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Description
A few different dragon head types.

And a T. rex? I really love dinosaurs, but it makes me kind of sad how much dinosaurs (probably Jurassic Park in particular) influenced depictions of dragons. If you look back at dragons in European art from before the 1800s, they look nothing like dinosaurs in any way, and even up through the end of the 20th century it was really common for dragons to have lots of bizarre webbed crests and ears and things. But since it's become much more common to see depictions of western dragons that could pretty much have regular dinosaur skulls inside them, just with horns added on. The most recent example of this I've seen is this european dragon by Arvalis — I forgive him for doing it since he obviously knows exactly what he's doing anatomically when it comes to dinosaurs, and also has illustrations of dragons with different skull designs, but you can see exactly what I mean with that upper jaw shape. Take away the spiny fringes, the horns, and the hint of a beak, and it's literally just a dinosaur head. But definitely check out his other dragons, each one has a totally different design.

Another thing was that it used to be much more common before Jurassic Park to have dragons where the eyes are on a higher level than the flatter surface of their snouts, which is also true of animals like crocodiles. But since more realistic dragons have taken more nods from dinosaur and bird anatomy in the past ~20 years, the snout/bridges of the nose have often tended to be much more vertical, separating the halves of the face more like that T. rex up there, rather than the more mammal-shaped heads of older European dragons. It's also more common to have the legs look more like dinosaur limbs rather than the side-splaying reptile-like limbs that were more common in the 20th century.

They also got a lot bigger because of dinosaurs! Seriously, if you look back at dragons, and illustrations of European land-dwelling monsters in general, again, from before the 1800s, they just aren't very big, never bigger than a horse , let alone an elephant. Because these people knew a tiger-sized dragon would still be scary! Whereas nowadays if you want to have a movie or something with a Chimera, it can't just be goat- or lion-sized, with a normal goat-sized head, it has to be some giant version. My theory is that since the discovery and museum display of 45-foot skeletons like T. rex with 6' long heads, and then their subsequent appearances in movies like The Lost World and King Kong in the early 20th century, goat-sized monsters just stopped being able to cut it. Similar to how "giants" in the olden days used to just have to be like 8 feet tall or something, not 20 or 50.

We've hd a seriously monster/dragon size inflation problem ever since, to the point where now in Jurassic World they had to scale up the dinosaurs (specifically thinking of the Apatosaurus; they decided during production that the real-sized one wasn't impressive enough) to make them 'good' enough for modern audiences, when dinosaurs were what started the size-increasing arms race in the first place!

Anyway, I digress. I'll probably do a second round of these with more original designs, maybe based on some features of different animals (like, start with hippo, bat, snake, etc. skull shapes, and design a dragon head around it).

Description
A few different dragon head types.

And a T. rex? I really love dinosaurs, but it makes me kind of sad how much dinosaurs (probably Jurassic Park in particular) influenced depictions of dragons. If you look back at dragons in European art from before the 1800s, they look nothing like dinosaurs in any way, and even up through the end of the 20th century it was really common for dragons to have lots of bizarre webbed crests and ears and things. But since it's become much more common to see depictions of western dragons that could pretty much have regular dinosaur skulls inside them, just with horns added on. The most recent example of this I've seen is this european dragon by Arvalis — I forgive him for doing it since he obviously knows exactly what he's doing anatomically when it comes to dinosaurs, and also has illustrations of dragons with different skull designs, but you can see exactly what I mean with that upper jaw shape. Take away the spiny fringes, the horns, and the hint of a beak, and it's literally just a dinosaur head. But definitely check out his other dragons, each one has a totally different design.

Another thing was that it used to be much more common before Jurassic Park to have dragons where the eyes are on a higher level than the flatter surface of their snouts, which is also true of animals like crocodiles. But since more realistic dragons have taken more nods from dinosaur and bird anatomy in the past ~20 years, the snout/bridges of the nose have often tended to be much more vertical, separating the halves of the face more like that T. rex up there, rather than the more mammal-shaped heads of older European dragons. It's also more common to have the legs look more like dinosaur limbs rather than the side-splaying reptile-like limbs that were more common in the 20th century.

They also got a lot bigger because of dinosaurs! Seriously, if you look back at dragons, and illustrations of European land-dwelling monsters in general, again, from before the 1800s, they just aren't very big, never bigger than a horse , let alone an elephant. Because these people knew a tiger-sized dragon would still be scary! Whereas nowadays if you want to have a movie or something with a Chimera, it can't just be goat- or lion-sized, with a normal goat-sized head, it has to be some giant version. My theory is that since the discovery and museum display of 45-foot skeletons like T. rex with 6' long heads, and then their subsequent appearances in movies like The Lost World and King Kong in the early 20th century, goat-sized monsters just stopped being able to cut it. Similar to how "giants" in the olden days used to just have to be like 8 feet tall or something, not 20 or 50.

We've hd a seriously monster/dragon size inflation problem ever since, to the point where now in Jurassic World they had to scale up the dinosaurs (specifically thinking of the Apatosaurus; they decided during production that the real-sized one wasn't impressive enough) to make them 'good' enough for modern audiences, when dinosaurs were what started the size-increasing arms race in the first place!

Anyway, I digress. I'll probably do a second round of these with more original designs, maybe based on some features of different animals (like, start with hippo, bat, snake, etc. skull shapes, and design a dragon head around it).