Not used for Contest 2013

[Federreptil]

Any museum should be proud to have such an educational and beautiful display.

Then I guess the task now is to find the museum that sees it the same way. I would be very pleased to be able to present these ideas in public space. Even though it will certainly be exciting to see where the museums can get the budget from and how the exchange with the experts will be, since I can't prove that I have a scientific background. In the best sense, I would be a three-dimensional paleoartist, who is also allowed to speculate with scientific advice.

[Federreptil]

  Fantastic! So many possibilities. It must have been very hard to choose the one pic for the contest.

Curiously, the selection this year was not the difficulty, because I had mentally separated the competition entry and the documentation of diversity in the diorama.

So Part 1 of these compilations shows the photo motifs that were taken with digital camera and tripod and where the naturalistic athmosphere got a stronger emphasis. Here essentially a basic situation with slight variations has been played through.

The pictures in Part 4.1 and 4.2 were taken with a smartphone and show the different situations and positions. However, the model-like nature of the set-up still remains perceptible. The scenes can still remain recognizable as a made diorama, because I'm really driven by the idea of how to make more than just a single photo motif out of these set-ups.

[Federreptil]

On your own doorstep
So far, I hadn't managed to stage a scene that wasn't set far away in Asia or America.



So I used the big diorama construction to show at least an intermediate state. The biggest find in the north of Germany are the different skeletons of Europasaurus holgeri. Exciting, because they are not only fossilized tracks, like most of the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous finds. There is also the additional aspect of the inserterization, because the closest relatives of Europasaurus are Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan, whose most famous reconstruction due to the colonial past is now in Berlin.



This is an intermediate state, because not all protagonists are yet perfectly selected. For example, the Stegosauriae in the background are indeed evidenced by a single tooth found. But whether it should therefore be the American archetype is perhaps not yet the best choice. A Miragaia would be already closer from the localization. Because of the island dwarfing of the Sauropden perhaps the smaller Kentrosaurus would be a more suitable companion. Iguanodonts are with a larger temporal dispersion for Europe very widely provable. With the predatory dinosaurs and the further sauropods one usually refers to the fossilized traces. Without the matching bone finds, however, the naming of the tracks often seems to me to be a question of marketing. Especially since I wonder why the Macronaria dwarfed to be able to use the habitat of island chains in the shallow water sea. But an Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Allosaurus or Torvosauraus could exist in maximum size in this biotope. Wouldn't they have to be dwarf species?



Because of the scale it will be exciting to be able to integrate Archaeopteryx here. The stand-ins for Pterodactylus are already there. Compsognathus, Juravenator, Rhamphorhynchus and the primeval crocodiles are still missing, for which the suitable models must be searched.



If you enjoy these mind games, you should definitely go to the book "Europasaurus. Urzeitinseln voller Leben" 2020 by Oliver Wings and Joschua Küppe. Here he finds the whole biotope of the primeval times in detail represented, even if some stars from Solnhofen are missing. The painting of the Europasaurus is also based on the depiction of the Europasaurus by Joschua Küppe in the book for a better "recognition effect". The figures are white 3D prints of GN models, which come from Shapeways.