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Profile
True to Life?

Profile

Species: sastrei
Range: Late Cretaceous (Santonian-Maastrichtian, 85-70 MYA) from Argentina
Size estimate: 25-30 ft length, 1-1.5 tons
Discovery: Jose Bonaparte, 1985
Classification: dinosauria, saurschia, theropoda, ceratosauria, abelisauridae

True to Life?

Since no one has ever seen a living dinosaur, and the missing pieces of the fossil record withhold important clues to their appearance, no artistic representation of a dinosaur ever gets it 100% right. On top of that, new discoveries can change our ideas of extinct creatures drastically. So, how close does this sculpture come to what we know of the original animal?

• Thanks to an excellent specimen (which remains the only Carnotaurus specimen known) which preserved most of the skeleton and the first known skin impressions from a theropod, this sculpture ranks among the most anatomically accurate in the Park.
• That said, it’s not perfect. Like many other carnivores in the Park, this sculpture suffers from Generic Tooth Syndrome. Real Carnotaurus teeth have slightly lower crowns and a knife-like shape rather than conical.
• Carnotaurus sported a feature almost unknown in carnivores of any stripe: horns. Unlike the crests of its cousin, Ceratosaurus, these horns grew a thick, D-shaped cross section, with the flat part of the D facing upward. Such a shape surely had a function beyond display, but we have no data for figuring what that function may have been. The horns on this sculpture present a reasonable approximation of their life appearance.
• Tyrannosaurus’ infamous arms gained notoriety for their supposed uselessness. In truth, those arms had functional claws and could curl about 400 lbs. Carnotaurus’ arms, though, were truly useless. Of the four remaining digits, only two bore nails, and all of them lacked the joints necessary to bend or grasp. They also lacked wrist bones and a functional elbow joint, though their shoulder joints allowed an unusual range of motion, including straight back against the body. The pose shown on this sculpture would not be possible for the real animal, and the hands might look slightly different.
• Only the top of the shin bone was ever recovered, so we don’t know what its shins, ankles, or feet looked like. Based on more complete and more recent finds of its relatives, the proportions and shape of this sculpture’s lower legs come reasonably close to Carnotaurus’ probable foot anatomy.
• Shapes of the bones at the base of the tail show that the muscles which drove the legs grew unusually large. Though this sculpture’s tail should probably look a little thicker, the muscle anatomy of this area overall does a good job of portraying what we know. The back of the thigh, for example, should have considerably less definition than the front, which is easy to see on the right leg of this sculpture.
• The back half of the tail was likewise missing in the type and only specimen, but in this case, the practical need to balance the sculpture helps us reconstruct the length of the tail with fair accuracy.
• The type and only Carnotaurus specimen was the first theropod discovered with skin impressions. They occurred in patches across the side of the chest, with one big patch at the base of the tail. This sculpture does not match those patches in close detail, but it does portray the general pattern: large “feature scales” that probably acted like decoration, each surrounded by a mosaic of much smaller scales. The scales did not overlap like in some lizards and snakes. Naturally, since the feet did not survive we don’t have a good idea of whether their scales looked like those on bird feet. A distant relative, Concavenator, does preserve a birdlike pattern of scales on its feet, but since the timing of the development of scale patterns across theropods remains unclear, it remains hard to reasonably speculate just how Carnotaurus’ feet may have appeared. Rather than using birds or crocodiles as a model, this sculpture opts for developing a variant of the body scales. Though not an unreasonable speculation, we still can’t tell how probable it may be. Take it with a grain of salt.
• Behind the Scenes: this sculpture used to occupy a spot just east of the Rock Shelter to the northwest of this sign. When construction started on the restrooms currently occupying that plat, we moved the Carnotaurus from there to its current location in front of the Bone Cabin Outpost. With an extra visual appeal, both the sculpture and the Outpost have seen more guest visits.
• Behind the Scenes: unlike many other sculptures in the Park, this one’s color scheme doesn’t conform to any ideas of its plausibility for the animal. Rather, it is meant to stand out from the red brick of the Outpost at a distance, as well as to reflect a feature of the animal itself in a memorable way. Carnotaurus seems to have developed a sprinter’s acceleration at the cost of maneuverability, sort of like a dragster. We therefore gave it a naturalistic version of hot rod flames and racing stripes!