The Last Dinosaur

Archaeopteryx is a creature that seems to be half bird, half dinosaur. He is featured in this latest of my paleo art series. It lived in the Late Jurassic Period around 150 million years ago and it seems to represent the transition from dinosaur to bird. As a result I've called this image The Last Dinosaur. Though, of course, I'm speaking symbolically. There were still dinosaurs walking around at the same time as this guy. In fact, some scientists argue that he was in fact simply a dinosaur and had no actual relation to modern day birds.

Actually, this work started out as purely a landscape with no fauna. In fact, I would say the landscape is the real star of this artwork. I really wanted to go for the painting look. It lacked a focus though so I went through my entire menagerie of animal models until I landed on the Archaeopteryx.

The Archaeopteryx is by Dinoraul, I picked it up on renderosity.com. Everything else is Vue work. The render was actually rather quick, just a few hours. I used the z-map to create a mask for the foreground and added the fog in post production using G