RE: Irritator & Noasaurus

["Tracy L. Ford" <dino.hunter@home.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
Jordan Mallon
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2001 3:54 PM
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Re: Irritator & Noasaurus

>From: "Øyvind M. Padron" <gorgosaur@hotmail.com>

>I just finished a skull restoration on irritator, and I just want to know
>if
>i did something horrible when I:
>1) based the snout and dentary on Angaturama
>2) based the nasal on Suchomimus/Baryonyx

Well, I think the safest route would be to wait for the paper by Hans-Dieter
Sues redescribing the skull of _Irritator_.  It should be coming out
shortly, as I understand it.

>I'm allso going to do a life restoration of Noasaurus, but I can't find any
>skeletal information of in on the net.

That's probably because there's next to material assigned to this guy.
Little more than some pedal elements, a maxilla, and other odds and ends, if
I recall correctly.  Although I'm anxious to see the final product, I'm
wondering if the effort would really be worth it or not.  I mean, what would
you base such a reconstruction on?  _Masiakasaurus_?<<

True there is very little evidence for Noasaurus. A few weeks ago I did a
skeletal reconstruction of Noasaurus and Masiakasaurus. If you use the
illustration in the paper of Masiakasaurus you have to either change the
size of the vertebrae to the limbs or vice a versa. If you used the sizes
they have in their paper you get only 3 sacral vertebrae to the size of an
ilium! I did one skeleton using their skeletal reconstruction, then went
back and increased the size of the other elements to accommodate the
vertebrae to fill an ilium with 5 sacral vertebrae. This one works much
better because the other way you get an incredibly long torso with short
limbs.

I did these for George Olshevsky's next article in DinoPress. But he only
wanted silhouettes of Noasaurus, Masiaksaurus, Velocisaurus and Ligabueino.
I also did a skull reconstruction of both Noasaurus and Masiakasaurus, which
does not look like the one they had on the cover of Nature.

Maybe I'll put all those on my Website as soon as my friend comes over and
shows me how to do it (Its not up really, yet, but soon).

Tracy L. Ford
P. O. Box 1171
Poway Ca  92074