One of my favorite parts of the story of Senta and the Steel Dragon is the dinosaurs.  Senta and her friends constantly have to deal with velociraptors, deinonychus, utahraptors, dromaeosaurs, and t-rex.  Port Dechantagne has a trolley pulled by a triceratops and the people there keep (and eat) iguanodons.

Birmisia has a rather cold climate.  I think Senta and the Steel Dragon is one of the few stories in which dinosaurs appear in the snow.  I enjoyed the writing t-rex/snow scenes in The Dark and Forbidding Land a great deal.  I was careful that only cretaceous period dinosaurs appears in the books, both for basic continuity, and because the Earth was much cooler during much of the cretaceous than it was during the jurassic.

I started writing after it was already discovered that velociraptors and utahraptors had feathers.  I decided that they should be very feathery– so much that the people in Birmisia refer to them as birds.  As it turns out– they really were.  And so far I think, nothing else I guessed about and put in the book has been overturned by science.  I did assign specific colors to the dinosaurs and scientists are just starting to figure out the feather colors of fossils.  I look forward to seeing how close I was.

I had read an article speculating that t-rex had been black with a red head– kind of like a vulture.  I liked the idea just because of the visuals, so that is how the t-rex appears in my books.  I was really excited when I was watching a recent “Walking with Dinosaurs” type show and the t-rex was colored just like mine.  Someone read the same article.  They looked just like I pictured them.