Eofauna: New for 2022

[Sim]

All of that ignores the greater point that animals don't just disperse heat by having their skin touch the air. (Some) mammals can sort of do that through sweating, but most animals can only cool themselves without external or behavioural means to any meaningful degree by dispersing heat from muscles that are near the surface of the skin.

This is why ostriches have bald undersides. They live in deserts in some parts of their range, and yet the only bald areas are on the underside where they're already shielded from the sun. Ostriches are bald where they have large muscles near the skin. Elephant birds were even larger and had no bald regions, since they weren't active long distance runners like ostriches are.

This is why we expect to see bald regions on the tail, legs, and underside of large Tyrannosaurs. Because these are the areas where being bald gives them a functional benefit. Tyrannosaurus, let alone Deinocheirus, gains nothing from having a bald back. The muscles there are covered by other tissues.

The skin touching the air is a way to cool down given the right air temperature.  So is immersing in water.  It's not true that Tyrannosaurus and Deinocheirus gain nothing from having a bald back.  By having a bald back they no longer need to give resources to producing feathers.  If having feathers on the back was so helpful to large dinosaurs, why do sauropods and hadrosauroids lack this feature?  Also elephants and rhinos have bare backs and manage without the fur that blocks some solar heat from reaching the skin of other mammals.  Having a bare back seems to be of some use, perhaps related to what dinofelid shared earlier from a Saurian post:

In addition to the physical evidence for reticulate scales, there is also a biomechanical argument to be made. One of our major consultants on this reconstruction, Scott Hartman, has been conducting physiological modelling on early dinosaurs and other reptiles, including quantifying thermal constraints (Hartman 2015, Hartman et al. 2016). He is not working specifically on T. rex, but his research has implications for its potential feathering. According to his research, depending on ambient temperature, animals stop receiving any benefit from dermal insulation at somewhere between 1 and 3 tonnes. Due to the costs of producing such integument, this may cause these traits to be selected against, as has occurred in many large mammals and fur.

Looking at the skin evidence from the rest of the dinosaur family tree, this shouldn't be that large of a surprise. If we assume that filaments are basal to all dinosaurs, then they have already been lost at least 4 times prior to tyrannosauroids: thyreophorans, cerapods, sauropods, and ceratosaurs. This makes feather loss in one additional clade hardly a stretch of the imagination.

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

This discussion is going on for quite a while and tangentially related to what is most likely a 2023 product. It was interesting I suppose but I think it has been going on too long for me to read the last few posts.
The Diplodocus and Konobelodon are a month away at least. Will be nice, though a shame to say goodbye the 2008 Carnegie Diplodocus.

[CARN0TAURUS]

This discussion is going on for quite a while and tangentially related to what is most likely a 2023 product. It was interesting I suppose but I think it has been going on too long for me to read the last few posts.
The Diplodocus and Konobelodon are a month away at least. Will be nice, though a shame to say goodbye the 2008 Carnegie Diplodocus.

Even tho you'll most likely be right, I can't help but hope you're horribly wrong  

I've been waiting 4-5 years to hear that Eofauna would make a large Tyrannosaur, I don't mind waiting till 2023 but I'm certainly hoping that there is enough time for it to be a late 2022 release.

[stargatedalek]

All of that ignores the greater point that animals don't just disperse heat by having their skin touch the air. (Some) mammals can sort of do that through sweating, but most animals can only cool themselves without external or behavioural means to any meaningful degree by dispersing heat from muscles that are near the surface of the skin.

This is why ostriches have bald undersides. They live in deserts in some parts of their range, and yet the only bald areas are on the underside where they're already shielded from the sun. Ostriches are bald where they have large muscles near the skin. Elephant birds were even larger and had no bald regions, since they weren't active long distance runners like ostriches are.

This is why we expect to see bald regions on the tail, legs, and underside of large Tyrannosaurs. Because these are the areas where being bald gives them a functional benefit. Tyrannosaurus, let alone Deinocheirus, gains nothing from having a bald back. The muscles there are covered by other tissues.

