Feathers on dinosaurs? That's so gay <3 ♥❤

Kicking off the year by checking in on my birthday girls. What have they been up to? A lot, it seems!
Not just sitting pretty, but sitting on eggs.

Muru and Nuppu are a couple, but they're both female, so where did they acquire these downy little ones?
Well, birds and maybe non-avian dinos, too, can be sensitive to disturbances when nesting, and may
abandon their clutch if they judge the location they've chosen as being too dangerous after all, so maybe
the chicks' biological parent(s) did so, and these two ladies happened upon the nest before a scavenger did
and before it was too late for the eggs to continue incubating.
It's nesting season, so instincts told them to brood them instead of, perhaps, eating them.

In that case, are their new babies actually even the same species as them?
For now, who knows, though they presumably are at least coelurosaurian theropods since the eggs
were familiar enough for the two raptors to see as adoptable, and since they're this fluffy and also sharp-toothed.
So even if not conspecifics, chances are good they're carnivores.

A doodle of one possibility for what the animal JP/W Velociraptors are cloned from might have looked like.
Mostly JP1 raptor colours, and Skye's crest for this gal.

Raptor doodles with watercolour, silver pen, pink acrylic paint, and various degrees of
digital editing after transferring to computer by taking a photo of them.

Acrylic paint, marker, and clippings from various papers (mostly from a wall paint catalogue, actually,
and the eye and two coverts are cut from a gold foil detail). Again transferred to computer by taking a photo
since shiny things don't scan well, and edited some after that.

Based on/inspired by/feathered redesigns of two of the Utahraptors appearing in Jurassic Park media.
And are they girlfriends? Of course they are.

How long has it been since I last mentioned that I like drawing gay dinosaurs? Hours!

As a birthday present for myself, I made a pattern full of cuddling raptor lesbians.

Plumage designs loosely based on moths and butterflies. I drew them really small,
but I guess moths and butterflies are pretty small, too.

A group of Deinonychus, on their way to making someone's day deino with their nychus, probably.

Are they pack hunters? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Deinonychus fossils having been found several in close proximity to each other and to a Tenontosaurus has been interpreted that way, but later it has also been suggested the Deinonychus may have been competing over a carcass instead.

Modern birds don't offer many examples of cooperative hunting, including many of the ones that do live in groups of varying social structures and permanence. There are some, such as Harris's hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), which hunts in small family groups, although not quite with the level of coordinated hunting patterns of Jurassic Park Velociraptors, which were originally modeled after Deinonychus, and whose characterization as pack animals was originally based on the theory of Deinonychus having been that. Present-day dinosaurs doing things a certain way doesn't have to mean non-avian dinosaurs were exactly the same, but they are a more closely related reference than pack-hunting mammals, and dromaeosaurids' current pop culture reputation as "dinosaur wolves" is largely based on Jurassic Park, so to be clear (especially since I do draw a lot of fanart of specifically JP raptors being very social), in real life raptors and especially all raptors having been pack hunters or even particularly social is not a certainty.

But, a group of carnivores taking down a bigger prey than each of them could have killed alone can look like seamless teamwork and a peacefully shared meal, and it can look like planless chaos that works by sheer luck and leaves the hunters bickering over the spoils before going back to living solitary lives, or like something inbetween.

For these four, maybe they're a parent and their almost-old-enough-to-be-chased-away-to-fend-for-themselves offspring. Could also be a group of such offspring, four subadult siblings sticking together for now (with one brother and three sisters, having already grown sexually dimorphic plumage), or maybe unrelated subadults forming a temporary group while getting used to independence, before adulthood will prompt them to seek their own territories. Maybe in addition to safety in numbers, they hunt cooperatively, and maybe they don't, or maybe they do even if it's not the norm,
as nature is full of exceptions.

posted to: deviantart - tumblr - cara

Speculatively applying some avian raptor behavior I've seen a lot of on nestcams to non-avian raptors.
Birds of prey cover their food with their wings while eating to keep it out of sight and reach of would-be thieves.
In the context of nestcams that's usually a juvenile mantling to keep their siblings away, or even at the parent
who just brought the prey specifically for the juvenile, since it's instinctual for them to guard their food.

The hunter here is an Acheroraptor temertyorum, also in a pretty speculative appearance, since it's only known
from pieces of upper and lower jaw. One of the last dromaeosaurids before the K-Pg extinction event, and one that,
despite not being as famous as its cousin Velociraptor, lived alongside some of the biggest of big names in Dinosauria.
The animal I had in mind while drawing the prey is the mammal Purgatorius, which was still around a few millions of years
after Acheroraptor and other non-avian dinosaurs became extinct, but it could also just be some as of yet unknown
Late Cretaceous relative that, like this particular individual and its hunter, didn't make it out of the Mesozoic.

Also my attempt at the idea of troodontids with facial discs, based on that both they and
modern owls have asymmetrically placed ears, and that both that and a facial disc
of feathers are adaptations to improve the ability to detect prey by sound.

And as is the case with owls, about half of the apparent size of each raptor here is feather fluff.
The parent's head is only barely wider than from one outer corner of an eye to the other.

I decided to redraw this picture from last year a bit. Despite my attempts at accuracy, I still made the raptor much too scrawny, and the wings were posed more for showing they're wings than for realistic animal behavior, which bothered me enough to correct.

Feathers can add a lot of bulk to the silhouette even if the critter under them is pretty small and slender, as noted with the owly troodontid, and this revision is based on more carefully observing modern raptors and how their plumage behaves. Bipedal animals also don't tend to splay out their forelimbs much when walking or running unless it's necessary for balance or such. Birds that spend little time on the ground can be clumsy walkers and need to compensate with their wings, but species that on the other hand are more used to moving around on foot, too, keep their wings folded and out of the way when walking. The Velociraptor here is in its element and should appear so. Dromaeosaurids couldn't fold their wrists as much as modern birds can, but a 90 degree angle should be doable for them.

The message of the original picture still stands as far as I'm concerned: a significant and probably growing number of non-avian dinosaurs were feathered regardless of how you feel about it, and they were real animals, not fictional monsters, so stop acting like they need to conform to your personal tastes. Respect them as they are and how we're constantly finding out more about them having been, and enjoy unrealistic and outdated depictions as well all you want, but don't try to insist those are the only ones worth existing or supporting.

Science denial is not a path you want to go down to get your nostalgia feels.

posted to: deviantart