Jurassic World Concept Art "Hybrid Dinosaur/Indominuis Rex"

With the recent leak of the appearance of"Indominus Rex" or "iRex" I found myself very underwhelmed. Granted, when we hear that there is a Hybrid dinosaur I don't think it need to be freakish to be cool. Especially in the "designer dinosaur" world of Jurassic World. They are making a living entertainment product based off the genetic material of animals they have in the park. With this in mind I looked at the Jurassic World Website to understand which animals would I could mash together. I then did these head studies.

Overall I like the wide sweeping mouth, top mounted nostrils, and narrow head of the Mosasaur and decided that would be core to defining locations of the antorbital fenestra and orbits. The jugal of the Mosasaur is also much similar to a zygomatic bone and could give a more intelligent and human characteristic to the animal since it's intelligence is called out in the trailer. This means that the anatomy needed to be adjusted and still supported in favor of the wide mouth design.  From there I added and removed elements from various other animals on the list, which can be seen above. I found that the head if too long looked too much like a Baryonyx or a Suchomimus, who is visually very close to a Spinosaur who we have seen on the screen before. I wanted to make something that looked new. I do like the sort of Nasal crest of these animals however, and kept coming back to that element.I found that too many elements would make it feel too much like a dragon or a pumped up Ceratasaur. With the name "Rex" it needed to feel more T-Rex than anything. I finally rested on the top middle head. from there I extrapolated a body.

 

 

This is just still a rough sketch. I am not fully married to it yet. I wanted to give the animal a long neck to allow it to peer around corners and let it search for prey in narrower spaces, a problem experienced by carnivores in all the films :p. I also wanted to give it longer arms, more in the vein of Deinocheirus since the animal has to climb out of it's pen, as in the trailer. Besides bigger claws and arms are scary! Since the dinosaur designers are looking for a more intimadting animal to add to the park, what better thing to give it than huge clawed hands. I am wanting to beef up the arms more. to accommodate this act. I also wanted to give the animal these spiny crests to continue to draw on the Baryonyx/Suchomimus/Spinosaur intrest as well as the bulk of a Metricanthosaur. This was also to address my biggest beef with the current design which is isolated spines on the arms and neck. This ultimately led to an exploration of the Skull to better understand the specifics of the skull, primarily the supratemporal fenestra and the modification of the quadratojugal with the modified jugal. The result was this.

I ultimately had to pull reference from a snake skull in order to get the structure that I wanted. The result is kinda cool looking even though this compromises the power of top jaw's bite. The way I see it this just means larger jaw muscles attached to the parietal bone to support a bulkier lower jaw. I painted the result quickly to solidify the design of the head more.