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Description
Too long of a title. Anyway, this is the face of a curious Pelecanimimus, an ornithomimosaur trying to be an unenlagiine, quickly sketched down.

Based on the skull reconstruction (and soft tissue restoration) made by Ville Sinkkonen . The throat sac/pouch thing appears deeper mainly because the skull is more strongly ventriflexed at the occiput than in his skeletal.

To get deeper and nerdier...

Following a nice post at MattMart's blog (massive kudos to you!), I decided to leave the snout and the immediate pre-orbital region featherless and go out on a limb here (and, strangely, that's how always I imagined this theropod to look). Given that Pelecanimimus is pretty much certainly a descendant of fully protofeathered dinosaurs, and that most theropods are preserved with their dorsal snout feathered, I figured that the now secondarily-featherless AOF, lacrimal and patch in front of the eye should be naked skin, bare of feathers and scales (as in modern birds with secondarily featherless faces).

As Pelecanimimus was an outgroup to toothless, beaked taxa, I went a bit further and experimented with beak segmentation, similar to modern birds as Matt explained it in his blog post. The nasal, lacrimal and the narial fossa are covered with keratin sheets, while the premaxilla, maxilla and dentary, bearing teeth (and lots of them!), are left scaly in accordance with the data.

Discuss!

And someone please enlighten me about those hot osteological news that make a case against it

Description
Too long of a title. Anyway, this is the face of a curious Pelecanimimus, an ornithomimosaur trying to be an unenlagiine, quickly sketched down.

Based on the skull reconstruction (and soft tissue restoration) made by Ville Sinkkonen . The throat sac/pouch thing appears deeper mainly because the skull is more strongly ventriflexed at the occiput than in his skeletal.

To get deeper and nerdier...

Following a nice post at MattMart's blog (massive kudos to you!), I decided to leave the snout and the immediate pre-orbital region featherless and go out on a limb here (and, strangely, that's how always I imagined this theropod to look). Given that Pelecanimimus is pretty much certainly a descendant of fully protofeathered dinosaurs, and that most theropods are preserved with their dorsal snout feathered, I figured that the now secondarily-featherless AOF, lacrimal and patch in front of the eye should be naked skin, bare of feathers and scales (as in modern birds with secondarily featherless faces).

As Pelecanimimus was an outgroup to toothless, beaked taxa, I went a bit further and experimented with beak segmentation, similar to modern birds as Matt explained it in his blog post. The nasal, lacrimal and the narial fossa are covered with keratin sheets, while the premaxilla, maxilla and dentary, bearing teeth (and lots of them!), are left scaly in accordance with the data.

Discuss!

And someone please enlighten me about those hot osteological news that make a case against it