The convention of shrink-wrapping: thoughts for artists

Europasaurus holgeri - twice. These portraits are of the same animal using the same specimen and the same view, but one is restored with extreme shrink-wrapping (above) and the other has a more generous amount of facial tissue (below). But which one is more plausible, and can we even tell from fossil bones alone?

You can't move around palaeoart circles on the internet nowadays without someone being criticised for 'shrink-wrapping' their reconstruction. This refers to the convention of restoring extinct animals with minimised soft-tissues, allowing details of muscle layouts and major skeletal contours to be seen in allegedly healthy living animals. At its most extreme, this includes clearly visible ribs and vertebrae, tissues sunk into skull openings, ultra-prominent limb girdles and skinny, sinewy legs. We owe the term 'shrink-wrapping to sauropod expert and SV:POW author Mathew Wedel who, in a 2010 article, compared the contour-hugging soft-tissues of these restorations to items wrapped in tight plastic for transport.

Shrink-wrapping is a well known convention among those interested in palaeoart but is a relatively modern invention. Palaeoartists restored ancient animals with relatively bulky soft-tissues until the end of the 20th century to an extent where visible deep-tissue anatomy is genuinely exceptional in pre-modern palaeoart (a well known exception are ichthyosaur sclerotic rings, reflecting erroneous interpretation of these structures among early palaeontologists - see Buckland 1836). Shrink-wrapping became popular as conservative reconstruction approaches became dominant in the 1970s and went on to become a standard palaeoart convention soon after. Many, perhaps most, of the restorations produced by late 20th century artists employed shrink-wrapping and it remains conspicuous in artwork produced today. It has even spawned related traditions, such as tightly cropping fur and feathers to ensure animal shapes remain obvious, and has influenced approaches to restoring colour and skin texture, these elements being used to outline the topography of underlying bones. Famous shrink-wrappers include artists like Gregory S. Paul and Mark Hallett, who tend to be on the less dramatic side of the tradition, showing slight contours of the skull features alongside lean, though well-muscled, bodies and limbs. More extreme shrink-wrappers, like Ely Kish and William Stout, have works where shrink-wrapping is taken to a wholly unrealistic level. Gaping vacuities exist between neck vertebrae; rib cages and limb girdles bulge from the torsos; limbs are extremely thin and faces are lipless and gaunt. It’s difficult not to look at some of these works and not think of starving animals or even decaying remains: they do not look like healthy, virile beings.

William Stout's Quetzalcoatlus, posted at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, has to be the most shrink-wrapped being ever rendered in paleoart. If it had any less tissue we'd be looking at moulds of the internal organs.

We might assign three reasons for the popularity of shrink-wrapping. The first is that its development coincided with a reinvention of dinosaurs as bird-like, active and powerful animals rather than oversized, under-muscled cold-blooded creatures. The athletic appearance of shrink-wrapped dinosaurs chimed with this renaissance and contrasted newer art from the plodding, perhaps over-voluminous animals of previous generations. Shrink-wrapping is not a dinosaur-exclusive tradition of course, but the popularity of these reptiles means that palaeoart conventions applied to dinosaurs are inevitably followed in artworks of other species. Secondly, images of prehistoric animals as heroically-built, powerful beings are preferred by many merchandisers and palaeoart fans, these interpretations most closely matching the erroneous but popular portrayal of prehistory as a savage struggle for survival, where only the most powerful animals survived. Thirdly, shrink-wrapping allows palaeoartists to ‘show our work’, demonstrating that the anatomy underlying the skin of a restored animal matches the osteological information provided by fossils.

How shrink-wrapping became unfashionable

Nowadays, shrink-wrapping is losing popularity among some parties as scientists and artists note a simple, but obvious problem: modern animals are generally not shrink-wrapped in the way we draw their extinct relatives. The most famous counter-shrink-wrapping arguments are in All Yesterdays (Conway et al. 2012) but something of an anti-shrink-wrapping movement was underway from the mid-2000s onward. Some now argue that, while champions of the rigorous reconstruction movement were right to draw attention to the true shapes of fossil animals and to emphasise their form in art, they might have gone too far in thinning out skin, muscle, fats and other tissues. Few animals have deeply sunken tissues over skull fenestra or distinctions in skin colour and texture correlating with skeletal anatomy, and no animals witnessed outside of veterinary clinics have detailed limb bone outlines projecting through their skin. Even reptiles - meant to be the living poster boys of shrink-wrapping - have a suite of elaborate, contour-altering soft-tissues. They include voluminous fat deposits; large amounts of wrinkly, saggy skin; eyes which bulge prominently from their sockets; deep lip tissues which fully sheath their teeth; jaw muscles which completely fill and swell from their skull housing; thick or pointed scales and, in some species, even expansive, mostly cartilaginous noses.

Matt Wedel's touching plea to end shrink-wrapping, from 2011. The struggle is still real: if you have spare paint, pixels clay or graphite, please donate generously.

Nowadays, many view skeletal elements as providing an important palaeoartistic foundation for soft-tissue shape, but concede that overlying tissues must have smoothed-over skeletal contours to produce 'softer' body forms. Indeed, there's something of an collective interest in knowing how deep extra-skeletal tissues can get. The answer, it seems, is 'very'. The necks of many birds and mammals are often flexed at much higher angles than we would assume based on their external appearance because their overlying tissues are so thick that the entire neck skeleton posture is hidden (Taylor et al. 2009). The muscles and bones of major anatomical elements – such as necks and proximal limb segments – can also be obscured under skin, fat and integument. Contour-altering structures like horns, spikes, spines, combs, humps, armour, fins, and webbing are often composed of soft-tissue, and the large, savage-looking teeth of mammals and lizards can be completely obscured by facial tissues. We need only look at x-rays of living animal species to see their often-startling lack of correlation between external appearance and internal anatomy.

Even seals get in on this action, as evidenced from this Irish Seal Sancutary x-ray. Their site appears to be down at time of writing, but SV:POW! has this image hosted there for the time being. 

It's from this general train of thought that a  push for more bulk, fuzz and fat in palaeoart has been born, and this general philosophy is lining up well with fossil data. We have direct evidence that the bodies of ichthyosaurus (Stenopterygius) and mosasaurs (Prognathodon) bore tall fins and paddle extensions that vastly exceeded the limits of their skeletal margins (McGowan and Motani 2003; Lindgren et al. 2013). Preserved body outlines of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs show deep tissues which created smooth, streamlined torsos that are much bulkier than the underlying skeleton (Frey et al. 2017). Fossils of early horned dinosaurs (Psittacosaurus), Tanystropheus and ‘mummified’ hadrosaurs (multiple taxa) show extensive muscle volume that bury their skeletons as well as elaborate structures – soft-tissue filaments, combs and skin membranes – that defy ‘shrink-wrapping’ conventions (e.g. Mayr et al. 2002; Renesto 2005; Bell 2014). The feather outlines on innumerable fossil theropods show that they were just as densely feathered as modern avians, and the fuzzy ‘halos’ of fossil mammals and pterosaurs suggest they too were also adorned with deep layers of filaments. Several pterosaur fossils (Pterodactylus, Pterorhynchus) also preserve unexpectedly broad neck tissue outlines which contrast against their thin, tubular neck vertebrae, as well as elaborations of crest tissues that create body outlines more voluminous than those predicted from musculoskeletal restorations (e.g. Frey and Martill 1998; Czerkas and Ji 2002). The 'shrink-wrapping hypothesis' is being falsified with regularity.

Select fossilised body outlines of exinct taxa: no shrink-wrapping here. A, plesiosaur Mauriciosaurus fernandezi, B, ichythyosaur Stenopterygius quadriscissus; C, dromaeosaur Sinornithosaurus millenii. A, after Frey et al. 2017; B after McGowan and Motani 2003.

Anti-anti-shrink-wrapping

But while cries of 'bulkier, deeper, fuzzier!' are generally well-placed in palaeoart discussions, we should be careful not to overshoot the mark. Amid the cry for deeper tissues, we might be overlooking the fact that some living creatures are somewhat shrink-wrapped - at least in some regions. In fact, virtually animals have areas where their extra-skeletal tissues are shallow and skeletal contours are visible. Common areas of thin tissue include the ends of limbs and tails; the midline of the sternal region; and some areas of the face, such as the frontal and nasal regions; the ‘cheek region’ (over the jugal in birds and reptiles, and the zygomatic arch in mammals), and the lower margins of the bottom jaw. Our own anatomy is no exception to these trends, as is borne out by the extremely well-studied tissue depths of human faces (e.g. Stephan and Simpson 2008) or the simple act of looking in a mirror. The osteoderms of sauropsids are another example of close interaction between skin and bone: as with modern armoured reptiles, extinct scaly sauropsids with extensive osteoderm arrangements probably looked pretty darn like their fossil remains - in other words, kinda shrink-wrapped.

There is no tissue, only Zuul.

In reality, there is a spectrum of tissue depth in living species and some are more 'shrink-wrapped' than others. While no healthy living animal attains the most extreme levels of shrink-wrappery portrayed in palaeoartworks, certain lizards, fish, and crocodylians have anatomies which are more shrink-wrapped than average, possessing large areas of relatively thin, skull-hugging tissues which recall shrink-wrapped art. These thin tissues are highly characteristic of these species and are something something palaeoartists would want to capture if restoring these animals from fossils. We would miss this, however, if we assume that all animals have their tissue volume settings cranked up to maximum.

These observations mean we have to be careful with applying a general philosophy to shrink-wrapping rather than scientific investigation. Tissue depth is evidently not a matter of palaeoartistic style or fashion, but a biological variable we should be aiming to predict and infer. If we're aiming to approach this topic like scientists, we should look to see what fossils and comparative anatomy can tell us about tissue depth to make informed, specific predictions about extinct animal appearance and avoiding a one-size-fits-all 'anti-shrink-wrap' philosophy. So, is there anything in the fossil record that elucidates how deeply buried animal skeletons were under muscle, skin and so on?

