Do you mean true dinosaurs? Because
Estemmenosuchus wasn't actually a dinosaur, but a therapsid, a relative of mammals, which lived before the dinosaurs, over 250 million years ago. If you aren’t concerned about scientific accuracy, you could still use it (after all, the even older, sail-backed synapsid
Dimetrodon appeared in the first LBT), since it may have been at least partially carnivorous. By the way, here’s
a restoration of the head of
Estemmenosuchus mirabilis, and
a full-body restoration of its smaller-horned relative,
E. uralensis.)
As far as actual dinosaurs go, the Horned King reminds me the most of either
Carnotaurus (which, to my knowledge, had the most prominent, most hornlike headgear of any carnivorous dinosaur) or some kind of ceratopsian (horned dinosaur). Ceratopsians may have eaten some meat as well as plants, and there were a lot of pretty frightful-looking ones. There’s the well-known
Styracosaurus and its close relative
Rubeosaurus, the splayed-horned
Medusaceratops, the four-foot-long-horned
Coahuilaceratops,
Diabloceratops (whose name literally means “Devil Horned Face”), and the colossal-headed
Pentaceratops, whose skull measured nearly ten feet from the tip of its beak to the top of its frill. If you had your heart set on a theropod, though, I’d go with
Carnotaurus (or possibly
Allosaurus, which had fairly large, hornlike crests over its eyes, and much more powerful and well-developed forelimbs than
Carnotaurus).
I can’t say there are a lot of dinosaurs that remind me of Davy Jones. :blink: Looking at prehistoric animals in general, he’s a LITTLE bit like an
ammonite, a swimming, spiral-shelled mollusk related to the modern squid, octopus, and nautilus. Some species had shells measuring over six feet in diameter, but seeing as all ammonites were confined to water, and most probably weren’t very fast swimmers, they probably wouldn’t be ideal for your story (unless Davy Jones can still only touch land once every ten years
).
If you did choose an actual dinosaur for Davy Jones’s dinosona, you might actually want to make HIM a
Suchomimus or
Spinosaurus. Both were carnivores (and very large ones; roughly the same length as
Tyrannosaurus, or even longer), but probably ate mainly fish and other aquatic animals, possibly spending much of their time literally up to their noses in water (Their nostrils were located higher on their snouts than most dinosaurs, allowing them to breathe while holding their jaws underwater, poised to snap at prey like monster-sized herons). Another interesting fact about them: the tips of their snouts were dotted with tiny pits or pores, which probably detected vibrations in the water, allowing them to sense approaching prey. Among carnivorous dinosaurs, they were the kings of the water, their only enemies being giant crocodiles. Neither dinosaur really had horns anyway; just a single small, pointed crest along the midline of the skull. But tie an octopus around one’s neck and it wouldn’t make a bad Davy Jones.
