how many books have you illustrated?

I would say many in about 20 years dedicated to paleoart, but at least 50 dedicated to dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals working for all the world's major publishers. This was a question that Garrett came up with. We gave a lot of time to think about this.

a lot of specific requests for the illustrations. How demanding were we compared to other authors you've worked with? Yeah, it's fitting that you're asking the questions and I'm playing the part of Franco. But this one, yeah, that was definitely my question. And Franco said, it is always stimulating to work with demanding authors, I believe, because

because it pushes an artist to try to surpass himself and step out of his comfort zone. And with you, it has happened, and I thank you. That is such a nice answer. It is. He also said, moreover, the real stimulating challenge of this project was to compare old versions and outdated conceptions of dinosaurs with the latest and most accredited reconstructions of these incredible creatures. And he did an amazing job. And yes, we were pretty demanding, because...

Like he said in the earlier question about how he does the detailed sketches to show the editorial team. We gave a lot of notes on those sketches. We did give a lot of notes. I'm very glad that that was the way it went and it wasn't like, here's my completed, beautiful, finished product.

just yes or no. You could tell he did them quickly. They had a ton of detail in them and they were well-made illustrations. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely made by someone very skilled. But you could tell that it didn't take him a ton of time. And that was good because we did request a lot of changes. We did. But it was all like

In the details, I would say. Yes. Like the sketches were great. And then it was like, oh, let's just work on that claw a little bit. Move that nostril or adjust the shape of the arm or the knee height or, you know, all these little details that when you're looking at the skeleton, you might...

notice just slight changes or what we know from other dinosaurs. Like if you're talking about Brachiosaurus, not having the nostrils on top of the head, having them more towards the snout and then having a little bit more

of a passageway over the top of the head for the air to pass through since that's the current thinking. But one thing I thought was really interesting is, as he was saying, we had the old version that Stata sketches, the original version of what we thought these dinosaurs looked like, and then we have the new version that's in color and it's supposed to be as accurate as possible. And

A lot of our feedback was actually on the old version saying, this is too good. Yes. You know, like, its feet look too right. Its posture looks too good. You know, like, make it in a worse posture with a weirder head and worse feet and all that kind of stuff. The one that stands out to me is the cover, the Stegosaurus, because I remember the first time we got it. We love this concept. This looks so cool. But wait, the first impressions half looks...

A little too much like what we know now. Yeah. How can we differentiate more? Yeah. And that was tricky, too, because there is a big posture difference in what we first thought was Stegosaurus. But in order for that piece of art to work where the back half of the animal is the new Stegosaurus and the front half is the old one, they kind of have to be in the same posture. Right.

And then you kind of have to pick what version of early Stegosaurus because it changed pretty quickly. It did, yeah. So the version that it started out as was Stegosaurus with plates sort of flat against his body, almost more like an ankylosaur because that's how armored animals usually are. Usually if you have armor, it's against the body. It doesn't just stick up right in the middle of the back, only barely protecting one part of the body. That's crazy. But we requested the Jobin...

and what I think of as the more Godzilla version. Yes, it looks kind of like a giant porcupine. It's got huge spikes all around its back pointing out all over the place.

It's basically like a thagomizer spike from the end of the tail, except instead that's like covering its whole body. And part of the reason we'd like that one better, I think it was slightly earlier, the illustration we found of that. It wasn't nearly as detailed because a lot of times these very early drawings are just sketches where it's basically like a paleontologist finds a few bones and is like, I wonder if it looks something like this. And it's just like a simple little drawing. Right. Although Jobin was an artist, not a paleontologist. Oh, okay. Sorry. Okay.

And so it being slightly earlier was one of the reasons we liked it. But the other reason is it gave more of a distinction between the two. Because if it's plates flat on the body versus plates standing up, that's kind of interesting. But these crazy like quill things all over the place versus the plates. And yeah, then we had to make the head worse and the feet worse. Yes, yes. Because like...