Looking for clues of 'shrink-wrapped' tissues

Frustratingly, one of the first lines of evidence we have to jettison are those body outline fossils. As great as they are, they can be of limited use for determining subtle variation in tissue thickness as their shapes are readily altered by taphonomy, preservation styles and even our own preparation work. Regions of thin tissue depth will be were especially sensitive to destructive processes and are easily obliterated by imperfect preservation or human error, so their chances of preservation are minimal. Phylogenetic bracketing is also of limited utility because the vastly different cranial architecture of extant and extinct animals makes such investigations almost meaningless. Non-avian dinosaurs, for instance, have skulls which are neither truly croc-like or bird-like, and it's probably not sensible to assume their extant relatives provide reliable insights into their facial tissues.

Predicting regions of thin tissue is thus largely left to comparative anatomy - predicting minimised tissue volumes using fossil bones and the living structural analogues. Among extant species, we see shrink-wrapping largely applying to animal faces, so if we investigate the skulls of ‘soft-faced’ animals like mammals, monitor lizards, snakes, and certain birds, and compare them to species with shrink-wrapped faces, like turtles, crocodylians, chameleons and well-ossified fish, we might find characteristics that correlate with facial tissue depth. These will then give us some criteria to assess tissue depth in fossil species. I've had a go at this, and suggest that osteological attributes related to facial tissue depth include:

How might we predict shrink-wrapping in fossil animals without good soft-tissue remains? It's challenging, but these attributes might give a general idea. From top to bottom: Burchell's zebra (Equus quagga burchellii); water monitor (Varanus salvator); Alligator mississipiensis and Arrau turtle (Podocnemis expansa).

Openness of skull architecture. The skull openings of softer-faced animals - including the temporal muscle openings, orbits and nares – tend to be large. At their most extreme these openings are not fully bordered by bone (e.g. many mammal orbits and nares, the lower temporal fenestrae of lizards). Larger skull openings necessitate a larger fraction of face structure be composed of soft-tissue, such as muscle, organs, and cartilage, and this overwhelms the contours of the bony skeleton to make a 'soft-faced' species. The nasal cartilages of monitors and mammals, as well as bulging mammalian jaw muscles, are examples of this. Conversely, shrink-wrapped species have smaller cranial openings, which impose physical limitations on how much soft-tissue can form the shape of the face. Muscles and organs might protrude from these somewhat, but their impact on facial structure is less than that of species with large skull openings, and more of the face shape reflects bony contours

Rugosity. Soft-faced animals tend to have smooth bone textures with limited or no areas of rugosity, whereas the skulls of shrink-wrapped species have large areas of rugose textures, often corresponding to specific epidermal features (e.g. scales or keratinous sheaths - see below and Hieronymus et al. 2009). This factor largely seems to reflect the proximity of epidermal tissue, which can leave characteristic textures in species with tightly-bound skin. Soft-faced species generally lack this rugosity because muscles, fat and voluminous integuments (fur and feathers) don’t leave broad osteological features (Hieronymus et al. 2009), or simply because their skin is displaced far enough from the bone that it doesn't alter its surface. We might also note that the skull contours of soft-faced species are generally more rounded than those of shrink-wrapped species, which can be crisp and sharp. Rugosity is a particularly useful criterion because it can show the presence of tight skin tissues with some precision. If one part of a skull is rugose, and another isn’t, there’s a good chance that the smoother region had a different tissue configuration which could - among other things - reflect a deeper or 'softer' facial covering.

Fossil skulls - like those of the centrosaurine Centrosaurus apertus - are covered with features that allow us to predict aspects of their facial skin. Often - as is the case here - they suggest fairly low-volume structures, like scales and horn sheaths, which generally don't deviate too much from the underlying bone (yes, I know there are exceptions, but we're looking for major trends here). Centrosaurus skull redrawn from this Wikipedia photo, data on facial tissue correlates from Hieronymus et al. (2009).

Pits, grooves and foramina. Shrink-wrapped species tend to have large numbers of perforations in their skulls, while soft-faced species show the opposite (Morhardt 2009). This is particularly evident around their jaws and presumably reflects the greater capacity for soft-faced animals to carry nutrients and sensory information through their soft-tissues, whereas shrink-wrapped animals are forced to run nervous and vascular networks through their face skeletons.

Correlates for epidermal projections. Elaborate skin projections – such as soft-tissue horns or crests - leave characteristic osteological signatures (Hieronymus et al. 2009). Given that these projections can alter animal faces quite substantially from the underlying skull shape, the presence of these is a clear indication that the species was not shrink-wrapped. We would expect a lack of correlates for epidermal projections in shrink-wrapped species.

As is often the case with zoological topics there are exceptions to these observations that preclude using any one of these criteria in isolation to determine tissue depth (e.g. smooth bone textures can underlie thin naked skin, so are not always a hallmark of deep tissues). However, applied collectively, they might give a general insight into how shrink-wrapped or 'soft-faced' an extinct animal was. I'm encouraged to see that these proposed osteological features of soft- and shrink-wrapped faces covaried in the past as much as they do for modern species. This doesn't mean these criteria are 'correct' as goes their relationship to tissue depth, but at least shows there's variation in their skull architecture that we can recognise as equivalent to that of modern species, and it isn't unreasonable to think the variance might reflect the same anatomical factors.

