The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 14

Happy Birthday, brother John Lund!

I'm doing my Tyrannosaurus without lips.

I know that theropods had holes parallel to the gumline that could have carried nerves and blood vessels to support fleshy, muscular lips. I also know that lips help prevent teeth from drying out, which is helpful when you need your teeth to keep living. I also know that all living reptiles (except crocodilians, which live in the water so their teeth don't dry out, and beaked reptiles like turtles and tortoises) have some kind of lips, or at least scales that hang down to cover the teeth when the mouth is closed.

I also know that Tyrannosaurus had really, really long teeth. And while certain animals clearly manage to have both lips and exceptionally long teeth, it does pose problems. Further, since Tyrannosaurus (and all theropods) were constantly growing new teeth, protecting the old teeth would be a lower priority. Last, some stuff got published 11 years ago that says Tyrannosaurus had no lips.

I'm doing this piñata without lips.

That's actually harder, because it means when I apply the light brown paper flush with the upper jawline, I'm going to need to cut sockets.

I decided the best way to figure out exactly where each tooth was positioned relative to the jawline was to do a crayon rubbing. I taped up a big sheet of brown paper, peeled the wrapper off a brown crayon, and rubbed away. Just like those leaf rubbings you did in the second grade, this gave me a good outline of where the teeth went. After that, it was just a matter of cutting away the paper teeth and leaving nice neat sockets in place.

Handling the giant pieces of paper proved much more difficult than the little scraps I've been working with. The glue makes the paper heavy, and (perhaps not surprisingly) sticky. My arms ended up entirely covered in glue on more than one occasion as I attempted to cover the last few dry parts of the paper without the rest of the sheet ending up a balled-up gluey mess.

In the end, it all worked out though . . . and the crumpling of the paper left a very cool pattern when the glue dried. It's one of those "happy accidents", the kind of unexpected turn-for-the-better that makes hands-on projects turn out extra good. Stuff like this is what made the ships and creatures of the original "Star Wars" trilogy so much better than the CGI stuff of the new trilogy.

Not that my piñata is nearly as cool as the sarlacc or the Y-wing.


Four working days left!