He was saying his process is going through the primary sources, the modern primary sources and making it as good as possible. So then going back and saying like, no, make this as bad, not bad as possible, but as early and out of date as possible is something that almost no one would ask for except us. I feel like I just have to clarify real quick. Jobin was a French illustrator and he did a lot of paleo art.

And then I feel like it gets a little bit tricky sometimes because personally, I feel like at least some paleo artists could be paleontologists. Yes. But I will confess, I do not know that much about August Jobin other than some of his

really cool, but now known to be outdated pieces of paleo art. Yeah. And we love the early paleo art and especially we, you know, are sort of poking fun a little bit at it about how inaccurate it is compared to our modern vision. But really with the material they were working with at the time, it's astonishing that they were as close as they were. Yeah. Like you think about something like Iguanodon, not just drawing a giant iguana,

When all you have is teeth and thinking like, oh, maybe it was had a slightly different body shape and all that kind of thing. It's pretty good. I think with stegosaurus too, he illustrated it before Marsh even came out with his own illustration of what he thought it looked like. And before we had good skeletons to go with it. Yeah.

But yeah, I think we were pretty demanding, which is what I wanted to know. I kind of thought maybe a paleontologist who dug up a dinosaur and had a very clear vision of what it would look like would be more demanding than us. But it sounds like we're up there. Yep. Well, we wanted the accuracy. Yes. And we got it. So our next question for Franco was, do you have a favorite illustration in our book?

I think I did my best work on this project. On each illustration, I tried my best. And I think I have to mention at least two illustrations that I am particularly pleased with. Dilophosaurus and Parasaurolophus. The Dilophosaurus is fantastic. Oh, yeah. It's got the more modern, larger crests on its head. And then they sort of

meet a little bit higher on the head than you see in the earlier renditions of it, even just from a few years ago. And they, it looks a lot like a hornbill to me, or one of those birds that has the big hollow cask or whatever you want to call it on top of its head. And it's, it's just really cool. And it has just a, a really, uh,

and interesting crest combined with a more modern version of Dilophosaurus. And I think a lot of people will see this not knowing that it's not just a Jurassic Park version,

version of Dilophosaurus and be like, it doesn't have a frill, but look at how much more impressive its head ornamentation is. Look at how much bigger it is and all that kind of stuff. It's so cool. It is. It's also drawn walking through some water, which is really neat because we have so many tracks from probably Dilophosaurus or a close relative. And a lot of them are in these sort of lacustrine lake type environments. So it's very fitting. He definitely does his research. Mm-hmm.

Which is why I consider many paleo artists to be paleontologists because they do the research and they know these animals inside out. You have to if you're going to bring them to life in a realistic way. They're a huge part of paleontology for sure. The Parasaurolophus is also extremely beautiful. I have to agree with that one.

And there are actually three Parasaurolophus drawn sort of in a little group, but there's one more front and center and it is fantastic. It shows all of the details that everyone loves about Parasaurolophus, especially that huge crest on its head. And since it's drawn,

almost head on, just like a little bit off to the side, you can really appreciate how that head crest isn't just sticking off of the back of the head. It's a continuous piece of bone that starts at the very tip of the mouth and stretches all the way up, almost like if you took your lip and stretched it all the way up over the top of your head and back. Which sounds unpleasant. It does. And he colored that whole piece in this really pretty blue color too, to sort of highlight it as its own piece. And it's fantastic.

Well, our next question for Franco was, did any of the details in the before or after descriptions surprise you? Like the Therizinosaurus turtle. And he said, oh yeah, that was really weird. But also the Stegosaurus we used for the cover and Megalosaurus old style, closer to bear than a dinosaur. Incredible how much our idea of these animals has changed. Yeah, I think...

We came up with a trivia question recently, and I was going through our book. How many different animals have been mistaken, well, that we thought were different animals and then realized later these are dinosaur bones? We got bison and triceratops, therizinosaurus and turtle, sediosaurus and a whale.

And then, yeah, the Megalosaurus just, to me at least, looks kind of like a bear. Yeah. I mean, it's the closest thing we have today because it was a huge quadrupedal predator and basically a bear is the closest thing we have. With a long tail. Yeah. Sort of like a bear crossed with a crocodile. It's maybe more of a crocodilian-like head on it.

