Welcome to our Aquilops gateway page. All of the images are just thumbnails – click for the full-size versions.
The paper
Open access and freely available to the world.
SV-POW! posts
- Please welcome Aquilops americanus
- Reconstructing the skull of Aquilops
- How
bigsmall was Aquilops? - Aquilops in today’s LA Times
- Aquilops wants to play
- What have you done with Aquilops!?
- New information on the integumentary ornamentation of Aquilops americanus (that I have on my shoulder)
- A quick stop at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History [photos of Aquilops on display there]
- There has been an Aquilopsing – have you felt it?
- Old drawings (of heads)
- What it’s like to watch a Hugo-winning artist draw your dinosaur
- Another Utah trip, and Aquilops on display at Dinosaur Journey
- Aquilops skull, take 3
- James Herrmann’s Aquilops bust
Images
1. Life restorations by Brian Engh
Read Brian’s blog post on how he created the art: link.
Possible life appearance of Aquilops. This painting appears in the paper as figure 6C. CC-BY.
The paleoenvironment of the Cloverly Formation, with a family group of Aquilops and the early mammal Gobiconodon. CC-BY.
Aquilops with a human for scale. CC-BY.
2. Photos of the specimen
OMNH 34557, the holotype specimen of Aquilops.
Andy Farke, lead author on the paper, holds the type skull of Aquilops next to a cast skeleton of Centrosaurus, a typical Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur, in the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, CA.
3. Photos of the 3D reconstructions
Be sure to check out the interactive 3D skull at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. In all of the following photographs, the model is copyright Garrett Stowe, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Garrett Stowe at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History working on a 3D model of Aquilops. Photo copyright and courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Aquilops, one of the world’s smallest ceratopsians, meets Pentaceratops, one of the largest. Photo copyright Leah Vanderburg, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
The reconstructed skull of Aquilops sitting comfortably inside the orbit (eye socket) of Pentaceratops. Photo copyright Leah Vanderburg, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Rich Cifelli with Aquilops and Pentaceratops. Photo copyright Leah Vanderburg, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Close-up of the reconstructed Aquilops skull. Photo copyright Tom Luczycki, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
The reconstructed skull in oblique view. Photo copyright Tom Luczycki, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
And head-on. Photo copyright Tom Luczycki, courtesy of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
4. Paper Models
Aquilops hand puppet. This model by Kathy Sanders at the Raymond M. Alf Museum has a hinged jaw, and it is significantly more awesome than my caveman prototype versions below. You should just build this one and skip the others.
Aquilops cut-and-fold – 2 small skulls. Should print 2 skulls at about life size on regular 8.5 x 11 or A4 paper. Warning: they’re small.
Aquilops cut-and-fold – 1 large skull. Still not very big.
Media Coverage
Almost certainly woefully incomplete – if you know of more Aquilops stories or blog posts, please email them to me or post them in the comments.
- CBS News
- National Geographic
- International Business Times
- The Guardian
- Daily Mail
- LiveScience, republished at NBC News and Fox News
- Yahoo News
- Norman Transcript
- IFLScience
- Maine News (at least initially using Mike Keesey’s sketch of Aquilops without permission or credit!)
- mediabistro
- LA Times
- Huffington Post, and again
- BBC.com
- Claremont Courier
- CuteAnimals.me
- io9
- Spiegel Online [in German]
- Japan Times
- Dehli Daily News
- Helena Independent Record
- Montana Standard
- Washington Post
- History.com
- Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
- Daily Mail
- USA Today
- Edmond Sun
- Christian Science Monitor
- Nature World Report
- KSL.com – nice account of the discovery of the Aquilops holotype specimen by Scott Madsen
Other Blogs
- The Integrative Paleontologists (by lead author Andy Farke): post 1, post 2
- Don’t Mess With Dinosaurs (by artist Brian Engh)
- Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs
- Scientific American – Observations
- Science is OK: post 1, post 2
- Species New to Science
- Palaeoblog
- The Dragon’s Tales
- Pteroformer – a very nice workup of my cut-and-fold Aquilops skull by Gareth Monger – and a cute desktop model in this post!
- Dinologue
- Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs
- Waxing Paleontological – Zach had his own copy of the Aquilops fossil 3D-printed
- Lady Naturalist – Ashley has a short video of the paper Aquilops hand puppet in action
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
December 12, 2014 at 2:32 am
Awesome work! Especially starting from a distorted and partial specimen! But the Quadratojugal? – the crest above the jaw – seems arbitrary, too geometrical? Doesn’t seem like an organic form. I know this is a subjective comment. The fossil appears eroded at that point, but the reconstruction – not the fully fleshed illustration – seems overly simplified there.
Repeating myself….
Very interesting and enjoying the access!
March 28, 2017 at 9:03 pm
[…] and the skull of Aquilops, a little ancestral horned dinosaur that I got to help name in 2014 (ditto). Many thanks to my friends and colleagues at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History for […]
May 25, 2017 at 6:05 am
[…] may think I’m exaggerating the problem. I’m not. If you look at the Aquilops paper (Farke et al. 2014), you’ll see a lot of ceratopsian silhouettes drawn by Andy Farke. We were making progress on […]
July 28, 2018 at 5:59 am
[…] Brian’s Aquilops head recon in the signage (correctly, with attribution), because it’s also freely available to the world. In fact, I’ve seen Aquilops on display at several museums now for just those reasons. So, […]