The skin touching the air is a way to cool down given the right air temperature.  So is immersing in water.  It's not true that Tyrannosaurus and Deinocheirus gain nothing from having a bald back.  By having a bald back they no longer need to give resources to producing feathers.  If having feathers on the back was so helpful to large dinosaurs, why do sauropods and hadrosauroids lack this feature?  Also elephants and rhinos have bare backs and manage without the fur that blocks some solar heat from reaching the skin of other mammals.  Having a bare back seems to be of some use, perhaps related to what dinofelid shared earlier from a Saurian post:

In addition to the physical evidence for reticulate scales, there is also a biomechanical argument to be made. One of our major consultants on this reconstruction, Scott Hartman, has been conducting physiological modelling on early dinosaurs and other reptiles, including quantifying thermal constraints (Hartman 2015, Hartman et al. 2016). He is not working specifically on T. rex, but his research has implications for its potential feathering. According to his research, depending on ambient temperature, animals stop receiving any benefit from dermal insulation at somewhere between 1 and 3 tonnes. Due to the costs of producing such integument, this may cause these traits to be selected against, as has occurred in many large mammals and fur.

Looking at the skin evidence from the rest of the dinosaur family tree, this shouldn't be that large of a surprise. If we assume that filaments are basal to all dinosaurs, then they have already been lost at least 4 times prior to tyrannosauroids: thyreophorans, cerapods, sauropods, and ceratosaurs. This makes feather loss in one additional clade hardly a stretch of the imagination.

I specifically said "most animals can only cool themselves without external or behavioural means" because many animals will cover themselves in water or wet substrate to disperse heat.

Emu feathers, which are structurally equivalent to Tyrannosaur feathers, do disperse additional heat relative to fur which only cools by providing limited cover from the sun. No the study did not test whether emu feathers dispersed heat better than a lack of feathers, but there is concrete evidence they disperse heat better than fur.

Elephants are bald as far back as semi-aquatic ancestors. I don't know if that's also true for rhinoceros. Mammoths secondarily re-developed thick coverings of hair when forced to by new environments, elephants didn't loose that hair relative to mammoths when they entered warm environments. The group seemingly "started" bald long before becoming as large as they are, and those in warm climates had no pressure for hair to return.

0/2, elephants seemingly did not loose their fur for thermodynamic reasons (though they likely would have anyway and/or that lack allowed them to reach their large size), and fur is not comparable to tyrannosaur feathers. And so we confirm, as we do every time someone mentions feathered tyrannosaurs and it blows up into a giant thing, that elephants are not an appropriate analogue to tyrannosaurs. This same argument has been thrown around for decades, seen it made by a hundred different people, many with exhaustive lists of sources on every little bit of data imaginable about large mammal thermoregulation. And I've already gone over in this thread how terrible the "ostriches are X size and already loosing their feathers" argument is; I can feel that one is coming next, so please just don't.

As for saruopods, cerapods, thyreophorans, and ceratosaurs, those are more complex than typically assumed.

We have very little integument for sauropods, only relatively small sections of scales and numerous detailed footprints. From this we can say their scales are distinct from scales in other dinosaur groups showing they developed independently, but we don't technically have a lot to go on in regards to sauropod integument. They were almost certainly bald, sans perhaps display structures or structures on juveniles that were lost in adults, but this is inference based primarily on how primitive their feathers would have been, far from the branched feathers of tyrannosaurs let alone the "true pennaceous" heat dispersing feathers of birds.

Cerapoda may have lost feathers twice, in fact it's most likely. We see no baldness earlier than Psittacosaurus in ceratopsians and ankylopollexia in ornithopods. There is nothing to suggest pachycephalosaurs or earlier ornithopods were bald, and there is reason to suspect some earlier ornithopods and pachycephalosaurs did retain their feathers, or at least would have benefited from feathers had they had them, based on size and environment. Ornithischia broke off far earlier than sauropods from other dinosaurs, so their feathers would have been similarly primitive and again it makes sense to infer they would be lost, at least to a major degree, in large members.

Thyreophorans are known from some great preservations of enlarged armoured scales, as well as scutes, plates, etc., but we don't have any areas preserved from their undersides or unarmoured regions that I am aware of. They are also ornithischians so again it makes sense to see feather loss in larger animals.

Which brings us to ceratosaurs. Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Carnotaurus still the only ceratosaur with preserved integument? Carnotaurus whose integument has been largely unstudied aside from a handful of people, was largely damaged in preparation, and that has multiple times occasionally come under scrutiny for being far less complete than often depicted? Hardly seems like conclusive evidence of much, especially given that we would again expect ceratosaurs to exhibit decidedly more primitive feathers that again, make sense to be lost, at least in large part, by large animals.

[Concavenator]

Will be nice, though a shame to say goodbye the 2008 Carnegie Diplodocus.

You read my mind haha, I literally sold my Carnegie Diplodocus this week as I'm planning to get Eofauna's.

[dinofelid]

Emu feathers, which are structurally equivalent to Tyrannosaur feathers, do disperse additional heat relative to fur which only cools by providing limited cover from the sun. No the study did not test whether emu feathers dispersed heat better than a lack of feathers, but there is concrete evidence they disperse heat better than fur.

By "disperse heat" are you exclusively talking about blocking solar radiation and thus reducing solar heating, or are you saying there is evidence that feathers allow internally generated heat to disperse more rapidly than fur? Like I said, it seems to me the Dawson and Maloney paper talks only about how feather block solar radiation. And the point I was making about a hypothetical featherless emu was just about how I think we can be confident it would have an improved ability to disperse internal heat, I wasn't suggesting it would absorb less solar radiation than a feathered emu.

[Sim]

I could respond further to stargatedalek's post but I don't feel like it, so I'm going to leave that discussion as is.

[CARN0TAURUS]

I could respond further to stargatedalek's post but I don't feel like it, so I'm going to leave that discussion as is.

I read these discussions sometimes and I honestly wonder what if anything they have to do with dinosaur toys.  I have learned some things but unfortunately most of that knowledge is limited to learning about the personalities of individual posters and less about the science.  Seems to me like even the experts know they don't have enough information to make concrete determinations about most any of these issues whether it's feathers, lips or whatever...  Yet even in the case of the experts I can see some justification in many of them letting their egos get involved in their theories because their is money to be made and reputations/legacies to establish in their fields.  But here on these forums, what are the stakes here when there is no money or reputation to establish?  I honestly don't understand the motivation/drive to take sides on these issues.  It just makes no sense to me and I've seen the ugliness that sometimes comes from these discussions.  Seems like the best outcomes are when folks are civil and agree to disagree like we see in this particular instant.

Personally, I enjoy the discussions dealing with and discussing the merits of a molds, seam lines, molding techniques, paintwork, and other assembly line mass toy manufacturing issues etc.  I enjoy these types of discussions because we know more about these things and it seems a lot more relevant to dinosaur toy discussions.  My grandfather once told me never to argue about things I knew little or nothing about.  When it comes to the billion piece puzzle of the dinosaur age and knowing that we only hold a tiny fragment of those billion pieces.  I think everyone is mostly in the dark, it's okay to have a theory but the bottom line is even the experts don't know all that much.  I remember reading a scientific study in high school that argued that bumble bees should not be capable of flight.  I get the feeling that people become so enamored with their opinions and conclusions that even if we could transport them back in time 80 million years they might not want to accept what there own eyes would see. 

As for the results that a company produces, my role is only to decide if I will support those efforts based on a simple matrix.  Was the company mindful of the data available?  Did they use quality materials and is the sculpt good?  Did they attempt a believable realistic finish on paintwork based on extant species?  Do they offer a reasonable price for the product?  Does the pose look natural and does it please the eye?  If the answer is yes on 3 or 4 of those questions then I'll consider buying it if it's a species I'm interested in.  And sometimes even if it's a species that normally doesn't interest me, I'll buy it if all those answers are yes.  Less important to me is size as lately I'm leaning towards collecting smaller figures.  I'll take a fantastic sculpt at 1/40 over a mediocre one at 1/20 any day of the week and twice on Sundays even if they cost the same.  That's  it, that's my role, that is all I can do or influence.  I understand my place in all of this.  I either choose to support the company's efforts or I vote no with my wallet.

[thedeadlymoose]

I could respond further to stargatedalek's post but I don't feel like it, so I'm going to leave that discussion as is.

I read these discussions sometimes and I honestly wonder what if anything they have to do with dinosaur toys.  I have learned some things but unfortunately most of that knowledge is limited to learning about the personalities of individual posters and less about the science.  Seems to me like even the experts know they don't have enough information to make concrete determinations about most any of these issues whether it's feathers, lips or whatever...  Yet even in the case of the experts I can see some justification in many of them letting their egos get involved in their theories because their is money to be made and reputations/legacies to establish in their fields.  But here on these forums, what are the stakes here when there is no money or reputation to establish?  I honestly don't understand the motivation/drive to take sides on these issues.  It just makes no sense to me and I've seen the ugliness that sometimes comes from these discussions.  Seems like the best outcomes are when folks are civil and agree to disagree like we see in this particular instant.

