Speaking of wild rides, our first illustration depicts a pair of cowboys getting buzzed by a truly monstrous pterosaur, big as a plane, with a terrifying toothy gape! The illustration accompanies an apocryphal story of some Texas cowboys who supposedly shot an enormous, leathery winged flying creature, though there's no evidence the story ever actually occurred. The text supposes that the cowboys killed the last surviving Quetzalcoatlus, a giant pterodactyl which lived in the area in prehistoric times. While this beast did indeed stand as tall as a giraffe and have a wingspan the size of a small plane, this image unfortunately depicts nothing like that animal. In fact, the creature in the picture is quite obviously simply an up-scaled Rhamphorynchus, a small German pterosaur. As in the picture, Rhamphorynchus possessed a long beak lined with long, sharp teeth, a crestless head, and a long, robust tail. Given the image reproduced here and in the "family portrait" picture from my last post, it's quite apparent that the artists did no research on this animal other than "it's like, super big!"
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| Interestingly, Mark Witton has illustrated a similar scene more than once. |
The mighty Behemoth from the Book of Job makes an obligatory appearance in every creationist dinosaur book, inevitably identified as a long-necked sauropod dinosaur. The key verse cited in every case mentions the creature's tail which "sways like a cedar". The creationists take to task any who would suggest the elephant as the creature described, as its tail looks in no way like a mighty tree. To drive the point home, many books include a side-by-side comparison between an elephant and a dinosaur, and that's just what our illustrators do here.
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| Gratuitous butt shot |
This one isn't strictly cryptozoological, but it does depict dinosaurs alongside humans, so I figured it was close enough. Here we see a depiction of the consequences of the Fall of Man: rampant death and sin, carnivory, and hideous birth defects like spinal deformation. It's okay, Quasimodoraptor. You'll always be special to me.
I really like this picture overall; it has a good energy to it, and a good sense of motion, at least on the part of the horse and rider. Nearly as common as the behemoth trope, most creationist books will also have some variant of the "knight in shining armor" story, suggesting that dragon-slaying stories in general have their origins in cultural memories of encounters with dinosaurs. Many creationist books get even more specific, not only retelling the story of St. George and the Dragon, but also mentioning Baryonyx as a particularly dragonish looking dinosaur. Here the illustrators go a little to far, giving the poor creature overly short hindlegs and a quadrupedal posture, though since a good amount of illustrators were portraying Baryonyx as a quadruped at this time, this is perhaps an understandable mistake. They make a decent reconstruction otherwise, with the eponymous "heavy claws" on the hands and the small crest on its crocodile-like snout.
FLAME-THROWING HADROSAURS!!! Here we have probably the most entertaining picture in the whole book. The biblical Leviathan (also from the Book of Job) makes regular appearances in creationist literature as well, invariably portrayed as another late surviving prehistoric beast. Gish & Co. take this fire-breathing beast at face value, and assume there must have existed some flame spewing dinosaur to match it. Now, since fancy hadrosaur head crests have been imagined as everything from scuba tanks to boom boxes, the author apparently decided they were fair game and threw his own wacky hat into the ring of wild speculation. Taking a cue from the bombardier beetle, the author suggests that hadrosaurs such as Parasaurolophus stored caustic chemicals in its long winding nasal passages, which would ignite upon shooting forth into the air. While certainly a provocative theory, this doesn't hold up to the creature's skull anatomy, as one can see from the very illustration the artists so helpfully provide. The nasal passages are just that: long winding nostrils. There are no hidden chambers in which to store volatile materials without blocking the poor dinosaur's airway and choking it to death. It does make for a fun picture though. The hadrosaur itself looks reasonably accurate, though it should have more of a humpback like a bison. On the left we have a poor, scorched Ceratosaurus, which we can confidently identify on the basis of its nasal horn and four fingers, despite a rather shapeless, vaguely humanoid body. (Incidentally, I find theropods like Ceratosaurus to be slightly more plausible candidates if we do want to speculate on fiery breath. They could have hitherto-unrecognized storage pouches in the neck or something, and since their nasal passages are nice and short, they don''t risk choking on the chemicals quite as much. I still find the whole idea rather silly, however. The fiery breath was probably just poetic language, guys.)
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| BURNINATION! |
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| Damn the metriorhynchids! Full speed ahead! |
Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoyed this look at Dinosaurs by Design (especially the sillier parts) and the uniquely creationist paleoart found therein. Look up the rest of my articles in this series, and let me know what you think!
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