New dinosaurs

I've always quite liked Todd Marshall's paleo-illustrations, so I was very pleased when—after hearing about the description of two new abelisaur and carcharadontosaurid dinosaurs from Niger (by Paul Serreno—who else)—I did a GIS and found out that he had whipped up some nifty B&W illustrations of the guys. Both are from the Elrhaz formation, which straddles the Aptian-Albian boundary at roughly 112 Million Years Ago. Both are very basal members of their clades as well.

I have to say that finding out about the diverse—and different—dinosaur faunas of Cretaceous India, Africa and South America is one of the most exciting things to happen to dinosaurs in the last 10-15 years or so. Not that I don't love T. rex and Triceratops and all those fellas as much as the next guy, or that I thought the North American and Asian correspondences weren't pretty interesting, but it's fascinating to see that the "global" late Jurassic fauna went entirely different directions in the former Gondwana continents than it did in the northern hemisphere.

Anyway, I mentioned art, so I should post it. Here's Kryptops palaios, the basal abelisaur.

And here is the basal carcharadontosaur Eocarcharia dinops, described as very similar to Acrocanthosaurus but without the vertebral spines: