Sponsored commission for a species of amphibious jetguppy, with its large gill chambers adapted to hold stores of oxygenated water for extended periods of flopping on land (a sort of reverse air tank), and highly elongated jaw flanges used to push itself along.
(This animal lives during the ice age with the other jetguppies, so it's a bit of a retroactive species)
2023-07-27 08:32:42 +0000 UTC View Post
With the evolution of giant, macropredatory calacarnas, and other such predators capable of hunting equally giant shimmershiners, like sea serpents and snippers, there has been a proliferation of more extreme defences amongst these huge marine snarks to counter them. Simply getting larger was infeasible as they risked constant starvation at large sizes and their predators grew larger still and ...
2023-07-26 10:33:36 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a bit unconventional because this species is technically a very aberrant member of the maceback group, but it at least it gives a basic look at what traits are shared by macebacks (they're spiky, rotund, and have a large mouth).
(Also, unrelated, but there's finally an eelsnake tree now)
2023-07-23 09:47:48 +0000 UTC View Post
A sketch for a sponsored commission of a floating forest endemic species of maceback (paper got creased, sorry). Macebacks are a subgroup of largely herbivorous shimmershiners which have become heavily armoured to defend themselves from marine predators, and a larger, rotund body to facilitate a large gut to more effectively digest marine vegetation.
The urchin-belly has reduced som...
2023-07-21 06:30:34 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a commission for a scene from Walking with Dinosaurs in line with my current revamping of the entire series. No one scene was specified, so I chose what is probably the most iconic scene from the series, the bait-and-switch opening of "Cruel Sea".
Of course, the pliosaur is no longer blue whale-sized, but an eleven metre-long pliosaur is nothing to sneeze at. It would be ...
2023-07-21 02:57:14 +0000 UTC View Post
I forgot there was a lizard (played by an instantly recognizable Chinese water dragon) that got eaten in The Ballad of Big Al so I went back added one, although technically I've changed it to a sphenodont, so it's a tuatara relative instead of a true lizard.
It's another one of the those giant herbivorous tuataras I described in the "Spirits of the Ice Forest" entry. Althou...
2023-07-18 01:40:49 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode was definitely the toughest to cobble together, considering nearly all of the species are of questionable classification and/or are known from very fragmentary fossils and there was a degree of fossil site mixing and mild potential anachronisms.
I feel like this one was the budget episode, considering two of the animals are played by modern day animals, and four of them reuse...
2023-07-15 09:19:45 +0000 UTC View Post
This might be the most controversial change, but it's a major issue with anachronism. The original episode was set 106 MYA, but of the animals depicted, only the Muttaburrasaurus was actually known from that time, every other animal is only recorded from the Barremian to the Early Albian. Koolasuchus and "Allosaurus robustus" are the upper extreme here, being only known from t...
2023-07-15 09:01:09 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the more notorious animals featured in the series was the "polar allosaur" that was the primary antagonist in "Spirits of the Ice Forest". It should be well known now that there is no such animal, although the details on its true identity are a bit murkier. Although it is widely thought to actually be Australovenator, this is impossible given that this species was only excavated...
2023-07-14 08:33:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Preliminary sketch for a commission of a remade scene from Walking with Dinosaurs to accompany my WWD Redux series. There were a lot of potential choices for scenes, and I thought about the options for a while, but I decided the best choice would be the scene that is arguably the most iconic of the entire series, for better or for worse: the introduction to "Cruel Sea", showin...
2023-07-13 09:12:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Entity AMHULUK (AKA RED MOON & ERABUS)
First Sighting: N/A
Size: Variable
Weight: Variable
History: In the early 1970s, during one of many Monarch expeditions around the world investigating the origins of kaiju and evidence of their global exis...
2023-07-13 07:37:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Because I assume they were trying to save money in this episode, one of the animals is just stock footage of a tuatara hunting a giant weta. Neither animal is actually known from the region, their presence is inferred through their fossil record and modern geographical distribution. This is therefore the most speculative member of the cast in the episode considering it technically does not exis...
2023-07-12 06:53:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Pterosaurs only appeared very briefly in distance shots and are not identified; they didn't even bother to make a new model and simply reused the small unnamed pterosaurs in the previous episode. It is a little more justified in this case, as pterosaurs are known from Australia around this time period, but they are all very fragmentary and none of them had names at the time. Accompanying texts ...
2023-07-11 09:59:05 +0000 UTC View Post
In the episode, briefly the Leaellynasaura nests are threatened by a potentially egg-eating mammal, played by a coati. This is identified in supplementary material as the stem-monotreme Steropodon. Whether or not Steropodon actually resembled a coati is up for debate, since it is only known from a jaw fragment with three teeth, and its closest living relatives are ech...
2023-07-09 06:33:37 +0000 UTC View Post
The largest animal in the episode, since Australian titanosaurs were not yet known at the time of the episode's production (or technically at this point in the Cretaceous). This is the only major character in the episode that is not actually known from Dinosaur Cove, it's known from the more northern Allaru and Mackunda Formations. The episode gives the explanation that it migrates south during...
2023-07-06 20:09:43 +0000 UTC View Post
This is definitely the most ambitious of the episodes of the original series. This was an ecosystem which had been discovered only about a decade prior and all the animals of it were incredibly obscure and poorly known. Still the effort is appreciated in the attempt to be cutting edge in dinosaur science, to dispel the notion that the age of dinosaurs was just endless tropical jungles and swamp...
2023-07-04 22:38:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Coloured sketch for Anguirus; the Disaster God of Earthquakes, the master of stone, possibly the mightiest of them all. As old and mighty as the earth itself, with a bristling carapace so durable no weapon on Earth could pierce it, and a club upon his tail heavy enough to blow down an entire kingdom in one swipe. His mere footsteps cause the mountains themselves to tremble, a single strike of h...
2023-07-03 08:39:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Preliminary sketches for a species of carver descended from the larger canicrow, known as the jackal-jay, which is being domesticated by the sylvans. This species evolved short, blunt, bone-crushing jaws to take advantage of the recent radiation of large armoured prey like burdles and snurtles. This also makes them highly effective scavengers, capable of even consuming and dige...
2023-07-01 09:52:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Preliminary sketch for a riding/pack animal for the scrounger people. It's a species of shaggy, horned lump (name pending), basically a cross between an oxen and an elephant in terms of ecology, behaviour, and usage (exact details also pending).
Their intelligence makes them easy to train and command, and their large, robust build means they can carry or pull a lot of weight at once...
2023-06-28 08:58:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Some unsorted sketches for the no-K/Pg project which have no text associated with them as far as I know.
(1) A member of a group of large, predaceous dromaeosaurs native to the Old World which have evolved congruently with carnosaurs or abelisaurs, with broad, flesh-rending jaws and reduced forelimbs.
(2) Two different species of South American kritosaurines, one with a large, colou...
2023-06-24 08:25:11 +0000 UTC View Post
