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Description
Paleontology is wonderful. The end. There is little to do.
Why? Because it's an endless challenge: if you think something it's right, then in a blink of an eye it reveals to be wrong. And you think how to make a prehistoric beast more realistic and this work it's very hard. Hard but in a good way. Urge you to seek the truth about the great creatures of the past. Ah, what a sublime feeling.
Why did I write that? The motivation is that I recently read an interesting post by Matt Martyniuk on his blog DinoGoss talking about the position of the wrists in theropods. Taking as inspiration a work of artist Nobu Tamura (for those who don't know who he is, just remeber that the various reconstructions of dinosaurs and / or other prehistoric animals that are on the english version of Wikipedia are made by him), these features are often introduced to the public neglected.

That was so inspiring so...So, here I am.

Part One: a small pattern depicting a naked Deinonychus, to see the animal without the cloak of feathers.
A couple of things: in addition to be "flesher" (everywhere, not just on the skull; in most reconstructions it's literally skin and bones), the two things that are most visibles are - A) The position of the forelegs and B ) The tail strongly inclined downwards.
A) is a direct result of a post written by Hone on the position of the limbs of Microraptor. Dromeosaurid's could'nt bend the forelimbs as modern birds, so most reconstructions of today are wrong. In particular, this problem is complicated by the presence of long feathers on the arms: if the livin' animal usually kept its "arms" as seen in most reconstructions, the feathers would be in direct contact with the ground, so they could be ruined. It's more plausible that the beast in question held the limbs parallel to the body, so the feathers are preserved. This rule can be applied with Micoraptor as much as any other Maniraptoran (with the exception perhaps of oviraptorosaurs). Technically, this thing is much more complex than that, but this is basically the substance.
B) There is a particular feature in the drawings of Martyniuk. All (or the vast majority) of its dinosaurs have tails tending downwards, something that seems almost unnatural if we compare with those drawn by other artists. The fact is that we forget about a trivial thing, but no less important: this silly little thing is called gravity. It's the same reason that explains why every single vertebrate with a tail on this planet has this vertebral-extension pointing more or less strong to the ground. The tail is in fact, said in a rather profane way, straight only if the animal is using it, but generally maintains a position much more relaxed and at the mercy of gravity. It makes no sense that dinosaurs are fleeing from the law of physics in this way. Of course, dinosaurs used it more than any other vertebrate, but to draw an animal with its tail almost perfectly horizontal, it's for me like to draw an animal constantly on alert. I know, these are little things, but many people do not care.
Ah, one last thing: this Deinonychus has also proto-patagia. Small light that came to reading the book review of Raptors! The nastiest Dinosaurs! on Tricia's blog .

I'm hoping that I didn't say a lot of cr*p XD .

Description
Paleontology is wonderful. The end. There is little to do.
Why? Because it's an endless challenge: if you think something it's right, then in a blink of an eye it reveals to be wrong. And you think how to make a prehistoric beast more realistic and this work it's very hard. Hard but in a good way. Urge you to seek the truth about the great creatures of the past. Ah, what a sublime feeling.
Why did I write that? The motivation is that I recently read an interesting post by Matt Martyniuk on his blog DinoGoss talking about the position of the wrists in theropods. Taking as inspiration a work of artist Nobu Tamura (for those who don't know who he is, just remeber that the various reconstructions of dinosaurs and / or other prehistoric animals that are on the english version of Wikipedia are made by him), these features are often introduced to the public neglected.

That was so inspiring so...So, here I am.

Part One: a small pattern depicting a naked Deinonychus, to see the animal without the cloak of feathers.
A couple of things: in addition to be "flesher" (everywhere, not just on the skull; in most reconstructions it's literally skin and bones), the two things that are most visibles are - A) The position of the forelegs and B ) The tail strongly inclined downwards.
A) is a direct result of a post written by Hone on the position of the limbs of Microraptor. Dromeosaurid's could'nt bend the forelimbs as modern birds, so most reconstructions of today are wrong. In particular, this problem is complicated by the presence of long feathers on the arms: if the livin' animal usually kept its "arms" as seen in most reconstructions, the feathers would be in direct contact with the ground, so they could be ruined. It's more plausible that the beast in question held the limbs parallel to the body, so the feathers are preserved. This rule can be applied with Micoraptor as much as any other Maniraptoran (with the exception perhaps of oviraptorosaurs). Technically, this thing is much more complex than that, but this is basically the substance.
B) There is a particular feature in the drawings of Martyniuk. All (or the vast majority) of its dinosaurs have tails tending downwards, something that seems almost unnatural if we compare with those drawn by other artists. The fact is that we forget about a trivial thing, but no less important: this silly little thing is called gravity. It's the same reason that explains why every single vertebrate with a tail on this planet has this vertebral-extension pointing more or less strong to the ground. The tail is in fact, said in a rather profane way, straight only if the animal is using it, but generally maintains a position much more relaxed and at the mercy of gravity. It makes no sense that dinosaurs are fleeing from the law of physics in this way. Of course, dinosaurs used it more than any other vertebrate, but to draw an animal with its tail almost perfectly horizontal, it's for me like to draw an animal constantly on alert. I know, these are little things, but many people do not care.
Ah, one last thing: this Deinonychus has also proto-patagia. Small light that came to reading the book review of Raptors! The nastiest Dinosaurs! on Tricia's blog .

I'm hoping that I didn't say a lot of cr*p XD .