If we apply these criteria to some fossil taxa, what predictions might we make? The roomy, smooth-boned and foramina-lite skulls of cynodont-grade synapsids and fossil mammals match predictions for ‘softer-faced’ species, and this might be true of some fossil reptiles – like sauropod dinosaurs - too (this is not a new conclusion: both Matt Wedel and Darren Naish have been saying similar things about sauropods for years). If right, the 'soft-faced' sauropod that greeted you at the start of this post might be more likely that the shink-wrapped toilet-headed version we're so familiar with. At the other end of the spectrum, the highly textured, pitted bones and solidly-built skulls of ankylosaurs and anamniotes meet our criteria for shrink-wrapping very well, and they likely had facial anatomy tightly conforming to their skull shapes.

Applying the criteria outlined above might help us roughly sort predict 'shrinkwrapped', 'soft-faced' or intermediary conditions in extinct taxa. The placements of the animals here are only rough, but give an indication of their relation to the tissue-depth criteria outlined above. Fingers crossed that some of these will be corroborated or refuted with soft-tissue discoveries in future.

Careful examination of fossil skulls allows us to also predict partial or regionalised shrink-wrapping in species where some aspects of their facial anatomy conformed to the underlying bone, and others did not. An example of this configuration is demonstrated in some living lizards, like gila monsters, which have skull textures strongly indicating minimal tissue depth over much of their skull but smooth, foramina-lite jaw margins. In life, these animals have shrink-wrapped dorsal skull regions and snouts, but vast, fleshy lips, which is what we might predict based on their skull anatomy.

Partial facial shrink-wrapping seems apt for many fossil species. Gorgonopsians, for instance, might not have soft faces like living mammals as their snouts and foreheads are quite rugose and their nasal openings are small (e.g. Kammerer 2016). These features might indicate the presence of tighter skin over the snout. However, they have few jaw foramina and relatively open regions for jaw musculature, so they might have been fleshier around their jaw margins and at the back of head (below). Tyrant dinosaurs have skulls with relatively small openings compared to some of their theropod relatives, rugose snout textures, several hornlets (Carr et al. 2017), as well as a slightly elevated foramina count (Morhardt 2009). This cranial anatomy is consistent with tighter tissue depth in several areas, if someway short of a fully lipless, crocodylian-like degree of shrink-wrapping. Many pterosaurs show pitting and vascular canals embedded into their jaw margins, and some species have indications of tight sheathing on their crests and jaws, but the presence of striated bony crests – correlates for epidermal projections – as well as large skull openings and smooth bone textures in other parts of the skull, indicate that their faces might not have been entirely skeletal.

Was gorgonopsian Inostrancevia shrink-wrapped or soft-faced? According to the criteria of this post, maybe a little from column A, a little from column B. 

Time and testing will tell whether these criteria are a genuinely useful means to predict facial anatomy. I hope - as with other aspects of extinct animal appearance - that genuine research into this issue will be carried out one day. Criteria to predict tissue-depth are a desirable tool for any palaeoartist as it's simply more honest and scientific: if we're serious about this reconstructing extinct animals gig, predictive methods and sound hypotheses are infinitely better than sticking to our personal hunches, guesses or erring on what looks coolest. Regardless of whether we can predict tissue depth or not, the take home here is that we should not approach our artwork having already decided how thin or fat the tissue volumes of our subjects will be. There is probably not a single ‘universal truth’ that can be said about restoring tissue depth for all animals, whether we err toward thicker or thinner: the right tissue depth is the most defensible and best rationalised on for each subject and its constituent body parts.

