Osteodontorinis orri by LeFedere on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Published: Jul 18, 2017

Description

With its pseudotoothy grin

Started drawing this last Friday night, when my parent's church group came over for dinner. I had just woken up from a nap, the internet was slow, and watching films felt like a waste of time. As it so happened, I had a Pelagornis skeletal, and a Blue-footed booby(Sula nebouxii) photo on my hard drive.

I really don't know what species the skeletal represented (hence Pelagornis sp.), but I trust it's reliable.

EDIT: I tried searching again for the skeletal I used for this illustration. Turns out it was published in Robert W. Boessenecker and N. Adam Smith's 2011 paper describing a humerus recovered from the late Neogene Purisima formation in California. The image is one of the first things you'll see when you do a Google Image search of Pelagornis skeletals. The well-preserved partial humerus was at that time assigned under said genus, hence my (still glaring) mistake.

"Due to its incompleteness, we refrain from naming a new species (Boessenecker and Smith, 2011)."

Differences in time and geography prompted the reassignment.

The species was named after paleontologist, Ellison Orr who had just recently passed away at that time.

Given that the specimen in question is a partial humerus and the restoration is that of a head and neck, I'm not sure how significant this hiccough is. Still...

MORAL OF THE STORY: Check and recheck your references thoroughly.

Image size

1536x2048px 386.67 KB

Date Taken

Jul 18, 2017, 7:36:58 PM