For our first post I though we could introduce you to one of the dinosaurs that first greets you at Dinosaur-Quest, Yangchuanosaurus. Yangchuanosaurus was a medium to large-sized predatory dinosaur, or theropod’ that was discovered in 1977 in the Yangchuan province of China. It lived in the late Jurassic period, about 158 million years ago.
Yangchuanosaurus may have been a close relative of the North American theropod Allosaurus, who was about the same size and lived around the same time. It had the standard theropod features: it walked on two legs counterbalanced with a long tail, had two short arms with three claws on each hand, and had an oversized head and sharp serrated teeth. Yangchuanosaurus might have been as long as 35 feet with a weight of up to 3.7 tons.
Its most distinctive features were the bony crests on its snout and above its eyes.
We don’t know what colors dinosaurs might have been in real life, but we can make educated guesses based on what animals look like today. In my life restoration I chose to give Yangchuanosaurus a reddish-brown skin with a lighter color on the belly. This is called countershading and occurs in many animals alive today.