But yeah, obviously very different than the Megalosaurus we know now, which looks more like Dilophosaurus or any other bipedal theropod. Our next question was, we love the unique perspective for the Stegouros from directly above. How did you come up with that?

I came to this after I realized in the first sketches with side or front view, I had realized the difficulty of showing the peculiarity of the plates arranged on the quote-unquote club tail of this animal. Hence the idea of showing it from an aerial perspective just above the animal. I'm glad you liked it. So yeah, it's got that maquahuit style design.

tail which is basically a whole bunch of triangular pieces sort of fused together into almost like a serrated axe or something like that very weird tail but since those project out to the sides if you draw a dinosaur from the typical side perspective you couldn't really see it i think one of the early versions was sort of from the front and then the tail was kind of over to the side and then like

tilting out but if i remember right our feedback might have been it couldn't bend its tail quite that much so that is like well how do you show the animal with the tail like unless you're just showing it from the tail side right which isn't great so but he did this above you which is just amazing and it's so beautiful and unique and i love it me too plus it's a it's a ankylosaur yes

We also liked the Uteranus, so we said, the Uteranus looks beautiful. How did you decide on the coloring and pattern of the feathers? Thank you, Uteranus. Quote, cold coloring was inspired by the cold and often snowy environment in which he moved and interacted. This seems to me to be the really interesting thing. The idea of imagining dinosaurs moving in snowy environments is now widely accepted by paleontologists, but it has not always been like this.

Yeah, the Uteranus is really cool, obviously. It is sort of like a bluish, maybe a little bit of hints of green in it coloring. And it's got a little bit of red on its face to make it look a little more exciting. And presumably, you know, these things could have changed even in a mating season. You could have a male with a more brightly colored face or something to attract mates or maybe just all the time. Yeah. Because it depends.

Depends on their whole vibe, but it is one of the most realistic U-Tyrannus drawings I've seen, obviously.

I mean, in my opinion, is the most realistic. It doesn't have the huge feathers that you sometimes see on Uteranus because we don't really have evidence of big, panaceous or flight-like feathers. It's a fluffy dinosaur. Yeah. And some of the fluff is pretty long, but not all over all of its body. It just is sort of specific where the lengths of feathers were. That was some of our feedback. And it looks great. It does. Doesn't look like its feathers were heavier than its bones.

Definitely not. Not even close. I was thinking that when I came up with that fun fact, like any of the dinosaurs in our book like that. And I was like, well, maybe Microraptor, but it's not possible to estimate that kind of thing. Yeah. Our next question was, is there any dinosaur that you find yourself wanting to draw over and over again? T-Rex. It is always my favorite one.

You know what, that one makes a lot of sense to me, especially because the research keeps coming out and what we think it looks like changes. So that'd be a lot of fun.

trying out the different changes. Yeah, it has changed a ton. And you're right that year to year, you might have more feathers, less feathers. Lips. Yeah, lips, all sorts of changes. Not even getting into whether or not you want to split out different individual specimens as new genera, and that might change what you consider to be actually the Tyrannosaurus look. But

But we like Tyrannosaurus so much that we have two spreads in our book for it. We do. There's only two dinosaurs with two spreads in the book. It's Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus. Yep. And it's because they've both changed so much and there's so much to say about them. So for both of them, there's a full two-page spread that has a big old sketch of what we originally thought it looked like. Yes. And then an even bigger drawing for...

fully illustrated on the next page of our modern reconstruction of what it looked like. Oh, you know what? I misspoke. Deinokyris also has a two spread. So we got three of them. Three of them. And Spinosaurus was the only one we knew going in that was going to have extra space. But then when we started writing these other dinosaurs, like, oh, there's way too much to say. Yeah. Because Spinosaurus was the first thing we wrote.

