Lineart is available to color under CC BY-NC 3.0 license.
[img id=Digital artwork depicting a slice of the Carboniferous period, 359.2-299 million years ago. A logo at the top of a globe with a ribbon encourages viewers to ‘spot ‘em all!’. The digital artwork contains over 250 Carboniferous organisms with lots of different colors and textures. The artist’s favorite organisms here are the shark with a pillar full of teeth on its head (stethacanthus), the 6-foot long centipede (Arthropleura), and edaphosaurus, an early synapsid with a big frill on its back. The organisms are displayed on a pre-Pangea map and large artistic conveniences were taken with regards to which things lived in Antarctica during the Carboniferous. Apologies for not listing every single organism, but rest assured, if you have a favorite animal or plant from the Carboniferous, it’s probably here somewhere!
The second image is the same as the first, only it’s just lines, and ready for coloring. /end img id]
It is beautiful!
The Carboniferous is not my favourite geological period, I prefer the Cambrian (because of the trilobites), and the most important in my heart is the Triassic (the first frogs, horsetails, and the first pterosaurs)… But in Carbon, my beloved ostracodes had their golden age and there developed intensively goniatites, finally we also have insects. Unfortunately, the era of graptolites and trilobites is ending, which makes me sad.
Sorry for possible naming errors. I wrote the text in Polish with the correct terms - but google translate could messed something up :)
Thank you! I would not be able to distinguish any naming errors if there are any in your response. I am so thankful that it made you happy. Maybe someday I will have a Cambrian or a Triassic version of this, too!
To generally note, I do not have paleontology expert backing on the research I did for this piece. There could be organisms I am missing or have misrepresented. I made it as an example of something I would like to someday create with an expert helping me out. For the time being, I only hope it brings joy.
To the person who brought up tiktaalik in the tags:
As far as I know, tiktaalik didn’t persist into the Carboniferous and is not depicted in the scene above, but I want to acknowledge the tiktaalik enthusiasm because I like them too. Here you go, a little visitor from the Devonian, with some low-effort lycopsids. I also saved some blank lines (CC BY-NC 3.0) if you want to color it!
[img id 1 of 2: Digital artwork of a tiktaalik, which is a fish that has lobe-like fins allowing it to crawl across the ground. Scientists propose that the tiktaalik shares the common ancestor between fish and all existing tetrapods and is an example of a transitional fossil. The depicted tiktaalik is submerged with its lobe fins on the bottom of a shallow pond covered with gravel. Three ancient plants called lycopsids are arranged around the tiktaalik, and they look like weird green pitchforks with only two tines. The plants were probably not rendered very accurately because all of the reference I could find was crunched and hard to make out.
img id 2 of 2 is the same image, but the colors are omitted so interested parties may color it for themself.]
The final batch of drawings for Mermay! Thank you all so, so much for the response. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this series to be so well liked and successful on somany of my social media platforms.
I felt like for the final batch, I wanted to explore how paleontologyinfluenced merfolk would look like, and how they influence ‘modern’ merfolk. (Prehistoric Planet probably influenced my decision haha)
These are the lads and lasses that help found the formation for merfolk culture, from first-of-the-firsts like the Anomalocaris and the Tiktaalik to true giants of the sea, like Shastasaurus, Livyatan and Megalodon. The Megalodon is Kara’s personal idol. (Kara’s the great white shark featured in all previous batches, here she’s teaching kids how cool history is!)
The most important figure here in Merfolk history is actually the Mosasaurus, AKA The Ocean Lord. He was a Barbarian King who hated landlubbers and was the sworn nemesis of “The Tyrant King”. He’s revered by modern Merfolk for his combination of strength, cunning, battle prowess and magnetic personality.
However, a tablet written during his time paints a different picture of the Ocean Lord: One of an arrogant, bloodthirsty ruler whose conquering ways and obsessive hatred of the landlubbers did more harm long term than anyone could have imagined.
A shout out to @miuzes , who motivated and helped me with tips all throughout the way. Another shout out @florence-is-gay/@legendary-disaster , who made fan art of Kara!. I’m STILL freaking out! Never would I expect I’d get fan art for this! :D
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE I’m so invested in all these, I love your designs and cool ideas so I just had to show my appreciation <3
The final batch of drawings for Mermay! Thank you all so, so much for the response. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this series to be so well liked and successful on somany of my social media platforms.
I felt like for the final batch, I wanted to explore how paleontologyinfluenced merfolk would look like, and how they influence ‘modern’ merfolk. (Prehistoric Planet probably influenced my decision haha)
These are the lads and lasses that help found the formation for merfolk culture, from first-of-the-firsts like the Anomalocaris and the Tiktaalik to true giants of the sea, like Shastasaurus, Livyatan and Megalodon. The Megalodon is Kara’s personal idol. (Kara’s the great white shark featured in all previous batches, here she’s teaching kids how cool history is!)
