One more dinosaur for the road.
Art & design by howlhawk

I see this guy’s paler markings as being shiny and reflective for display; this is how he looks in flattering light. His normal colors can be seen here

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I’ve grown increasingly fond of dilophosaurus lately… it occupies such a misunderstood place in our perception of dinosaurs, and it’s not just because of Jurassic Park.

A lot of dinosaur media is anachronistic, meaning poor dilo is suddenly being weighed against its much larger cousins that lived millions of years later in real life. So people feel the need to differentiate it as a “small” dinosaur - they make it nocturnal, they give it venom, they give it an identity as a tricky creature that needs to sneak around because it could never compete with the real apex predators like T-Rex.

But in reality, it didn’t need to! Dilophosaurus lived far before dinosaurs had figured out how to get really big, and while it’s pretty modestly-sized on the grand paleontological scale, it was the largest terrestrial animal at the time! It was the enormous apex predator of its day!

I also grew up being well aware of the real dilophosaurus, since it was discovered in AZ and there’s a couple beautiful statues of it in our natural history museum here. Probably some of the beginnings of my fascination with sculpture in paleoart.

A lot of my love for dilo comes from wanting to further appreciation for the real animal, but I’m not immune to those anachronistic influences either - I haven’t played the Isle in years, but their eerie distant audio design was still a foundational part of my vision for this design. And their nocturnal playstyle probably influenced this palette, but I’m thinking of it more like a prehistoric black panther than an obligatory nocturnal animal.