Allosaurus fragilis sketch

Allosaurus fragilis, graphite.

This sketch was a highly speculative reconstruction I did a couple of years ago based on a photograph I took of the Allosaurus fragilis that's posed attacking the rearing Barosaurus in the famous mount at the American Museum of Natural History. Were I to reconstruct the same animal today it would be less bony and probably with more interesting arrangements of the scales.

Allosaurus moving in the kill . . .

I took this when my wife and I, in New York to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in 2001 made the pilgrimage to those dinosaur halls of legend, and walking in we were faced with this incredible sight:

If this chap steps on your foot, it's going to smart a little.

It would be no exaggeration to say we were speechless for a few seconds. Being small island hayseeds we had never seen such an dynamic mount, and the rest of the museum lived up to that initial burst of excitement as we walked through the dinosaur hall and into the feathered dinosaurs exhibition that was on a the time. It was great to see our more regular hunting ground the Isle of Wight was represented by a superb Hypsilophodon foxii skeleton, presumably from the Hypsi bed of the south west coast.