Racing Turtles

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.

Quick silly

Sapien boy and neanderthal girl doze in the springtime, finally together again

Maysozoic Day 9: Shonisaurus 🐋

(feat. birgeria)

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

We flap into 2009 with "Of Giants and Dwarfs," an acrylic painting of Pleistocene Malta. The stars of the composition are the giant swan (Cygnus falconeri) and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon falconeri).

she...

i have a question for uhhhhh idk maybe anthropologists?

something that fills me with wonder beyond words are realistic models of ancient humans and our relatives. I’m well and truly obsessed.

i recently had the great pleasure of seeing perhaps my favorite neanderthal model of all, “neanderthal father and child” by kennis & kennis:

however, what always confuses and even disappoints me on even the most beautiful reconstructions I’ve seen, including this one, is the matted hair.

the hair is almost always matted. not tangled, as perhaps might happen to a child in a day of play, but truly “would have to cut it and start fresh” matted. the kind of matting that takes months of neglect to develop.

this troubles me because we of course know that matting poses health risks. to name a few—insect infestations, scalp sores which can become infected, and even mold growth.

Keeping hair clean and untangled isn’t just an aesthetic choice or luxury, it’s a medical necessity.

it’s for this reason that grooming practices feature so heavily in the social bonding of so many animals today. not just in primates, but in birds, cats, and more.

so it’s difficult for me to imagine that Neanderthals and indeed early humans would have walked around with matted hair, or to imagine at least matting would be the norm.

around the world, regardless of hair texture and ethnic heritage, humans of countless cultures use various braiding techniques as protective styles, to this day.

And we know that Neanderthals could twist cord. And of course that humans have been braiding hair for thousands of years.

so I again, I cannot imagine that our ancestors and relatives would have been walking around with their hair matted to the scalp.

even without protective styles, surely finger combing and detangling would have been common practice?

Am I missing something here? It seems like this is just an oversight & even stereotype that has become commonplace in this specific genre of scientific art. seems like a very reductive idea of the “dirty caveman” which has made its way into even modern scientific models.

Thank G-d, I'm so glad this bothers somebody other than me.

I feel like there's some sort of "well, they're more primitive than us, so they didn't take care of themselves as well" which happens on a subconscious level with art like this. Like it's not a scientific statement but an artistic one, a sort of visual shorthand for "these are primitive people, these Neanderthals. They're from a long long time ago and weren't really people yet."

That both does a disservice to the science behind the art and betrays a bias that also isn't terribly scientific.

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.

Two gulls follow a weird fish. Featuring the newly elongated Otodus megalodon.

They stretched the shark???

They shrunk Dunkleosteus to make Megalodon longer. Its the law of equivalent exchange.

I felt compelled to make this. Enjoy!

This, too, is yuri

Ahdhsjzbbjshkdjsh

Palaeoloxodon falconeri, Falconer’s dwarf elephant, by Zdeněk Burian

… whoops. Honey, I shrunk the elephants.

Remember when I said Palaeoloxodon was huge, bigger than a mammoth? Turns out it also occupies the other extreme of the elephant size continuum. Palaeoloxodon falconeri from Malta and Sicily is an example of insular dwarfism, where big animals evolve to be smaller on islands. In this case a fully grown adult P. falconeri was the size of a modern elephant calf.

Burian not only gives us some nice island scenery, but also helpfully adds some swans for scale. The result is surprisingly endearing and even cute.

Research alert! Imagine putting flippers on a 24-foot Komodo dragon. That’s how Amelia Zietlow, a Ph.D. student at the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School, describes Jormungandr walhallaensis, a newly identified species of mosasaur that was named in part after a sea serpent in Norse mythology.

Living some 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous, this mosasaur is thought to represent a transitional period between other well-known species. In addition to flippers and a stumpy, shark-like tail, Jormungandr had a bony ridge on its skull that would have given it the appearance of having “angry eyebrows.”

Hello????

I illustrate palaeo books...

Paleo art inspired by Minoan frescoes

I was being cancelled because apparently it was classist to put feathers on dinosaurs.

Both dream me and irl me were very confused.

it might have been a dream, but feathered dinosaurs being linked to an ideology isn't that uncommon. Them being viewed as "leftist", "woke" or "gay" has occured several times.

I collect these examples.

reblog if you like dinosaurs, are gay, or just really like feathers

God...........

If you've been following paleo news lately, then you know ichthyosaurs have been screwing with evolution again.

little cretaceous guys + guest appearance of our even older friend the gorgonpsid (triceratops, pteradon, carnotaurus, parasaurolophus, deinonychus, ichthyosaur, gorgonopsid, repenomamus)