Palaeoart - early work

Deinocheirus - an early attempt (1989, school art project)

I put this together with very little idea of anatomy at the time (so muscles in weird places, strange toe arrangement etc).

I was looking at David Norman's Dinosaur book, which was the best 'off the shelf' dinosaur book you could get back then if you were after details. Deinocheirus is only known from the huge forelimbs, the rest of the body is unknown. From comparisons between it and other forelimbs illustrations  available to me at the time I thought it looked like 'oviraptosaur'. So here it is is a scaled up oviraptosaur.

Part of the reasoning I had at the time was that the animal would have required a short torso so that the disproportionately large forelimbs wouldn't make it front heavy. Many of the previous popular books suggested a much larger animal by making comparisons to other large theropods that had proportionately shorter arms (e.g. Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus).

Footnote: 14/06/07 Nature publish the discovory of a gigantic oviraptosaur vaguely similar to this. It's not Deinocheirus but can't help making the comparison...it is however only loosely similar...