Behavioral Reconstructions

These are three illustrations I did for a commission last year. The assignment was to depict a scenario for the famous “Fighting Dinosaurs” fossil, from the Djadokhta Formation, Upper Cretaceous Mongolia. In these scenes Velociraptor mongoliensis is actively stalking, then attacking Protoceratops andrewsi. In the struggle the two then exhaust one another, collapsing just as a powerful rainstorm begins.

I personally favor the hypothesis that the two were actually swept together in the debris flow of a huge, collapsed sand dune, and then may have bitten and kicked at each other out of sheer panic as they were being buried. But I would believe anything, since the very existence of this fossil is so improbable (talk about stochastic) it makes any idea of parsimony seem silly.