Personally, I enjoy the discussions dealing with and discussing the merits of a molds, seam lines, molding techniques, paintwork, and other assembly line mass toy manufacturing issues etc.  I enjoy these types of discussions because we know more about these things and it seems a lot more relevant to dinosaur toy discussions.  My grandfather once told me never to argue about things I knew little or nothing about.  When it comes to the billion piece puzzle of the dinosaur age and knowing that we only hold a tiny fragment of those billion pieces.  I think everyone is mostly in the dark, it's okay to have a theory but the bottom line is even the experts don't know all that much.  I remember reading a scientific study in high school that argued that bumble bees should not be capable of flight.  I get the feeling that people become so enamored with their opinions and conclusions that even if we could transport them back in time 80 million years they might not want to accept what there own eyes would see. 

As for the results that a company produces, my role is only to decide if I will support those efforts based on a simple matrix.  Was the company mindful of the data available?  Did they use quality materials and is the sculpt good?  Did they attempt a believable realistic finish on paintwork based on extant species?  Do they offer a reasonable price for the product?  Does the pose look natural and does it please the eye?  If the answer is yes on 3 or 4 of those questions then I'll consider buying it if it's a species I'm interested in.  And sometimes even if it's a species that normally doesn't interest me, I'll buy it if all those answers are yes.  Less important to me is size as lately I'm leaning towards collecting smaller figures.  I'll take a fantastic sculpt at 1/40 over a mediocre one at 1/20 any day of the week and twice on Sundays even if they cost the same.  That's  it, that's my role, that is all I can do or influence.  I understand my place in all of this.  I either choose to support the company's efforts or I vote no with my wallet.

I think it's 100% valid to prefer to talk about molds, seam lines, etc, but those don't excite my artistic imagination! (Well, they've started to, but only because I've begun to feel drawn to them as I think about how to go back to creating paleoart.)

These arguments seemed relevant to me in this thread, because Eofauna appeals heavily to the accuracy based market, and also makes really beautiful figures!

I've learned a lot from curiously reading @stargatedalek's posts over my years of lurking. The content has been fascinating, and relevant to my paleoart interests. And in this thread I particularly learned a lot, and thought of quite a few ideas! And -- the knowledge will certainly increase my appreciation of the Eofauna Tyrannosaurus once we get to see it.

In general, through forum posts here, I've been able to get insight into a whole lot of odd discrepancies and veiled references and unusual subcultural quirks within this field that I picked up on from reading discussion posts elsewhere and reading scientific articles because I'm a nerd, but didn't fully understand.

The most important thing to me is the beauty of the art pieces themselves. And it's extra neat for me to see beautiful depictions of extinct animals that are more unusual to the modern eye, yet just as accurate as the more traditional depictions (or more!).

I feel sad when I read these threads and see pretty cool posters getting deeply frustrated with each other, for reasons which are often obscure to me.

But still, I love to see the space created, on scientific grounds, for art that's a little less familiar.

This is helpful and rare and relevant. This creates space for more varied art in the field, and new kinds of beauty, and a wider array of visions of things we'll never see.

[stargatedalek]

Aww, thank you.

I should add, I argue for the plausibility of feathers in Tyrannosaurus, not their definitive presence. It's always possible for an animal to loose a feature, not just a neutral but even a beneficial one, due to behavioural selective pressures. Bald display tissues pushing out feathers for example.

[SidB]

Reading the above reflections by @CARN0TAURUS and T @thedeadlymoose is interesting, to say the least. I find myself agreeing with the basic thrust of their observations. I'll add this: 1) the hobby related aspects of science and the craft/artistry are unavoidably interlinked, so it's virtually impossible to function in only one of these spheres alone. I choose the latter, simply because I'm far less competent in the former and much of what I would contribute observation-wise to the science discussions, which are fascinating, would be more heat than light.

As for the probably impossible to avoid person-to-person difficulties that periodically emerge or flare up, I realize that it's part of the lay of the land, unavoidable, though generally containable. Otherwise the Forum wouldn't still be here. One thing is clearly necessary: for those of us who don't necessarily enjoy or even crave a bit of sharpness in and to the verbal banter, I'd have to say that a certain persistence, durability and even toughness is necessary. It takes a lot of that, not to mention other qualities, to be here on the Forum after 1,000, 3,000 or more posts. My commendation and respect go out to people who are still here after these milestones, and still going strong, still contributing and still a force for the positive. Stamina and passion are needed in heaping spoonfuls.

