So I was yelling at a certain fighter jet about Abelisaurs and I started to think about the one that has my favorite head shape of all of them. I had to google around a bit to find out which one it was again, but I got back to it: Aucasaurus, with its relatively boxy, long, low, untapered skull, like a more ornamented tyrannosaur almost. This in contrast to the way most Abelisaur skulls are short, high, and tapered anteriorly.
i think.
see a lot of other depictions disagree.
there was this one reddit post, can't seem to find it again, where they went on comparing it between several pieces of paleoart, including the Scott Hartman skeletal. There was one that outright seemed to use a fairly typical abelisaur skull with that strong taper towards the snout, then Scott's skeletal, and then the mount- aligned along the skull roof, the mount seemed to have a higher jugal and so an overall shallower skull in the back, but about the same depth up front, so Scott's was still highly tapered. And of course a lot of the comments were like "well that's probably perspective" but then they went back and edited the post to include an actual figure that showed that very rectangular skull profile from an actual paper that compared it to other abelisaurs and that at least looked credible, and doing wikipedia-deep reading i'm not sure how complete the skull is but it says it was "damaged" in some way- is this implying that the low shape is the product of injury or postmortem warping? did the mount just decide to make it look more tyrannosaur-like for popularity points and the paper just went along with that? i don't know, and a lot of relatively in-depth renderings also seem to be going to one side or the other fairly evenly.
i know this is short, shitposty, and even written in the all lowercase mode i do when i'm trying to be funny but i'd rather make a blog post of this than a twitter thread because i really want to put a pin in it for later. this is an animal i wanna draw and i wanna know what's going on with its head. if there's any grand and useful message i want to put here beyond that, i'll just say this: with paleofauna, often even the bones can be a little more tentative than we like to think, warped by time, individual and ontological variation, dimorphism, injury, scavenging, and just being filled in wrong from relatives with how many taxa we know mostly from just a toe bone or whatever. this is a point i'm sure the people who think T. Rex was a giant kangaroo or whatever the latest conspiracy is will love to throw back at us but, as some other social media post i can't find and directly link here but still vaguely remember once roughly said:
There are two things that most people need to know about Paleontology:
1) We have more data than most people realize.
2) We know less than most people realize.
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