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References

• Bell, P.R. (2014). A review of hadrosaurid skin impressions. In D.A. Eberth and D.C. Evans (eds.) The Hadrosaurs: Proceedings of the International Hadrosaur Symposium. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. 572–590.
• Buckland, W. (1836). Geology and mineralogy considered with reference to natural theology (Vol. 1). Carey, Lea and Blanchard.
• Carr, T. D., Varricchio, D. J., Sedlmayr, J. C., Roberts, E. M., & Moore, J. R. (2017). A new tyrannosaur with evidence for anagenesis and crocodile-like facial sensory system. Scientific Reports, 7.
• Conway, J., Kosemen, C. M., Naish, D., & Hartman, S. (2013). All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. Irregular books.
• Czerkas, S. A., & Ji, Q. 2002). A new rhamphorhynchoid with a headcrest and complex integumentary structures. Feathered Dinosaurs and the origin of flight, 1, 15-41.
• Frey, E., & Martill, D. M. (1998). Soft tissue preservation in a specimen of Pterodactylus kochi (WAGNER) from the Upper Jurassic of Germany. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Palaontologie-Abhandlungen, 210(3), 421.
• Frey, E., Mulder, E. W., Stinnesbeck, W., Rivera-Sylva, H. E., Padilla-Gutiérrez, J. M., & González-González, A. H. (2017). A new polycotylid plesiosaur with extensive soft tissue preservation from the early Late Cretaceous of northeast Mexico. Boletín de la Sociedad Geológica Mexicana, 69(1), 87-134.
• Hieronymus, T. L., Witmer, L. M., Tanke, D. H., & Currie, P. J. (2009). The facial integument of centrosaurine ceratopsids: morphological and histological correlates of novel skin structures. The Anatomical Record, 292(9), 1370-1396.
• Kammerer, C. F. (2016). Systematics of the Rubidgeinae (Therapsida: Gorgonopsia). PeerJ, 4, e1608.
• Lindgren, J., Kaddumi, H. F., & Polcyn, M. J. (2013). Soft tissue preservation in a fossil marine lizard with a bilobed tail fin. Nature Communications, 4, 2423.
• Mayr, G., Peters, S. D., Plodowski, G., & Vogel, O. (2002). Bristle-like integumentary structures at the tail of the horned dinosaur Psittacosaurus. Naturwissenschaften, 89(8), 361-365.
• McGowan, C. & Motani, R. (2003). Part 8 Ichthyopterygia. Sues H–D (ed.) Handbook of Paleoherpetology. Munchen: Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil. 175 p.
• Morhardt, A. C. (2009). Dinosaur smiles: Do the texture and morphology of the premaxilla, maxilla, and dentary bones of sauropsids provide osteological correlates for inferring extra-oral structures reliably in dinosaurs?. Western Illinois University.
• Renesto, S. (2005). A new specimen of Tanystropheus (Reptilia Protorosauria) from the Middle Triassic of Switzerland and the ecology of the genus. Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia (Research in Paleontology and Stratigraphy), 111(3).
• Stephan, C. N., & Simpson, E. K. (2008). Facial soft tissue depths in craniofacial identification (part I): an analytical review of the published adult data. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 53(6), 1257-1272.
• Taylor, M. P., Wedel, M. J., & Naish, D. (2009). Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 54(2), 213-220.

Exposed teeth in dinosaurs, sabre-tooths and everything else: thoughts for artists

Bear-sized gorgonopsid Inostrancevia latifrons. Sabre-teeth? What sabre teeth?

It is something of a trope that prehistoric animals must bare their teeth in palaeoart, even when their mouths are closed. Historically, the majority of palaeoartists covered the teeth of their subjects with lips, cheeks or other types of tissues and only select species – sabre-toothed carnivorans or mammoths – were depicted with exposed tusks or sabre-canines. This changed when artists working in the 1980s and 1990s - Paul, Hallett, Stout - and a certain 1993 movie started showing predatory dinosaurs with toothy overbites and perpetually exposed teeth. This convention has since expanded to all kinds of prehistoric animals, and some galleries of Deep Time now have more toothy grins than a holiday photo album. Theropod dinosaurs in particular are almost always shown with alligator-like overbites that perpetually expose their upper teeth, the large canines of stem-mammals protrude over their lower jaws, and even herbivorous animals with relatively unimpressive dentition (like sauropods) are shown without lips or other forms of dental covering.

Many words – mostly published at blogs, online mailing lists and social media - have been typed to discuss the credibility of lipless palaeoart, but the subject has traditionally received only cursory attention from academics. Happily for artists, this is starting to change. A small set of literature exists which debates the presence of extra-oral tissues in dinosaurs (e.g. Ford 1997; Knoll 2008; Morhardt 2009; Keilor 2013; Reisz and Larson 2016), and most of this agrees that some sort of soft-tissue - at least 'lips' - covered their teeth. However, a running theme of these works is that reliably inferring soft-tissues of the face is not a simple task, and we really need more data to be sure of anything. Work on more recent fossil mammals shows more reliable inferences (e.g. Wall 1980; Antón et al. 1998), obviously benefiting from soft-tissue data from a range of extant, close relatives. New insights on the evolution of mammal cranial nerves are helping to understand the development of sensitive lips and cheeks in stem-mammals (Benoit et al. 2016). It's still early days for understanding fossil facial tissues, but at least it feels like we're off the line.

Collectively, there seems to be recognition among the academics interested in this topic that understanding the tooth coverage of fossil animals lies largely in understanding living animals. Attempts to understand tooth exposure from skulls alone - through making inferences about tooth size, jaw closure and speculations on how extensive soft-tissues can be before they become untenable - do not consider all necessary data. For example, Prehistoric Times palaeoart adviser Tracy Ford (1997) looked solely at the skulls of predatory dinosaurs to infer the absence of lips, suggesting their teeth were so long that they would pierce lip sheathing once the jaws were closed. This study assumed that predatory dinosaurs closed their mouths to the extent that the teeth of the lower jaw contacted the roof of the mouth, and that the preserved tooth configuration was the condition in life. These points are common issues raised against lipped dinosaurs, but there are several major problems. Dissections and CT scans of reptile heads show that jaw muscles and other soft-tissues have a major influence on mouth closure, to the extent that reptile jaw skeletons are typically loosely closed under their skin, even when the mouth is fully sealed. Taphonomic studies show that teeth slip readily from their sockets after death and often fossilise in far more vampiric states than they were in life. And undermining this further is that no extant taxa with lipped jaws were used to calibrate a limit for oral soft-tissues. Arguments about tooth coverage based on simply looking at skulls, without detailed consideration of modern animals and their anatomy, border on being arguments from incredulity: "I don't believe the anatomy could do that."

