One crazy little dinosaur

[Bone guy]

This guy just popped up on an auction site. It looks very real, and very cool. It's an articulated Sinovenator from the Yixian formation. I just thought I would share it here because it looks great, but can the dino experts spot any restoration? 

[Bone guy]

[Troodon]

Nice to see one, my guess it was placed in this pose and its a composite

[gigantoraptor]

My first impression was 'wow'. It might be a composite, but since there have been many fossils from this species found, it might be all original. @Troodon, why do you think this is a composite? 

[XZY]

Looks like cracks and air holes in the matrix........but I am no expert.

[Bone guy]

You can see repaired cracks on the matrix, and those cracks go straight through any bones they touch. That tells me the bones were already in place when the matrix broke.

 

But the one thing that make me consider a composite being a possibility is the matrix. It looks so perfect and rounded, almost like it was sculpted prior to attaching the bones.

[Troodon]

23 minutes ago, gigantoraptor said:

My first impression was 'wow'. It might be a composite, but since there have been many fossils from this species found, it might be all original. @Troodon, why do you think this is a composite? 

Its what they do, well before the Moroccans and you would see it at fossils shows in the late 90's and early K2.

Its highly unusual to find any complete skeletons of a Troodontid even this species. The holotype skeletons were not even complete, see sketch.   The preservation of the bones is different and a most of the bones have been prepped.  Just look at the tail, its several colors and the narrow cream colored caudals end near the pelvic abruptly to dirty brown red ones.  If you look at the reconstruction the proximal caudals have high neural spines that slowly go down, not in the specimen shown.  The bones on the feet dont look right so just a lot of flags say its a composite.

 

 

[Bone guy]

7 minutes ago, Troodon said:

Its what they do, well before the Moroccans and you would see it at fossils shows in the late 90's and early K2.

Its highly unusual to find any complete skeletons of a Troodontid even this species. The holotype skeletons were not even complete, see sketch.   The preservation of the bones is different and a most of the bones have been prepped.  Just look at the tail, its several colors and the narrow cream colored caudals end near the pelvic abruptly to dirty brown red ones.  If you look at the reconstruction the proximal caudals have high neural spines that slowly go down, not in the specimen shown.  The bones on the feet dont look right so just a lot of flags say its a composite.

 

 

Wow, I would have never guessed! Whatever composite work was done was done very well its very difficult for the average joe to notice.

[Crazyhen]

I want to show another specimen.  Is it genuine?

[Crazyhen]

Higher resolution photo

[LordTrilobite]

The matrix around the spine of that last specimen looks very suspicious. I'd stay away from that one.

[ynot]

Does anyone else think the legs (item 2) are to big?

The legs look like they are as long as the body and tail combined.

[Troodon]

17 minutes ago, ynot said:

Does anyone else think the legs (item 2) are to big?

The legs look like they are as long as the body and tail combined.

That's probably because it appears to be missing all of the thoracic region from the scapula to the illium. See the Scott Hartmans reconstruction.

 

[Troodon]

@Crazyhen this appears to be a much more natural specimen than the first one shown but a number of red flags are seen that can only be assessed by a hands on inspection.  Without that the risk is to high to proceed.

[Pemphix]

18 hours ago, Troodon said:

Nice to see one, my guess it was placed in this pose and its a composite

Indeed. That's my guess, too.

[Pemphix]

1 hour ago, Troodon said:

@Crazyhen this appears to be a much more natural specimen than the first one shown but a number of red flags are seen that can only be assessed by a hands on inspection.  Without that the risk is to high to proceed.

I agree to that...

[Max-fossils]

Although my knowledge on (fake) dino fossils is very limited, this stood out to me as being a little bit weird:

 

The teeth at the front of the jaw look weird to me. Kind of as if they had been carved as individual little blocks (yellow). 

 

And in the skull in general, you can see several different colors of bone. Each "patch" of bone is separated by a little black line (cracks I suppose) (red).

I feel like this used to be a great piece, one that was maybe 60%-70% complete, but that someone tampered with it and added little bits of bone from other specimens (or maybe even plaster/artificial stuff) to fill in the missing pieces to make it look like a complete specimen. 

 

 

Now, once again, I may be wrong, and these things may all be perfectly natural.