A collaboration of McGrady Studios and Luis V. Rey.
My first proper dinosaur painting came late... it dates back to 1988, four years after I started frantic studies of the fascinating Dinosaur
Renaissance. I didn't dare to get into it until I felt confident enough.
The vision of a feathered dinosaur was outlandish and heretic and got many people into
trouble (including myself). Dinosaurs were traditionally
restored with scaly skin under the rigorous label of "Reptilia" and most
paleontologists dreaded (and still dread) what was considered more Sci-Fi
or Fantasy than Science backed with hard data. Archaeopteryx was
reluctantly accepted as a dinosaur but the boundary was clear: it was a
bird since it had feathers. A whole class was delimited by a characteristic
that today is mostly considered as a typical archosaurian trait and as an
ornithodiran synapomorphy (as Peter Buchholz and George Olshevsky have
recognised).
A whole array of new evidence has been piling since those old days, making
the heresies more and more believable. The dromaeosaurs' hands were
modified and recognised as homologous to the Archaeopteryx wings. The study
of the skeleton of Velociraptor and Deinonychus turned them to be a close
relative to the primordial birds. In fact, Greg Paul argued for
Dromaeosaurs being recognised as flightless descendants of Archaeopteryx...
and George Olshevsky went a bit further: all dinosaurs were flightless
'birds'.
More dinobirds and primitive birds were appearing in every new scientific
publication: Mononykus, Confuciusornis, Iberomesornis, Patagopteryx,
Protarchaeopteryx, Sinosauropteryx, Shuvuuia, Scipionyx , Rahonavis (the
sickle-clawed bird) and lastly Philip Currie's new stars Protarchaeopteryx
and Caudipteryx, the rage of the latest National Geographic conference in
New York and Nature's paper. They are the latest nail in the coffin of the
'birds are not dinosaur descendants' theories about theropods.
And if all this wasn't enough, recent ichno-evidence of a resting big
non-avian dinosaur (possibly Dilophosaurus, early Jurassic from
Massachusetts) show clear body feather impressions left on the petrified
mud.
In the meantime, I must say that I've loved Charlie McGrady's Velociraptor
sculptures since I saw them for the first time at the SVP meeting last
year.
As a way of 'signature', I have used the colouration that can be seen in
most of my 'raptors'. The different kinds of feathers (mostly in real skin
patches) have been carefully distributed for more realism.
It is a work in progress (the tail is not finished, but will include a
fanned, double row of feathers).
The results until now give us a completely different vision of a very
different kind of animal.
Dinosaurs have Class.
And here's my two cents on it!
Luis Rey, London 1998.
Dinosaurs were always 'there' since my childhood, but from the early eighties I could see them for the first time not as hieratic figures in dusty, venerable books... but now they were breathing, live animals.
Inspired by Bob Bakker and Greg Paul I decided to devote as much energy as
possible to dinosaur restorations.
Obviously, what mostly captured my imagination was the daring (for that
day) restorations of dinosaurs with feathers. So what I did was a painting
of a fully feathered Deinonychus pack. Bakker spend a long time in front of
the artwork the first time he saw it... he obviously was pleased with it
and recognised my tribute to his heresies.
From the above mentioned, evidence of keratinous protofeathers can be
found at least in Mononykus,Shuvuuia and Sinosauropteryx. The two specimens
of Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx have clear impressions of fully
formed symmetrical feathers (with that strange tuft of feathers at the end
of the tail of Caudipteryx)... and while nobody doubts that
Confuciusornis, Iberomesornis, Patagopteryx and Rahonavis were true
primitive members of the Avian clade, they are well confirmed now as
dinosaurs.
And I've been assured that there are even more feathery dinosaur specimens
to be described and published in the near future.
The heretic visionaries were right. This is just the beginning. The
positive evidence is now for middle and small sized feathery and
protofeathery theropods and negative for scales. The defenders of
scaly, reptilian middle-sized dinosaurs will have to find new evidence to
rebuff this evidence.
His model work has that natural quality that makes you feel in front of a
live animal (And his reconstruction of the hands is just right, all claws
and the flapping motion of a modified wing!).
I decided to ask him if he would like a joint effort; a collaboration that
would fulfil my ambition of seeing the three dimensional animal that I had
always dreamed. Thankfully he eagerly agreed. Next thing I know I received a
bunch of pieces of a Velociraptor life-size model. I didn't know where this
project would take me, but I had to try.
Due to lack of space and resources, my work has always been limited to the
two- dimensional world of painting. Now, thanks to McGrady's talent I'm
able to realise my dream. I have spent many hours of carefully building and
patient, almost taxidermist restoration (which has included carving,
remodelling, painting and feathery skin reconstruction) and was able to get
to this point in the realisation of a feathered, life-size Velociraptor
mongoliensis.
My original Deinonychus painting has mutated in Velociraptor and come to life!
They were like nothing we can see today, and at the same time they are
birds. Or is it birds that are dinosaurs?
The long lineage of modified archosaurs that came down from the trees in
different stages of arboreal adaptation and evolution has only one
surviving branch that we recognise as Aves.
The intermediate stages and side branches were ancient Darwinian triumphs
that we are barely starting to understand today.
CM Studio
600 N. Adams St.
Gillespie, Illinois 62033
T. 217 839 2593
FAX. 217 839 2558
