Paleontology and science illustration, and feathering ALL the dinosaurs
Today’s #Spectember concepts come from three submitters: anonymous, Jonas Werpachowski, and Novaraptoria.
Despite having a convergent resemblance to penguins or gannetwhales, the humdertaker (Suchomergus pollinctor) is actually a distant descendant of modern hummingbirds.
Continue reading “Spectember 2022 #03: Swimming Hummingbirds”Today’s #Spectember concept is a combination of a couple of anonymous submissions:
These two animals are the descendants of brontotheres and paraceratheres, almost the last living representatives of their kinds, hanging on in the equivalent of modern-day times in a world similar to our own.
Continue reading “Spectember 2022 #02: ‘Modern’ Brontotheres and Paraceratheres”Despite some minor delays, it’s time once again for #Spectember – when I dive back into the big pile of speculative evolution concepts that you all submitted to me in 2020, and try to get through a few more of the backlog.
(…There’s still over 50 of them left. This is going to take a while.)
So today’s concept comes from an anonymous submitter, who requested an arboreal ornithopod dinosaur:
Continue reading “Spectember 2022 #01: Arboreal Ornithopod”Most trilobites were able to roll themselves up into a protective ball – a behavior known as enrollment or volvation – exposing just their heavily armored backs to attackers. They’re often found fossilized curled up like this, and rare preservation of soft tissues shows that they had a complex system of muscles to help them quickly achieve this pose while simultaneously tucking their antennae and all their limbs safely inside their enrolled shells.
Some species also developed sharp defensive spines and spikes that jutted out when they enrolled, making themselves even more daunting to potential predators in one of the earliest known examples of an evolutionary “arms race”.
Continue reading “Cambrian Explosion #54: Trilobita – Transform and Roll Up”The major groups of the euarthropods are the chelicerates, mandibulates, and the extinct artiopodans, but there were some Cambrian species that still can’t be easily fitted in to any of those lineages.
Continue reading “Cambrian Explosion #49: …Some Sort Of Euarthropod?”(This was originally supposed to be a final-day-of-#Spectember bonus post, but it got much longer than I expected so it’s a few days late.)
To finish off this year’s diversion into speculative evolution, instead of pulling from my still-rather-long list of unused submissions I’m doing something a little different – trying to give an idea of how I go through the actual process of designing a speculative species.
And for today’s example I’m going to do a “redesign” of sorts for a classic Dougal Dixon After Man creature: the reedstilt.
For several reasons:
As we come to the end of the month, here’s another #Spectember concept from an anonymous submission:
Continue reading “Spectember 2021 – Dimorphic Tunicates”Today’s #Spectember concept is brought to you by @thecreaturecodex , who wanted to see a depiction of something from The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades:
Continue reading “Spectember 2021 – Slime Snouters & Megaphone Birds”Today’s #Spectember concept comes from an anonymous submitter:
Continue reading “Spectember 2021 – Quadrupedal Pachycephalosaurs”It’s September, the Cambrian series has been delayed until later this year, so instead let’s get speculative – it’s time for the return of #Spectember! I can’t manage daily content this time around, but I still have plenty of submitted concepts left over from last time.
So let’s get started with some marsupials suggested by someone crediting themselves only as Bruno Drundridge:
Continue reading “Spectember 2021 – Marsupial Predators”