Winter Moon / Troodon in the Rushes II

Illustrator: 

Raven Amos

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An ukyio-e (Japanese woodblock art) inspired painting of two Geminiraptor suarezarum wading through a seasonal floodplain, hunting for a midnight snack under a full moon.

Geminiraptor suarezarum is a small Troodontid dinosaur named after the fossil site discovered by twin geologists Dr.'s Celina Suarez and Marina Suarez. The holotype specimen, a portion of the end of the animal's snout, was found in the Lower Yellow Cat Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, and is dated to be between 139 to 134 million years old. The area is shown to have been subject to seasonal flooding and has thick layers of mudstone deposited from nearby ancient river channels. Petrified logs from conifer trees measuring a meter across shows this was a wet, warm world home to extremes - from giant sauropods and trees looming tall as any skyscraper, to the dimunitive and small, ekeing out an existence in the misty margins of an ephemeral rush-lined marsh.

Sources:

Aubrey, W.M. (1998). "A newly discovered, widespread fluvial facies and unconformity marking the Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous boundary, Colorado Plateau". Modern Geology. 22: 209–233

Kirkland, J.I.; Britt, B.; Burge, D.; Carpenter, K.; Cifelli, R.; DeCourten, F.; Eaton, J.; Hasiotis, S.; Lawton, T. (1997b). "Lower to Middle Cretaceous dinosaur faunas of the Central Colorado Plateau: a key to understanding 35 million years of tectonics, sedimentology, evolution, and biogeography". Brigham Young University Geology Studies. 42: 69–103

Chronostratigraphy and terrestrial palaeoclimatology of Berriasian–Hauterivian strata of the Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA Joeckel,R. M. et al. Geological Society, London, Special Publications(2020),498(1):75

Senter, P.; Kirkland, J. I.; Bird, J.; Bartlett, J. A. (2010). "A New Troodontid Theropod Dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Utah". PLOS ONE. 5 (12): e14329. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014329

"Winter Moon" - an ukyio-e inspired painting of two Geminiraptor suarezarum wading through a seasonal floodplain, hunting for a midnight snack under a full moon.

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