Forgotten Ornithomimidae

Take a look at some paleoart, a nice sellection, DeviantArt is good. You'll see lots and lots of theropods, some sauropods and ceratopsians, maybe a few ankylosaurids and stegosaurids (both forgotten in recent paleoart). However, take a closer look at the paleoart depicting theropods, and you'll notice something . . .

Where have all the ornithomimids gone?!

I noticed this in 2013, when I spent large amounts of time browsing DeviantArt, looking at the paleoart. This was a time when pretty much every self-respecting paleoartist on DA were producing pieces for All Your Yesterdays, or inspired by the original book. This was great for me, I loved seeing all those speculative depictions, and it's actually one of the things which kind of got me back into paleontology.

Anyway, during this time, I realised something - in all my hours of browsing all the amazing paleoart, I hadn't seen a single ornithomimid!

I don't know what happened to them, but they seem to have disappeared. This isn't to say that there aren't any depictions of them, I can think of at least one of the top of my head - but still, why has the paleoart community lost interest in them? There seems to be even less paleoart featuring them than dinosaurs which I already thought were underrepresented, such as stegosaurids and ankylosaurids. Indeed, many of the paleoart that I have seen seems quite biased towards theropods, but as for that particular group, the ornithomimids - nowhere to be seen.

This is sad, really, because they're pretty fascinating animals - kind of like a cross between a goose and an emu. I have only just began thinking about ornithomimidae ecology, and I think that it should be an interesting topic that I will definitely look into in more depth in future posts.

Anyway, until then, bye, and hopefully we'll be seeing more reconstructions of ornithomimids in paleoart . . .