Friday, April 10, 2009

Hard-headed Vegetarian - Euoplocephalus linocut 1st edition

hard-headed vegetarian: Euoplocephalus print
Euoplocephalus, a tank of a plant-eating, Late Cretaceous Ankylosaur dinosaur, has a name which literally means well-armoured head. He had fused plated protecting back and neck and triangular horns protecting his face, shoulders and tail. His main weapon was a ball of fused bone which acted as a club at the end of his tail. He was 20 feet or 6 m long, had thick legs to carry his heavy weight and likely ambled through woodlands in what is now Alberta and Montana.

This is an original, first edition lino block print on Japanese kozo (mulberry paper) 8 inches tall by 14 inches wide (20.3 cm by 35.6 cm). The edition is limited to 14 hand-burnished prints. The colour is a somewhat variable mixture, reflecting the variability we see in nature.

For the month of April, the MSOE challenge is the Cretaceous, a geological era 135 to 65 million years ago, which saw the break-up of Pangaea, the development of flowering plants, some first hints of early mammal life, the arrival new dinosaurs but ended with the largest mass extinction of the dinosaurs. The end of the Cretaceous was an end of an era like no other.

Euocephalus club tail
Euocephalus horns (print detail)
Euoplocephalus hard head

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