not paleoart – Page 5 – Nix Illustration

Spectember 2021 – Slime Snouters & Megaphone Birds

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:

Spectember 2021 – Quadrupedal Pachycephalosaurs

Today’s #Spectember concept comes from an anonymous submitter:

Spectember 2021 – Marsupial Predators

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:

Cambrian Explosion Month #05: Phylum Cnidaria – Anthozoa

Cnidarians are a diverse group that includes modern corals, sea anemones, sea pens, jellyfish, hydra, and even some parasitic forms. They’re the closest relatives of bilaterians in the animal evolutionary tree, and their ancestry goes back at least 560 million years into the Ediacaran Period, with the polyp-like Haootia being one of the earliest definite cnidarian fossils – and molecular clock estimates suggest the group might have actually originated much much earlier than that, possibly as much as 740 million years ago.

The anthozoan lineage of cnidarians (corals, anemones, and sea pens) spend their adult lives as polyps attached to the seafloor, either solitary or colonial, and since many lineages have hard calcium carbonate skeletons their fossil record is generally much better than that of the soft-bodied medusozoan jellyfish.

While corals are major contributors to reef ecosystems in modern times, back during the Cambrian they were actually rather rare. The weird little archaeocyathan sponges were the main reef-builders in the early-to-mid Cambrian, and after their decline reefs were mainly formed by algae and other types of sponges.

But, sometimes, growing among these reefs were also some tiny Cambrian corals.