[CARN0TAURUS]

I could respond further to stargatedalek's post but I don't feel like it, so I'm going to leave that discussion as is.

I read these discussions sometimes and I honestly wonder what if anything they have to do with dinosaur toys.  I have learned some things but unfortunately most of that knowledge is limited to learning about the personalities of individual posters and less about the science.  Seems to me like even the experts know they don't have enough information to make concrete determinations about most any of these issues whether it's feathers, lips or whatever...  Yet even in the case of the experts I can see some justification in many of them letting their egos get involved in their theories because their is money to be made and reputations/legacies to establish in their fields.  But here on these forums, what are the stakes here when there is no money or reputation to establish?  I honestly don't understand the motivation/drive to take sides on these issues.  It just makes no sense to me and I've seen the ugliness that sometimes comes from these discussions.  Seems like the best outcomes are when folks are civil and agree to disagree like we see in this particular instant.

Personally, I enjoy the discussions dealing with and discussing the merits of a molds, seam lines, molding techniques, paintwork, and other assembly line mass toy manufacturing issues etc.  I enjoy these types of discussions because we know more about these things and it seems a lot more relevant to dinosaur toy discussions.  My grandfather once told me never to argue about things I knew little or nothing about.  When it comes to the billion piece puzzle of the dinosaur age and knowing that we only hold a tiny fragment of those billion pieces.  I think everyone is mostly in the dark, it's okay to have a theory but the bottom line is even the experts don't know all that much.  I remember reading a scientific study in high school that argued that bumble bees should not be capable of flight.  I get the feeling that people become so enamored with their opinions and conclusions that even if we could transport them back in time 80 million years they might not want to accept what there own eyes would see. 

As for the results that a company produces, my role is only to decide if I will support those efforts based on a simple matrix.  Was the company mindful of the data available?  Did they use quality materials and is the sculpt good?  Did they attempt a believable realistic finish on paintwork based on extant species?  Do they offer a reasonable price for the product?  Does the pose look natural and does it please the eye?  If the answer is yes on 3 or 4 of those questions then I'll consider buying it if it's a species I'm interested in.  And sometimes even if it's a species that normally doesn't interest me, I'll buy it if all those answers are yes.  Less important to me is size as lately I'm leaning towards collecting smaller figures.  I'll take a fantastic sculpt at 1/40 over a mediocre one at 1/20 any day of the week and twice on Sundays even if they cost the same.  That's  it, that's my role, that is all I can do or influence.  I understand my place in all of this.  I either choose to support the company's efforts or I vote no with my wallet.

I think it's 100% valid to prefer to talk about molds, seam lines, etc, but those don't excite my artistic imagination! (Well, they've started to, but only because I've begun to feel drawn to them as I think about how to go back to creating paleoart.)

These arguments seemed relevant to me in this thread, because Eofauna appeals heavily to the accuracy based market, and also makes really beautiful figures!

I've learned a lot from curiously reading @stargatedalek's posts over my years of lurking. The content has been fascinating, and relevant to my paleoart interests. And in this thread I particularly learned a lot, and thought of quite a few ideas! And -- the knowledge will certainly increase my appreciation of the Eofauna Tyrannosaurus once we get to see it.

In general, through forum posts here, I've been able to get insight into a whole lot of odd discrepancies and veiled references and unusual subcultural quirks within this field that I picked up on from reading discussion posts elsewhere and reading scientific articles because I'm a nerd, but didn't fully understand.

The most important thing to me is the beauty of the art pieces themselves. And it's extra neat for me to see beautiful depictions of extinct animals that are more unusual to the modern eye, yet just as accurate as the more traditional depictions (or more!).

I feel sad when I read these threads and see pretty cool posters getting deeply frustrated with each other, for reasons which are often obscure to me.

But still, I love to see the space created, on scientific grounds, for art that's a little less familiar.

This is helpful and rare and relevant. This creates space for more varied art in the field, and new kinds of beauty, and a wider array of visions of things we'll never see.