Modern animals and their tooth coverage

For an upcoming project, I've been trying to crystallise my approach to restoring ancient animal facial tissues, and deciding whether to cover their teeth or not is an important part of that discussion. I've been deliberately broad in this assessment to attempt to try to sort the wood from the trees: discussions of oral tissues can sometimes get lost in the minutiae of tissue types, uncertain osteological correlates and so on - and many of these discussions result in the same answer: they can't be resolved with current data. That's not to say they aren't important discussions, but it's helpful to step back to see if we can answer the simpler questions as well: what gauge of teeth can be covered by oral tissues? When are teeth actually exposed? And what questions should we, as palaeoartists, be looking to answer when restoring facial tissues?

Reviewing literature and galleries of modern animals, we can see that overwhelming majority of living tetrapods have covered teeth, including all amphibians, most mammals and most reptiles (excluding birds, naturally. Hey, if they wanted to be involved in this post they shouldn't have lost their teeth). Exposed teeth are actually really rare, and a character completely absent in many major clades. The soft-tissues involved in covering the teeth are variable, but 'lips' – either slightly fleshy margins of skin, or skin overlying muscle - are so universal among tetrapods, as well as living relatives like lungfish, that we might assume lip tissues of some kind were ancestral to the group, and breaching these with large teeth is a derived condition evolved independently in a minority of lineages. Crocodylians are the only living tetrapods with fully exposed teeth, but it's increasingly obvious that they're also pretty specialised/derived/downright weird (Grigg and Kirshner 2015). Far from being 'living fossils' frozen in evolution, they have so many anatomical nuances and specialisations that their use as model organisms for other extinct taxa is increasingly questionable. This applies to aspects of their facial anatomy too - we’ll discuss this in more detail below.

Fossil big-tooths - species almost universally depicted with exposed teeth - versus modern animals with huge, but completely covered teeth. A, Inostrancevia latifrons; B, Tyrannosaurus rex; C, Smilodon fatalis; D, crocodile monitor Varanus salvadorii; E, mandrill Mandrillus sphinx; E, hippopotamus Hippopotamus amphibius. With the exception of Smilodon, the fossil taxa are out-toothed by the extant animals, and yet we know their oral tissues can accommodate their teeth without problem. Blue lines approximate lip margins in living species. A, after Kemp (2005); F, after Goldfinger (2004).

Looking inside animal heads (above) shows that facial soft-tissues can cover very, very large teeth – perhaps much larger than we might intuitively expect. Examples from a range of tetrapods – including rhinoceroses, sloths, tapirs, mandrills, baboons, camels, tuataras, snakes, peccaries, bullfrogs, hippopotamuses, monitor lizards, clouded leopards, numerous rodents and others – show that large fangs, robust tusks and other forms of enormous dentition can be retained within lips or cheeks. These large teeth are truly ‘hidden’ without bulges, changes in lip direction or other features to betray their presence, and are thus undetectable unless their owners open their mouths (and sometimes not even then). Many people are shocked by the size of animal teeth when they see their skulls, and the savagery of mammalian herbivore dentition – horses and camel fangs, rhino tusks, baboon canines - are particularly startling.

We owe many of these surprises to animal lips, which are generally much more extensive than we casually assume. Large teeth can slide into soft-tissue sheaths located between gums and lips, and these are quite visible in the open mouths of some species. Amphibians, lizards and many mammals have upper and lower lips of similar size which meet over the teeth and sheaths can form on either jaw, but some mammals – including most carnivorous forms - have very large, fleshy upper lips over thinner, tightly-bound soft-tissues of the lower jaw (Antón et al. 1998). In these species, the canine teeth overbite the lower lip but the upper ‘over-lip’ is large enough to obscure the fact that the tooth is outside the lower mouth tissues. I am unaware of a reversed situation with the lower lip covering a thin upper lip: this may reflect the fact that overbiting dentition is much more common than underbiting. Regardless of the specific configuration, it is clear that we should not underestimate the capacity for facial tissues to obscure even very large, sharp and ferocious-looking teeth. The assumption that all conspicuous teeth of fossil animals were on display in life is thus problematic and does not agree with what we can observe in modern animals (below).

Applying palaeoart-esque considerations of oral tissue capacity to modern mammals suggest hippos are giant hogbeasts and mandrills evolved in Mordor. Restoring modern animals using palaeoart approaches is a completely original concept which in no way owes anything to some book called All Yesterdays (Conway et al. 2013).

When do teeth breach the confines of soft-tissue? Mostly, it seems teeth used to process food remain covered. Mammal tusks and the exposed canines of certain deer are not directly involved in food processing, although this is not to say they are non-functional overall (e.g. elephants use their tusks to break branches, dig, topple trees; deer fight with their large canines). It seems that teeth of extreme size relative to the rest of the dentition are most likely to escape covering with soft-tissue, and it helps – though is not mandatory – if they grow obliquely or directly away from the jawline (this accounts for the majority of living mammal tusks). Teeth can remain covered even when their tips extend to the dorsal or ventral limits of the jaw skeleton, so long as they are aligned more or less vertically within the jaw (e.g. the mandrill skull illustrated above).

