Luis V. Rey Blog

Every time I come back from Mexico I bring a lot of samples from Hector Munive. Dalia Castillo and other Mexican sculptors and casters… that means hours and hours of further customising of quality casts that need to be “brought to life” with extreme care and detail. I enjoy every minute of it.

This time I got new samples of casts of Sinosauropteryx, Comnpsognathus and more. No computers here! Matching the colours with the original fossils is quite a challenge and I dedicate many hours to the completion of the pieces… As I did for the Caudipteryx before I expanded and refined techniques in order to making believable all the new pieces.

This cast of Sinosauropteryx is double the size of the most famous one where the feathers are so evident… the evidence for feathers for this one is at best sparse… but they are there no doubt. The claws are clear in this one too. The bones colour in the original fossil is lighter and the sediment looks different, which is tricky because everything changes from light to light. I thank Peter Norton from Gondwana Studios the challenge to make this better… we have one customised by him at the Dinosaur rEvolution exhibition. Don’t miss it!

Compsognathus on the other hand is a classic and needs to be restored to match similar colour to Archaeopteryx, since they both were found in the same famous deposits of Solnhofen, Germany. I might be missing some dendrite details in this one… but…

On top is is a great miniature Baryonyx skeleton in the process of fossilisation sculpted by Dalia and Hector. Under, some plaques of classic skulls: Eoraptor, Heterodontosaurus and Coelophysis. The Triassic section in my collection!

To complement the careful fossil model colour restoration, I’ve been working on some toys, including favourites that I feel I owe them some modifications to make them more believable… I have still some to go, but I first selected this Triceratops from Eofauna that I always liked, but one that regrettably went for the “full smile” cheek-less look that certain paper has brought to the fore… and that I don’t buy at all.

I know this Triceratoops may look fashionable, but , even if they are very distant relatives there are two things that a turtle and Triceratops share… they are both reptiles and they have beaks… if you look closely to the turtle pictures, the “cheeks” of the turtle attach precisely at the end of the beak… they are no cheeks at at al… they are merely flaps of skin that cover the sides of the jaws in order to keep the food inside.

If we count that Triceratops, on top of it all, has a distinctive inner cavity along the jaws, just before or after the beak (your choice), occupied by a full battery of teeth, it is obvious to me that the feature is there to process food and they needed the flap of skin to keep it inside. The muscle attachment is not discussed or doubted here… these are no cheeks in the mammal sense, but that cavity with its teeth must have been covered.

My advice to all model makers: don’t be fashion victims please! Thank you.

What could be next.,.. more Pathologies perhaps?