A Dull-Colored Deinonych / The Revolutionary 2.0

What it says on the tin. In a way, it's as much a remake of this as this one's a remake of that. Ah, childhood favorite paravians. Never cease to amaze.

Two things:

1) Against what has become fashion, this Deinonychus has unfeathered lacrimals, as their "knobs" seem to have extended laterally to a greater extent than in other dromaeosaurids (it's part of its diagnosis in Turner et al.'s 2012 monograph). I know the snouts of small paravians are extensively feathered, but I think what I did in this drawing works with >3 m Deinonychus.

2) I always fancied myself to be someone who can draw non-avialan dinosaur wings. I'm far less certain now. This one is my closest approximation to the remex patterns Longrich et al. (2012) and Xu (2012) proposed for Anchiornis and Archaeopteryx. Hope it worked. The secondary count is deliberately Velociraptor-ish.

While this drawing doesn't portray it as the most strikingly covered dromaeosaurid out there, I really enjoyed drawing this gateway drug to armchair paleontology as a rather drab animal. And it was as fun as educational: Astonishing just how compact Deinonychus is. The torso looks very short, although some of this might have been a result of its deepness; even more so than other eudromaeosaurs, it looks very "functional". Small pelvic girdle and legs, very large forelimbs, big yet lightly-built head, very long tail, enormous sickle claws. Yes, the first thing every 80s/90s kid learned about Deinonychus is that it had those huge sickle claws, but they're immensely large even by eudromaeosaur standards.

Refs by Scott Hartman.

Take-home messages: When a sheet of paper only allows for very short rectrices, stretch them in MS Paint. Would you have guessed that I did that if I hadn't told you?

//Edit: Slightly corrected some shading stuff.