What's up with crocodylians?

The elephants – or rather large semi-aquatic reptiles – in the room here are crocodylians: why do they have exposed teeth when all other tetrapods have largely covered mouths? Their teeth are not overly large, nor acutely angled. Some (Reisz and Larson 2016) have argued crocodylian dentition is only possible because of their semi-aquatic habits. The (unpublished, currently conference abstract only) Reisz and Larson hypothesis is that exposed teeth – specifically their enamel component – are at risk from desiccation and breakage without constant hydration from saliva or environmental water (Reisz et al. 2016). This is an interesting idea which potentially gives artists a useful, practical guide to restoring prehistoric animals: anything living outside water with enamel-covered teeth must have covered them with soft-tissue. Despite its unpublished status, this idea has already chimed with some quarters of the online palaeoart community who're restoring anything with enamel-covered teeth with full sheathing.

We need to talk about enamel and exposed teeth. The exposed canines of male wild boars, Sus, have enamel (white shading) coatings on 3/4 of their surface, despite being exposed (dentine is dark grey, cementum is light grey). What does this mean for the enamel desiccation hypothesis outlined above? Image from Hillson (2005).

However, this proposal may not be as simple to implement as it first appears. For one thing, there is a real lack of consistency in tusk composition in living animals (see Hilson 2005). It is true that, as noted by Reisz et al. (2016), the tusks of elephants have caps of enamel and cementum that wear off rapidly, leaving their tusks composed of dentine alone. This would seem to support the desiccation hypothesis, it implying that enamel is a liability outside of the jaw soft-tissues. However, living elephants may be atypical in lacking enamel on their tusks, there being fossil and living mammals which do have substantial enamel components on their exposed teeth. For example, the tusks of several gomphothere species have broad bands of enamel along their lateral surfaces, even as adults (Padro and Alberdi 2008), while the canines of male musk deer are enamel covered on the external surface. The tusks of male wild boars and warthogs only bear dentine on the posterior surface and wear facet, the rest of these large, exposed teeth being covered in enamel. The enamel components of these tusks are not just small caps that get worn off, but expansive coatings that persist on the tooth indefinitely and influence tooth wear (Koenigswald 2011). To confuse things further, walruses have dentine tusks like elephants, despite their aquatic habits seemingly precluding desiccation as a risk for their teeth, and the spiralling tusks of another marine mammal, the narwharls, are covered in enamel. If there is a relationship between enamel and tooth exposure, it is clearly a complicated one, and the presence of absence of enamel in itself seems to have little bearing on this topic in at least modern mammals. (Readers interested in tooth composition should check out the second edition of Samuel Hillson's Teeth (2005), for its extensive documentation and illustration of mammalian dentition).

Musk deer, Moschus, canines in lateral and medial view. Note the (white) enamel layer on the lateral surface, but dentine (grey) on the medial. From Hillson (2005 - the scale bar is likely erroneous!).

Our second reason to be sceptical of the enamel desiccation hypothesis concerns crocodylian behaviour. It is not widely appreciated that several crocodylians species ‘hibernate’, or more accurately aestivate, for months at a time in dry underground burrows during the hottest summer months (Grigg and Kirshner 2015). During these intervals they do not access water at all. Other, South American species spend dry spells as fully terrestrial carnivores, abandoning aquatic habits and obtaining water largely from the prey they kill (Grigg and Kirshner 2015). These states have to be explained against the suggested need to frequently moisten crocodylian teeth, because they suggest dental desiccation is not as risky as we're all assuming it is. Alternatively, it suggests that the requirement for hydration is so relaxed – literally months can pass without getting the teeth wet – that it probably has little influence on tooth anatomy.

Furthermore, there are important caveats about crocodylian facial tissues that we have to factor into any discussion of their lipless configuration. Crocodylian faces are far more specialised and unusual than they first appear, and this may factor into their lipless mouths. Their highly keratinous facial skin undergoes a developmental pathway unlike that of any other amniote (their facial skin is essentially one, highly 'cracked' scale) (Milinkovitch et al. 2013) and their heads are riddled with hyper-sensitive Integumentary Sense Organs (ISOs). ISOs are a unique crocodylian feature and are attuned, among other things, to sensing tiny vibrations in water (Soares 2002, see Grigg and Kirshner 2015 for a recent overview). In at least some parts of the crocodylian skull ISOs are situated over tiny foramina, presumably housing nervous tissues, and the overlying epidermis is thinned, with a reduced keratin component, to enhance their sensitivity (Soares 2002). We can thus see that ISOs do have a role to play in configuring crocodylian skin, and they present many questions that palaeoartists should be interested in. Are ISOs an important reason for crocodylian faces having such tight, contour hugging and lipless skin? Do the major functional and developmental distinctions of croc faces explain the lack of crocodylian lips? It might explain why virtually no other aquatic tetrapods have abandoned lips - aside from the the odd (and perhaps only) exception like the South Asian river dolphin*, there are no whales, snakes, seals or otters with crocodylian-like, fully exposed teeth. And given that no other lineages have osteological correlates for ISOs, should we put huge caveats around using crocodylians as models for facial tissues in anything other than their own ancestors? I don't know if anyone has answers to these questions yet, but they're food for thought when using crocodylians as ammunition for lipless reconstructions of fossil animals.