I apologize if my post seemed harsh.  As an example of what I'm getting at, imagine if you could take a paleontologist from the 1950s, that person's read everything and studied every fossil there was available in his/her time.  Now you take that person and have them post on this forum today.  How credible is that "expert" going to be today?  How credible are any of the current arguments going to be in another 50 years?  There will be a lot of new fossil discoveries and new technologies might be available to study them.  How much more information will we know that might make these passionate discussion seem completely irrelevant?  So what purpose does all of the chest puffing and grandstanding serve?  It seems we see new discoveries yearly that disprove accepted theories regularly.  I believe intelligence can be demonstrated in other ways besides beating others over the head with studies and theories for the sake of winning an argument.  There is much to be said for exercising restraint when the truth is that there is still just way too much we don't know.  Even the experts would be well served to show some humility in light of how little we actually do know. 

IMO I just don't feel we know enough about these animals to get overly passionate about conclusions, theories are good if based on what we do know.  But as fluidly as things have changed in this field just in my 50 plus years on this planet it just makes sense to be excited about whatever new discoveries will be made rather than getting hung up on old conclusions.

[dinofelid]

So what purpose does all of the chest puffing and grandstanding serve?  It seems we see new discoveries yearly that disprove accepted theories regularly.  I believe intelligence can be demonstrated in other ways besides beating others over the head with studies and theories for the sake of winning an argument.  There is much to be said for exercising restraint when the truth is that there is still just way too much we don't know.  Even the experts would be well served to show some humility in light of how little we actually do know. 

I think maybe you're misperceiving the discussion a little here, there's been plenty of disagreement about the weight of the current evidence but it's all been very politely expressed as far as I can tell, without anything I would see as chest puffing or grandstanding. The citing of studies and theories doesn't imply any overweening confidence in one's position on the object-level question "did T. rex have feathers", it's just about debating the relative strength of various arguments for and against. One can take the position that some particular "for" argument is overstated without it implying that T. rex definitely didn't have feathers, and vice versa. I think the comment of @stargatedalek that "I argue for the plausibility of feathers in Tyrannosaurus, not their definitive presence" is entirely reasonable, and I likewise was just making a plausibility argument about the no-feathers view, definitely not arguing for their definitive absence (and of course 'no-feathers' should be taken loosely, including the possibility of sparse dinofuzz like hair on an elephant).

Others can speak for themselves, but I kind of assumed by default that everyone taking part in this debate had a perspective like this. Even if one doesn't claim to know the answer, debates like this can be fun to participate in because you learn more about the different pro and con arguments.

[Cretaceous Crab]

The debate on Tyrannosaurus species diversity aside, all I can say is that I just purchased the Eofauna Giga, Trike and Atlas. And I was not disappointed.

Detail on the Atlasaurus is phenomenal. Paint Job was great on all, except of course, the bland color of the Giga's mouth. For their size and detail, not bad prices.

I eagerly await future figures from Eofauna.

[CARN0TAURUS]

The debate on Tyrannosaurus species diversity aside, all I can say is that I just purchased the Eofauna Giga, Trike and Atlas. And I was not disappointed.

Detail on the Atlasaurus is phenomenal. Paint Job was great on all, except of course, the bland color of the Giga's mouth. For their size and detail, not bad prices.

I eagerly await future figures from Eofauna.

@Cretaceous Crab

Congratulations on your new Eofauna figures!  Of those three the Atlasaurus is definitely my favorite and I'm mostly into theropods so that's saying something about the quality of that figure.  I'm eagerly awaiting the two delayed figures and I can't wait to see the them up close.  And now this news of a Tyrannosaur based on Sue has got me even more excited.  I'm hoping that it'll be released by the end of the year. 

I had been lurking around this forum for a long time (4-5 years?) before I finally started posting here in 2017.  The thing that finally inspired me to sign up and participate was the Eofauna Steppe Mammoth release.  So you can pretty much blame Eofauna for me coming on here and annoying folks with my posting 

[Flaffy]

"The Eofauna Diplodocus and Konobelodon figures will be available for our retailers/distributors at the end of this month.

The delivery of the goods is being delayed more than expected due to the global situation. We will finally receive the figures in two or three weeks, however. We are sorry for the delay." - Eofauna

[suspsy]

Looking forward to April!

[Sim]

I have more free time now, so I'm going to respond to stargatedalek's post.

I specifically said "most animals can only cool themselves without external or behavioural means" because many animals will cover themselves in water or wet substrate to disperse heat.

Isn't doing those things external or behavioural means though?

