by Marco Auditore for a good technical reference on the bones and soft tissue

(link to high res) To check the actual fossil in detail

And finally this beautiful restoration by Stephanie Abramowicz for a good look at both folded wings and how discrete the claws most likely would have been!

Aww thank you so much!To adress your question: As with any kind of palaeoart, even if you’re making a cartoony character, you’re going to want to get some good references and research done about the species you want to caricaturize.

As Tom Bancroft adresses this in his book “Creating Characters with Personality” using as an example a chikubanotomo (a raccoonlike animal) he designed for a project and speaks about how the first sketches had to lean towards ‘realistic’ proportions and anatomy so to understand the animal before actually making it into a stylized cartoon.

Of course, when it comes to prehistoric creatures, we can’t really go to a zoo and start sketching them Instead you can look up skeletals (Scott Hartman has a bunch of awesome skeletals!), and references of related, extant creatures.

You want to nail down the construction of the animal in its simplest forms, lets use Dilophosaurus as an example:

You’re also going to want to start doodling it, getting aquainted with its anatomy even if you go for realistic at first. My character design teachers would tell me: You need to KNOW the rules before properly breaking them!

As you can see, I started doing a few cartoon doodles, delving a little into the next step: What elements define the character which can be exaggerated or focused on, which parts can we simplify into larger shapes?This answers another of your questions: Shrinkwrapping and shaving dinosaurs should be just as avoided in cartoon as it is in realistic palaeoart if what you’re going for is an accurate yet stylized character. This means that research we talked about before should preferably include a bit of what we know about the animal’s feathers or lack thereof. 

In the case of this Dilophosaurus, it is a relatively old theropod and we don’t have fossil evidence of its feathers. We do know that fluffy protofeathers are a basal trait of the entirety of Dinosauria, so adding puffy, non-complex floof is fine as long as we don’t overdo it. After all the most distinguishable traits of Dilophosaurus are its crests and jaws, not its feathers!

Finally you gotta decide how much you’re going to anthropomorphize the character. This means, how many and how much you want its traits to resemble a human’s. Do you want a mostly correct animal with just the facial features humanized so you can express human emotion? Or maybe you’re going for a cereal box mascot sort of cartoony almost-human character? In here you decide about stuff like pronation (making it able to move the wrists like us) and how ’straight’ it stands!

My final tip is to never go with your first design! Even if you made one you really liked on your first sketch, try different size variations, different stylized vs realistic elements and whatever you do don’t be afraid of making mistakes, the best designs usually take a lot of tries to get right, even for professionals!