Helveticosaurus revised! (Patreon)

I said in the previous post that I had ONE illustration left to go for Ancient Sea Reptiles. That illustration was/is a life reconstruction of the peculiar Triassic marine reptile Helveticosaurus, a moderately large (c 3-4 m long), fang-toothed animal that might be related to sauropterygians. It's only known from one good specimen, initially described by Emile Kuhn-Schnyder in 1974 and redescribed in more detail by Olivier Rieppel in 1989. This reveals that the animal had moderately long, flipper-like limbs, a short and proportionally small skull and long, curved teeth. Its tail isn't properly understood because the one good specimen preserves less than half of the tail's length. The only good discussion of this animal outside the technical literature is that provided by my colleague Mark Witton, who produced this lengthy discussion of its possible appearance and behaviour.

I had a go at reconstructing Helveticosaurus at some point in the early 2000s. It's appeared here and there online (at one point it was feature at wikipedia), including at TetZoo, and here it is...

However, I've never been that happy with this image, for three reasons: (1) I don't think the reconstruction conveys how large the animal is. To me, it looks more like an animal less than 2 m long, not one twice that size; (2) the animal has a vaguely alien look and doesn't feel to me like a 'real' animal, and (3) I got the limb proportions wrong - I made the hindlimbs too small and too lightly built. So, for ASR, I opted to produce a new one. Using the skeleton above (which is articulated sufficiently well for you to work out most key proportions), I produced the new version you see above... below are various steps involved in its creation.

And that's that! I'm now about to email the new image to my colleagues in charge of ASR's design, and in the new reconstruction goes. Glad to get it finished.

More info on ASR as I have it :) Thanks as always for your excellent support!