Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops and friends

I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere. A timely example: I didn’t know that Alex Pritchard was out there making museum-quality dinosaur skulls and skeletons until I saw his work on the DinoCon Instagram feed in the run-up to the convention. Then I visited his website, DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk, and then I got very excited.

Here I am at Alex’s booth at DinoCon 2025, with his mounted Aquilops skeleton. If you’d like to see the skeleton without a big dumb mammal crowding the view, see the image at the top of the post, or visit the webpage.

That skeleton rocks on toast. Luggage constraints kept me from bringing a skeleton home, so I settled for one of Alex’s Aquilops skulls, only ‘settle’ isn’t the right verb because this is also extremely awesome.

I spent a *lot* of time reconstructing the skull of Aquilops for our descriptive paper (Farke et al. 2014), so it’s one of the few non-sauropod things I’m qualified to yap about (and have, here, here, and here). Alex’s Aquilops skull is so good it gave me flashbacks; it looked like my drawings had leapt off the page and into faux-fossilized-bone — and very shortly into my hand and then into my luggage.

I made a point to get to Alex’s table early on to scoop up one of his Aquilops skulls, which was a savvy move because he did later sell out — of Aquilops, and of darn near everything else, much of it gone by the end of the first day. I was also quite taken with his Psittacosaurus skull, which I got in two sizes, and an oviraptorosaur egg I picked up for the heck of it. I guess I should have nabbed a Velociraptor skull to complete the early ceratopsian/Djadochta Formation Venn diagram. Maybe next year.

I got to chat a little with Alex. He’s so easygoing and approachable that it would have been all too easy to overlook his passion and dedication, had the evidence of it not been covering a very long table and rearing around us on metal stands. I know how hard it is to execute these things faithfully in two dimensions; the sheer number of specimens that Alex has conjured into being in three dimensions — and not just accurately but convincingly — is pretty staggering.

Alex likes to show some love to the less-famous dinosaurs — on his Instagram feed you can see his reconstructed skeleton of the recently-named dromaeosaur Shri rapax. Aquilops turned out to be kind of a fluke — he’d already made the skull and skeleton before Jurassic World Rebirth‘s Dolores catapulted ‘my’ little weirdo from relative obscurity to global fame. That happy accident worked out pretty darned well for me, and I think for Alex as well — he had a whole raft of Aquilops skulls at the start of DinoCon, and none at all on day two. I assume he’s hard at work on more awesome critters; from now on I’ll be following his output a lot more closely.

So, if you want a faithful representation of the Aquilops holotype as it exists today, you can download and print the 3D model of OMNH 34557 that we published with the paper. But if you want a non-roadkilled Aquilops skull that looks like it might have come straight out of the Cloverly Formation, I can personally vouch for Alex’s — it’s the one I have sitting on my desk right now.

I got the impression that DinoCon 2025 punched a decent crater in Alex’s inventory, but he is accepting orders and I expect him to recover quickly, if he hasn’t already. So get on over to DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk and do the right thing.

Reference

Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/09/12/alex-pritchards-aquilops-and-friends/