Palaeoartist, palaeontologist, author, documentary consultant and creature designer. Affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, UK; views and opinions are my own.
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Mark Witton
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Not everything was lippy, of course. Taxa like rhynchosaurs clearly had beaks over at least their jaw tips. Exactly where their beaks ended isn't clearly established, though, and based on my own studies, I don't think they're as extensive as the recon in Terras et al. suggests.
So artists who still regard that JP T. rex aesthetic as plausible, or who draw sneaky, snaggly teeth emerging from lipped reptile mouths, need to get with the times. Deep-lipped, gummy lepidosaur-style jaws with reduced tooth visibility is what we should be imagining for most extinct reptiles.
Major new paper for #paleoart by Terras et al. on extra-oral tissues (lips, cheeks etc.) in Triassic archosauromorphs. They conclude what a lot of us have been saying for a while now: lipped mouths should be the starting point for restoring fossil reptiles.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Also, I can't not post these images of Iguanodon supraorbital bones. I'm uncertain if there's some exaggeration in this specimen, but they join other examples in suggesting a decent (and seldom restored) set of eyebrows.
Recent work has suggested that the presence of extraoral soft tissues (‘lips’), in the form of labial scales in theropod dinosaurs, could be inferred based on: anteroposteriorly distributed foramina ...
