Construction of A Cranium

From Sues et al., 2011

There are many places in which to see a labeled reconstruction of a fossil skull. There is only one place to really see a reconstructed and labeled of Daemonosaurus, officially at least. The description paper contains a fully labeled skull that is very handy for the amateur anatomist and the amateur dinosaur enthusiast. There are probably seasoned veterans of science that occasionally need a hint, especially with devastated fossils, so we cannot really say that the amateur scientist is the only person benefiting from labeled diagrams. The scale bar, which we also saw yesterday, truly shows how small this dinosaur was. A head only a 14cm long is not much of head, in regards to what we generally consider the size of a dinosaur head. In fact, there are many modern rodents that are not much longer than 14cm. Assuming there were analogous rodents in the Late Triassic in size, they could have made a fairly filling meal for the small theropod. Anyone forgetting exactly how small this dinosaur would have been overall should look back at the Robinson Kunz illustration of a few days ago. That illustration shows a rather diminutive theropod, as it only appears to top out at about 3m tall when standing in a normal posture.