To my my mind, the most exciting thing about Banjo, our specimen of Australovenator wintonensis, is his arm. He's a theropod predator of the T. rex body type but he's wonderfully different, especially in the arm and hand department.

T. rex is a huge animal with an equally huge head. It uses its head as the primary weapon; it just crunches into prey. The arms don't amount to much, in fact they're so small that their practical use is still not understood. Same goes for many other theropod dinosaurs.

Velociraptor uses another primary weapon; it's feet! Yes, the big toe of a Velociraptor has a killing claw so it kicks it's prey into submission. Kind of hard to imagine but no doubt pretty effective.

Australovenator, on the other hand, uses its arms as the weapon of choice. It's an important distinction as it affects much of the animals possible behaviors and its body form. Hunting animals that use their hands tend to be smart; they can better keep their head out of harms way and using their hands gives them fine motor control to manipulate things. It also allows their feet to concentrate on locomotion and dodging and swerving for position! We think that if Stephen Spielberg knew about Australovenator when he first made his Jurassic Park films he would have made Banjo the star. Instead he had to settle on an artificially oversized Velociraptor with a claw on its big toe! Not quite as glamorous. What's more, Australovenator is already the perfect size—there's no need to boost him up. He would look you right in the eye as-is. Now that would be scary!

Fortunately, we've found almost every bone in Australovenator's arm, so reconstructing it is of great scientific interest. It's a fairly big structure, but not too big meaning future 3D digital printing is very achievable. For all these reasons the arm quickly became our first priority for digital reconstruction work.

To build the digital model we took many, many photos and measurements of every bone and sent them as reference material to Travis Tischler, our paleoartist. From these Travis sculpted each bone using Zbrush software. Ideally we would have used a 3D scanner to capture the contours of each fossil and use that as the basis for reconstruction. However we didn't have access to a 3D scanner so it was all up to Trav!

Below are some computer renderings of Travis's finished 3D Australovenator arm model. Nice huh!