And we weren't sure how many dinosaurs there were going to be in a book like this. And that was what was sent out to publishers. But yeah, the concept came from how much Spinosaurus has changed. And that, yeah. And the really interesting stories behind how we've discovered these things. Like Nizar Ibrahim, Ernst Stromer, everybody involved with it. Yes. But in case you're wondering, our T-Rex does have lips and it has a tiny bit of fuzz, but very little, just a hint of fuzz.

It's a little bit of a hedge. Maybe it's got as much feather in proportion to paleontologists that think it has feathers. Maybe like 5% of paleontologists think it has feathers, so 5% feathered. I'm going to go with that. There we go. Our next question was, anything else you would like to share about your work?

He said, I hope the passion and enthusiasm that I still find in drawing these incredible creatures of our past comes through in my work. I think it does. Definitely shows. Yes, it does. And our last question to Franco was, where can people find your work if they want to purchase it? So we already mentioned one of them. It's on his official website, francotempesta.eu. And we'll have a link in our show notes for that as well.

You can also find it in various galleries, in some of which you can purchase originals. They're also numbered and signed fine art prints, or you can contact him directly by email, which is on his website. If you're on Instagram, you can follow him at TempestasaurusRex, and then you'll get all of the latest news on his art.

We'll have a link there too. And it's Tempestasaurus underscore Rex. Yes. And he also does art commissions. So you can email him for that if you're interested. Yep. And again, emails on his website. So thank you again so much, Franco, for working on our book.

Yes. Yeah. And I know we gave a lot of feedback over...

As a demanding author. Yes. I was a little bit worried because we would add our feedback and our expert reviewers would add their feedback. And a lot of times it felt like we were being really harsh or like overly critical because we would be picking apart all these little details that probably don't matter that much. And, you know, it's just like, do we really need to say all this stuff? But I think the end result is fantastic. And I'm glad that he didn't

Just quit. Yes. I think there were because there was so much that we loved about it. So we also tried to include the things we loved about it. But then sometimes that might have given a mixed message. So it might have been confusing. Yes. Yeah, I think so, too. So then in later responses, we would be a little more specific about what to change. And we didn't always say like, you know, this is nearly perfect. Yeah. But these minor changes. So, yeah.

Thanks, Franco. Yes, we love your style. And we'll get into our Dinosaur of the Day in just a moment, but first we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break. Craving your next action-packed adventure? Audible delivers thrills of every kind on your command, like Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, where a lone astronaut must save humanity from extinction, narrated with stunning intensity by Ray Porter. From electrifying suspense and daring quests to spine-tingling horror and Rome

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And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Chilontisaurus, which was a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you.

It was a theropod, I told you I would get into theropods, that lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now China, found in the Yuan Tzu Hai Formation.

And being a theropod, it walked on two legs. It had a long head and sharp teeth and a long tail and long arms and large claws on its hands. This almost sounds like the big bad wolf or something. Everything about it is large and long. Well, it was large. It was estimated to be about 36 feet or 11 meters long and weigh two and a half to four metric tons.

There's other estimates that it was six metric tons, but that's based on its femur length being similar to Tyrannosaurus. I was thinking two and a half tons is pretty light for 36 feet, but that's the lower end. Yeah. You had to take into account all the feathers, if there were feathers. Yeah. I'm just alluding to your fun fact for later. Yeah. Could add a few pounds, I guess. Yeah.

Now, the holotype found includes a right tibia, that's the lower leg bone, a claw on the first finger, and part of the femora, the thigh bones, as well as part of the hips. The claws were described as strong with a sharp curve. The claw on the first finger is similar to spinosauroids. It's large and long. These fossils were found back in 1960, and then they were described in 1964 by Hu. The type and only species is Scythopoda.

Chelontisaurus tashwecoensis. And that genus name means Chelontis salt lake. It's been a bit confusing classifying Chelontisaurus. It's been considered to be a carnosaur related to Allosaurus, a spinosaur because of its large claws, and also a salurosaur. That's the group that includes like tyrannosaurs and birds.

