I just realized that apparently I never shared this series here on Tumblr??  

I call it Living Paintings, as they are recreations of extinct animals that some artists actually saw and painted from memory, a long time ago.

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Recent updates to this series: Glyptodon and Thylacine!

OK SO a frozen baby Homotherium mummy has been found in Siberian permafrost and everybody is going nuts (including me). I had to make another installmente for this series with a figurine that has long been debated to either depict either a lion or Homotherium; Despite anatomical details pointing to the latter, there was no record of surviving Homotherium from the time the figurine was dated to have been made, so it was mostly believed to have been a cave lion. However, the frozen cub closes that temporal gap and makes it more likely that this was in fact the subject of the sculpture. So even though it’s not a painting, here it is brought to life.

In a monumental discovery for paleontology and the first of its kind "Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia"

Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1

I always knew it was possible, but I never dared to hope.