*Thanks to Ádám Lakatos for pointing out the toothiness of some river dolphins!

It's still very early days for the enamel/oral covering hypothesis, but modern animals suggest that interpretations of enamel precluding extraoral teeth are definitely more complicated than they first appear, and may even be flawed. If so, the simple presence of enamel on the teeth of fossil organisms may not be as useful to artists as some are currently suggesting. But this conclusion is preliminary, and we need to wait for this idea to mature before it's shot down entirely. We know, for instance, that there's more than one type of enamel among vertebrates. Reptilian enamel, for instance, is both thinner and of different microstructure to mammalian enamel, and these clades have rather different approaches to tooth longevity. This may mean something for enamel desiccation and long-term tooth exposure, and we may think differently on this matter once this research has been completed.

Predicting tooth exposure in fossil species

Fully 'lipped' gorgonopsids and theropods: maybe not be as exciting as their toothy variants, but are they more credible? Well... if modern animals are anything to go by, probably.

All this said, what can we say about the decisions to show prehistoric animals with exposed teeth? My reading of modern tetrapods is that covered teeth is their ‘default’ configuration, and we should apply the same logic to extinct animals. If so, maybe only the more extreme examples of fossil dentition should qualify for perpetual display. Perhaps instead of asking ‘does this animal have lips?’ we should ask why they should not have them. We have to concede that the dentitions of many fossil animals frequently shown with exposed teeth – particularly theropod dinosaurs, gorgonopsids and other carnivorous stem-mammals – are relatively no larger, and in some cases a great deal smaller, than those enclosed inside the oral tissues of living animals, especially once taphonomic tooth slippage is corrected (above). For these species, it is very difficult to justify why their teeth should not be covered.

If this is so, only especially long teeth which project a considerable distance from the margins of the skull and lower jaw should be considered strong candidates for permanent exposure. Select examples might include the canines of certain mammalian carnivores (e.g. Smilodon and other machairodont felids), the tusks of fossil elephants and their relatives, and the larger tusks of dicynodonts. We should also note those fossil reptiles – such as certain crocodyliformes, pterosaurs and marine reptiles – where entire toothrows are composed of dentition so long that their tips extend well beyond the margins of the jaw skeleton. Such extensive dental apparatus would seem to preclude the development of any sheathing tissues, at least akin to those exhibited by from modern animals, and these animals probably had fully exposed toothrows in life. Of course, this conflicts with the observation that food-processing teeth are almost always covered in the modern day. However, we can defend this approach by arguing that their morphology gives a strong reason for ignoring this guideline: it answers the "why we shouldn't give them lips?" question.

The large, procumbent dentition of plesiosaurs and certain pterosaurs argues against them being sheathed in life, although I do wonder if some plesiosaurs are in a 'grey area' here. Could animals like Leptocleidus (right) have covered its teeth with lip-like tissues? Hmm....

We might also set aside this guideline when extant relatives of modern forms provide us with means to predict unusual lip anatomy. For instance, the aforementioned ‘over-lip’ of modern mammalian carnivores is common enough across this group to assume it was present in their fossil relatives. Because we understand how the lips of these animals work, we can make more specific predictions concerning tooth exposure in species with particularly impressive teeth. Thus, we can look at classic reconstructions of machairodontid cats like Smilodon with perpetually bared fangs as reasonable because, unless their lips were arranged differently to virtually all their living relatives, that’s simply how their lip tissues would respond to a massive set of canines. And yes, I'm aware of Dunae Nash's recent discussions about sheathing Smilodon: given that this rests heavily on enamel being a no-no in exposed teeth, I'm unconvinced for the reasons explored above.

The concluding caveat

Of course, it must be reinforced that these are just guidelines - and guidelines based on my own qualitative studies, nonetheless, your mileage with them may vary - and there are exceptions to the suggestions made above. As is well known, for all the suggestion that restoring sabre-toothed cats with exposed teeth is reasonable, one living cat species – the clouded leopard – does cover a set of long upper canines in a lower lip sheath. We would not predict this based on other cat species and, if known only from fossils, clouded leopards would probably be restored with slightly exposed canines. Likewise, the exposed tusks of some deer are not especially massive, and if we followed the suggestions above we'd probably cover them up in a reconstruction. But palaeoart is ultimately a game of prediction and probability, attempting to restore what is most likely to fill gaps in our data, and any game of odds will have some failures. That’s not to say we shouldn’t ignore these exceptional examples - they show that guidelines can't be trusted all the time - but it makes sense for us to know where the guidelines are in the first place. As with all aspects of palaeorestoration, all of us stand a chance to be proved wrong about our artistic decisions: if and when that happens, the best we can hope for is to have been wrong for the right reasons.

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References

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