There have been other species named in the past, but they're not for certain. There's quote-unquote Chelontisaurus sibericus that was based on just one foot bone. And then other species have been reclassified, like Chelontisaurus maurtoensis, which was reclassified in 2009 as Shaochelong maurtoensis. That's the shark-toothed dragon that lived in the early Cretaceous. And then there was Chelontisaurus maurtoensis,

Jyosiangensis, that was based on foot bones and part of a lower leg bone, and it's now known to be a therizinosaur. A little bit different. Yeah. Well, the large claws, I guess, makes sense. Yeah. Well, in that one, they knew the foot bones and the leg bones. Okay. But still. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the Pachycephalosaur Sinocephali and the Ornithomimid Sinoornithomimus.

That's an interesting one. I've never heard of it before. Chilontisaurus. But it sounds pretty significant if it's that big. It's got big claws. It's pretty cool. It is. And our fun fact of the day is that many birds have feathers that weigh more than their skeleton.

I was thinking about this because we talked a lot about feathers in our book. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they big stiff flight feathers or fluffy downy feathers? How much of the body did the feathers cover? What color were the feathers? The list goes on and on.

Many of those questions for which we do not have any answers for most dinosaurs. Maybe someday. There's a lot of room for interpretation and artistic license. Yes. Which Franco did a good job with. You know, the beauty of what we know now is now is always changing. True. One thing we didn't talk about in the book is how much feathers weigh. Peacocks seem like an obvious place to start.

If you Google, how much does a peacock feather weigh? You will get the answer 300 grams, which is over a half a pound. But that is a lie. Oh. Complete lie. A lot of places cite that number. Oh, no. That's more the weight of the entire train of peacock feathers, not a feather, which is a pretty big distinction. Yes. Yes. I did find a study on peacock feathers from 2020 in Bangladesh National Zoo.

Their heaviest feather was measured at 3.17 grams, so about a hundredth of what you get if you Google it, although the average was under three grams. Just for the record, that's not the feather that has the eye, the pretty blue thing on it. It's a different part of the feather that's actually a little bit longer and stiffer.

So heavier, probably. Yeah, so they weigh a little bit more. I think the eye feathers are more like two grams or two and a half grams. Another bird with very big, heavy feathers is the ostrich. They have these huge, typically white feathers at the ends of their wings. And since they don't fly, the feathers can be quite heavy and still serve their purpose, mostly impressing mates and scaring off threats.

Their feathers, from what I could tell, can reach about 30 inches or about 70 centimeters long. That makes sense from the ostriches I've seen. Yeah. They're very big. I never put that into context on its own as an individual feather before, but that's a huge feather.

I couldn't really find any studies on this per se, but I found a lot of people selling ostrich feathers. And one of the main categories is the 24 to 30 inch feather variety, where I got that 30 inch number from. But I don't know for sure a lot of the details. It's hard to find a weight for these feathers because apparently no one but me cares. However...

If you do know how much a really big ostrich feather weighs, you can let us know at bit.ly slash dino questions because I'm curious. The best I could do was find listings for ostrich feathers for sale and

Nobody lists an individual feather, how much it weighs, because it's not relevant for shipping because they're pretty light. But if you buy... Light as a feather, one might say. One might. But if you buy a 50 pack of big ostrich feathers, they weigh about half a pound, which is 227 grams. One feather then would weigh about four and a half grams. More than a peacock. Yes. And I did find a lot of people saying the heaviest feathers are probably ostrich feathers from people that spend a lot of time with birds. Yeah.

So that seems to line up there. Just for the record, four and a half grams is about twice as much as a bee hummingbird weighs, the lightest dinosaur. Bee hummingbirds are so small. They are. But that's the entire bee hummingbird. That's all of its feathers, its organs, its skeleton, everything. That's how small it is. Yeah. That this one ostrich feather weighs twice as much as the whole bee hummingbird.

To put that another way, you could say there is a dinosaur alive today with a feather that weighs more than an entire dinosaur of another species. That's fun. It is fun. But that's not the fun fact for today. It's about one species feathers versus skeleton.

