Can you believe that this innocent looking face belongs to the man who puts the skins on the fiercest, most blood-thirsty dinosaurs that ever lived? To be fair, he also puts the skins on the dinosaurs who are herbivorous and gentle, but that doesn't sound anywhere near as exciting and horrific.

This mommy T. rex guards Daren's office. She makes sure that no one touches his lunch.(c)1999 BBC.

Now we haven't really seen it, but we are sure that Daren's office walls are covered with "pelts" just like the one illustrated in the article. Just remember, however,  that with digital technology removing a skin doesn't hurt a bit! 
 

Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette:  What was the most challenging skin texture to develop?
 

Diplodocus (rearing up on the left) had the most difficult skin texture. (c) 1999 BBC
 

Daren Horley:  Definitely Diplodocus. Up until I painted this animal they were all at a safe distance from the camera, fairly small on screen, but the storyboard for Diplodocus showed the animal right up close - (the shot where the  mother has just laid her eggs and is returning to the herd). We called this shot 'the wall of flesh'. It's just that, nothing on screen but dino skin, so it had to be really detailed, every wrinkle and  scale had to be painted, even detail within the scales! Actually it was the most rewarding animal  for me because I'm a detail freak, I love painting intricate tiny details. The problem is that the more detail there is the more trouble the computer has in generating the images, so we couldn't go to such extremes on every  animal.
 
 

D.I.G. We assume that you used some actual casts of dinosaur skins as reference. What were they?

D.H.:  Ken Carpenter (paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of
Colorado) gave me some skin casts from Stegosaurus and a hadrosaur to use as reference. What struck me was the size of the scales, they were tiny. On such a large animal they would disappear from view at a distance. To overcome this I varied the size of the scales over the body, so in soft flexible areas such as the belly or at joints I made them small, but made them larger at exposed, vulnerable areas like the spine, the thighs and shins. This would have provided an armoured protection. I also put heavy scales on the head of the carnivores, like T. rex. Seeing as he had such small arms, he may have gone in with his head when attacking prey or butting rival males, so heavy armoured scales on the head make sense.
 

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