Concerning the "horror mouth" and "snake eater"

So the other day I was alerted to a bit of a kerfuffle here a while back, concerning two spinosaurs here that turned out to be fake.

This amused me, since I created both animals eight years ago.

I know it’s been a year since then, but I just thought I’d chime in and explain the real story behind the “horror mouth” and “snake eater” for anyone who might be interested. Both dinosaurs were created for Gondolend, a worldbuilding project I’ve been working on for the past fifteen years or so where humans and dinosaurs coexist. Neither has ever set foot in Africa, as Africa does not exist in this setting.

The Horrormouth

Cryonyx phoboris (horrormouthed frozen claw) is a fourteen-meter baryonychine spinosaur from Gondolend’s far north. Though its ancestors specialized in hunting polar hesperornithiformes, C. phoboris is more of a generalist hunter. Its large teeth were originally an adaptation for piercing through the thick feathers and insulating fat of their ancestors’ polar hesperornithinorme prey, but over the animals evolution they began pulling double duty in courtship displays. As individuals with the largest and most impressive dentition were selected for mating, they grew larger and larger until they finally reached the extreme size seen in the horrormouth today. As protection against the frigid polar winters when the sun disappears below the horizon for months at a time, the horrormouth is covered in a thick coat of brown feathers.

Another, smaller species of Cryonyx, C. borealis, hews more closely to the ancestral form and, like them, frequently preys upon hesperornithiformes.

The Elegant Snake-eater

Ophidiophagus elegans (elegant snake-eater) is a small, gracile irritatorine spinosaur from outside the area of Gondolend inhabited by humans. Because of this very little is known about the animal, and because the only one ever seen happened to be eating a snake at the time it was called Ophidiophagus; whether snakes make up a majority of its diet or whether it’s more of a generalist is anyone’s guess.

(I’ve actually recently had some new ideas about Ophidiophagus, so all of that is subject to change in the future.)

The images posted here were drawn by me in 2006, not Makaveli7 as he claimed.

I posted a write-up of my thoughts on the matter on my site. While Makaveli’s attempt to pass drawings I worked fairly hard on as his own rankles me quite a bit, I have to say I found the whole thing more amusing than anything.