So modern birds and many dinosaurs have something in common, which is quote unquote hollow bones or more precisely pneumatized skeletons. And birds do proportionally have extremely light bones. In general, a bird's bones only account for about 5% of their total body weight. Oh, I didn't know it was that low. Yeah.

That's very impressive. Humans, on the other hand, have much heavier skeletons. The common number for us is 14% of our body weight. So proportionally three times more bone weight than a bird. And we don't fly. We don't have to fly. Yeah.

I did have a hard time finding a peer reviewed study on the comparison between the weight of a bird's bones and feathers because everyone just seems to accept it as fact and saying something like many birds or most birds have feathers that weigh more than their skeleton without naming a bird because that's like the cheaty way to do it. But,

But I eventually found an issue of the Wilson Bulletin from 1955 that weighed all of the parts of a bald eagle. The author collected a bald eagle in Florida in 1953 and then meticulously dissected it and documented the feathers and all the other parts of the body and exactly how much they weighed. Wow. He also counted out all the feathers. There were 7,182 feathers. 2,175 are from the head alone.

Wow. Which is kind of funny since it's called the bald eagle and it's got over 2000 feathers on its head. They're white, which is what sort of makes it look bald. But yeah, it's weird. 1200 ish were on the left wing, almost 1400 on the right wing. Oh, asymmetrical. A little bit. Yeah. Also, I wonder how many times he did this count. Yeah. Was it just once and then wrote it down?

Probably, because that's a lot of feathers to count. Hopefully he didn't lose count. Yeah. I think the real purpose was the weight. So it was probably just like as you're plucking them out, you might as well count them too. Yeah.

The feathers in total weighed 677 grams, which is over a pound, and accounted for over 16% of its weight. Oh, that is more than the skeleton. I mean, proportionally, that's more than even our skeleton weighs in our body. So it's not just like, well, they have really light bones. Yeah. They have a lot of feathers.

The skeleton of an eagle, this bald eagle in particular, only weighed 272 grams, which is just 6.7% of its weight. So at least in this bald eagle, the feathers weighed about 2.5 times as much as the skeleton. More than twice as heavy. Amazing. Yeah. For the record, most of its weight is in its muscles and nervous system tissue, about 2,360 grams or 58% of its weight. Wow.

They're really muscly. And the main pectoral muscle, which is used for flight,

just the one muscle or pair of muscles, weighs 646 grams, which is almost 16% of its body weight, about the same of all its feathers. So it's all feathers and muscle. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? They're mostly muscle. And then the next most common thing is feathers. And then you have like skeleton and organs are like an afterthought in terms of the priority in a bird.

Wow.

But they just punch so far above their weight because they're so muscly and they're so well adapted for this light weight that a pound goes a lot farther in a bird than it does in a mammal. Yes. But yeah, you can now confidently say that many birds, or you could just say the bald eagle because that's the one I could confirm, have...

feathers that weigh more than their skeleton. Someone should do this for the peacock. I think with the peacock, their skeleton probably... Yeah, their feathers definitely weigh more than their skeleton too. I want to know how many feathers. Somebody count. Oh, you want to know how many feathers it has on its head versus its body? Its tail. Yeah. The head feathers are so tiny that it would just be awful to count. Can you imagine counting 2,000 feathers off of a bird's head? No, that's why I want someone else to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

And peacocks are very beautiful. They have very fine feathers that give that like silky smooth look to them. Female peacocks, probably lighter. Yes, definitely. And not just because they're smaller. Are they even smaller? Yeah. Peahens are a little smaller, but they, yeah, have way less feathers. All right. Well, I really like bringing up birds lately. But they're modern dinosaurs. They are. They are.

Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. As a quick reminder, we are switching to bi-weekly, so we will not have a new episode next week, although we will, I don't want to

but the plan is to have some exclusive content on Patreon. There's likely exclusive content on Patreon being released next week. Yes, because again, going forward, we're going to be bi-weekly here so we can have longer, more in-depth episodes. And then on Patreon, we're going to be posting more regular bonus exclusive and we'll have early access content there. So make sure you join patreon.com slash inodino. Thanks again. And until next time. Watch me.

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