Emu feathers, which are structurally equivalent to Tyrannosaur feathers, do disperse additional heat relative to fur which only cools by providing limited cover from the sun. No the study did not test whether emu feathers dispersed heat better than a lack of feathers, but there is concrete evidence they disperse heat better than fur.

I'm not sure emu feathers are structurally equivalent to emu feathers.  My understanding is emu feathers are somewhat simplified pennaceous feathers while tyrannosauroids had branched and unbranched filamentous feathers. So the tyrannosauroid feathers lack a rachis while emu feathers have a rachis.  As I mentioned earlier, Matthew Martyniuk argued that filamentous feathers wouldn't act very differently to hair.

Elephants are bald as far back as semi-aquatic ancestors. I don't know if that's also true for rhinoceros. Mammoths secondarily re-developed thick coverings of hair when forced to by new environments, elephants didn't loose that hair relative to mammoths when they entered warm environments. The group seemingly "started" bald long before becoming as large as they are, and those in warm climates had no pressure for hair to return.

I think you're right.  I'm curious though, which elephant ancestor has integument preserved that shows they had bare skin?  If that is how things went it does seem to show that insulation from hair wasn't helpful to proboscidean species living in warm environments.

We have very little integument for sauropods, only relatively small sections of scales and numerous detailed footprints. From this we can say their scales are distinct from scales in other dinosaur groups showing they developed independently, but we don't technically have a lot to go on in regards to sauropod integument. They were almost certainly bald, sans perhaps display structures or structures on juveniles that were lost in adults, but this is inference based primarily on how primitive their feathers would have been, far from the branched feathers of tyrannosaurs let alone the "true pennaceous" heat dispersing feathers of birds.

I remember reading somewhere that a fully scaly baby titanosaur has been found, but I can't find anything about it while writing this so I can't check its authenticity.  (I actually found something about this while writing further down so I'll mention it there).  Regarding sauropod scales being different from other dinosaur scales, to me that can be interpreted as possibly all dinosaur scales starting the same and then just developing differently in different groups.  But how are sauropod scales different from other dinosaur scales?

Thyreophorans are known from some great preservations of enlarged armoured scales, as well as scutes, plates, etc., but we don't have any areas preserved from their undersides or unarmoured regions that I am aware of. They are also ornithischians so again it makes sense to see feather loss in larger animals.

There are some thyreophorans for which unarmoured integument has been preserved.  Scelidosaurus and Hesperosaurus preserve rounded scales, Gigantspinosaurus preserves coarser scales.  While I was looking up the scales of Gigantspinosaurus, I found a page that describes them as being alike to many other dinosaur scales including titanosaurs.  So maybe sauropod scales aren't different to ornithischian scales?  Here's the page that describes this: http://www.xinglida.net/news003.htm

Also, Victoria Arbour has commented on how there's a good record of ankylosaur integument besides their osteoderms and that she's written a paper about this.  I have seen this integument preserved in Borealopelta and possibly some ankylosaurids but I'm not sure which now.  Victoria wrote that in the comments section of this blog post: http://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2015/12/dinosaur-scales-some-thoughts-for.html

As for integument from a thyreophoran's underside, Stegosaurus and Jinyunpelta preserve osteoderms under their throat and Jinyunpelta also preserves osteoderms under the tail.  I seem to remember a nodosaurid also having throat armour but I can't find it now.

Which brings us to ceratosaurs. Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Carnotaurus still the only ceratosaur with preserved integument? Carnotaurus whose integument has been largely unstudied aside from a handful of people, was largely damaged in preparation, and that has multiple times occasionally come under scrutiny for being far less complete than often depicted? Hardly seems like conclusive evidence of much, especially given that we would again expect ceratosaurs to exhibit decidedly more primitive feathers that again, make sense to be lost, at least in large part, by large animals.

Ceratosaurus preserves midline osteoderms and an osteoderm that doesn't come from the midline.

[CARN0TAURUS]

"The Eofauna Diplodocus and Konobelodon figures will be available for our retailers/distributors at the end of this month.

The delivery of the goods is being delayed more than expected due to the global situation. We will finally receive the figures in two or three weeks, however. We are sorry for the delay." - Eofauna

Look at those two beauties, can't wait to add those to the collection in the next few weeks!

[SRF]

Eofauna seems to schedule their releases around this time of the year. The Triceratops was released around the same time last year. This will probably mean that the new Tyrannosaurus will be released sometime around March next year I suppose.