Deviation Actions
Description
So, this is my entry for the 2017 palaeocast contest.
You can support this drawing and help me winning the contest leaving a like here on Facebook and/or here on Twitter 
These links also show this drawing in full resolution and allow you a free download.
Two Tsaagan mangas are making love in the semiarid plains of Djadokhta.
I tried to push over my limits in order to participate to this contest without doing something strictly "infographical". So I decided to be more "artistic" without sacrificing scientific accuracy.
Since Tsaagan is only known by skull and cervical vertebrae, rest of the body is neatly based on Velociraptor and Linheraptor (both known by complete specimens). If you are going to ask me about Linheraptor synonymy issues I'm going to answer that I disagree with synonymizing Tsaagan and Linheraptor, since Linheraptor is more closely related to Velociraptor basing on at least four unambiguous cranial synapomorphies. So, if you are a lumper and are going to make Linheraptor and Tsaagan synonymous calling differences between them as "intra-specific" variation, you are free to do that, but then you have to call both of them "Velociraptor" by nominal priority. But this may be a topic for a future post...
As I previously said with Nedcolbertia, I have a stupid racism towards dinosaurs' names and etymologies. I don't like names that are genitives from people's names.... I'm not crazy about names that are provenance genitives from places... while I like names that are based on anatomic, peculiar characteristics of the related species... and most of all, I love names that are based on mytology (Haya, Zalmoxes, Citipati, Mahakala...).
Under this point of view, Tsaagan is special. Its name comes from the mongolian equivalent of "white", so I find it a very nice and ethereal name exquisitely oriental and devoid of latin suffixes (I'm an occidental but I'm an anti-occidentalist when I'm not reading some papers written by certain chinese authors...). What is even more unique, is that the mongolian equivalent of "white" is "Tsagaan" instead of "Tsaagan". So Tsaagan is a "wrong" name despite being valid. But this mistake would've eventually made it even more unique.
That's the reason the here represented female ( or male? It depends on your point of view 
) has a white plumage. At the same time I decided to represent the opposite sex as black, because... well... you know... since that was already asian-themed and right now I'm also eating sushi, the romantic idea of Yin & Yang completely got my heart.
It seems like I'm formulating a Raptor Red 2.0 setting, maybe with less melodrama and more porn than in Bakker's romance... mmmh.
Special thanks to Bob Nicholls, Joschua Knuppe and Emily Willoughby for supporting this.
