Dave, i hate to break it to you but the dinosaurs are extinct. My own theory is that they died out due to mechanical complexity and poor payload-range performance.
Actually, a peculiar fact of nature is that it never evolved any rotating systems (outside of several microscopic examples). So if birds had evolved rotors instead of wings what would they look like?
Slowrotor, i'm still trying to figure out what the typical mission profile of your machine is? Are you trying to achieve fixed wing efficiency/range but with limited endurance VTOL landing? Even with a turbo-piston engine you will struggle to get much speed.
Basically i don't understand why you are rejecting the rotor as a main source of lift? Why not go the other way and design a rotor with large enough blade sections to handle lift at zero RPM. Then you can play with variable rpm counterrotators without any fear of rotor resonance...