The most important figure here in Merfolk history is actually the Mosasaurus, AKA The Ocean Lord. He was a Barbarian King who hated landlubbers and was the sworn nemesis of “The Tyrant King”. He’s revered by modern Merfolk for his combination of strength, cunning, battle prowess and magnetic personality.
However, a tablet written during his time paints a different picture of the Ocean Lord: One of an arrogant, bloodthirsty ruler whose conquering ways and obsessive hatred of the landlubbers did more harm long term than anyone could have imagined.
A shout out to @miuzes , who motivated and helped me with tips all throughout the way. Another shout out @florence-is-gay/@legendary-disaster , who made fan art of Kara!. I’m STILL freaking out! Never would I expect I’d get fan art for this! :D
I’m back again, after a loooong time neglecting this blog. I’ve been planning to come back for a while, and I’m finally here! I thought I’d return with one of my favorite vertebrate fossils, Tiktaalik roseae! The common ancestor of all tetrapods was probably not Tiktaalik, but something very similar. Scientists use it as a model organism for that ancestor, though, and I’ll be doing the same here.
The invasion of the land is a fascinating subject for paleontologists, because it’s one of the first major steps toward life as we know it today. Life evolved in the oceans, and for the majority of earth’s history, stayed there. It’s uncertain when exactly life first made landfall. Rocks from deep in the Precambrian show evidence of photosynthetic microbes who lived on land, and simple plants were sprouting along shorelines by 430 million years ago. Before this, water on earth was confined to oceans or isolated lakes, but the advent of those land plants meant the creation of the first soils and mud, in turn leading to the formation of the first river systems. Not long after the first terrestrial plants, arthropods and their relatives arrived and began carving niches for themselves.
By the middle Devonian (~385 Ma), terrestrial ecosystems proliferated. The first forests covered the landscape, and invertebrates ran rampant, including the earliest insects. Fish, though, had yet to leave the water. So, what took them so long? Simply put, they waited until they had a good enough reason to go poking around up there. Although the land is my main focus today, the Devonian is more famously known as the Age of Fishes. This was the first time jawed vertebrates rose to the top of their ecosystems, and the first time they got truly big. This was the height of the placoderms, armored fishes like the infamously gigantic Dunkelosteus,andBothriolepis,which kind of looked like a shield with fins.On the cartilaginous side were the spiny ‘sharks,’ as well as true sharks like CladoselacheandStethacanthus.
At this point I’m just naming prehistoric fish that I like, so let’s get back to tetrapod evolution.
Most of the traits we associate with tetrapods evolved in fully aquatic fish. Specifically, in a branch of fish called Sarcopterygians, or lobe-finned fish. Today, lobefins are represented by a handful of lungfish and the coelacanth, but they were all over the place in the Devonian. Early ancestral cousins of tetrapods were animals like Eusthenopteron, which looked like ordinary fish on the surface, but had unique skeletal structures. Particularly, their pectoral fins are built similarly to tetrapod limbs. Later animals would develop larger, sturdier fins they used for walking along the bottom of rivers, rather than land.
This is where our starcomes in. Tiktaalik was adapted to live in shallow rivers or streams. It had a wider, flatter body than most fish, and it had lost its dorsal and anal fins. The four fins on its underside were built very similarly to tetrapod limbs. Tiktaalik is also one of the first vertebrates with a proper neck, meaning, in the words of Will and David from The Common Descent Podcast, you could strangle it, if you ever wanted to do that sort of thing.
Tiktaalik was a predator of small-to-medium-sized invertebrates. Its big, triangular head housed pointy teeth, and had two eyes on top. It looked like a crocodile in many ways, and may be one of the earliest animals to adapt the crocodilian lifestyle, laying at the bottom of a body of water and waiting for prey to come by. The placement of Tiktaalik’s eyes may have been useful for peering out from the water surface while staying mostly hidden.
Despite being known as the 'fish with feet,’ Tiktaalik wasn’t exactly graceful on land. Rather than walking primarily with limb muscles like most tetrapods do, Tiktaalik walked by heaving itself forward with its front limbs and powerful shoulder muscles. Basically, it walked by doing push-ups. As you can imagine, Tiktaalik probably didn’t spend much time out of the water. But, this goofy style of terrestrial movement was a precursor to the more efficient methods seen in landlubbers today.
Tiktaalik is my favorite prehistoric fish, and definitely a contender for favorite vertebrate. It was one of the first animals to really grab my attention once I started seriously getting into paleontology. While I was still trying to understand evolution I read Your Inner Fish, a book written by Neil Shubin, who was a part of the expedition team who discovered Tiktaalik. It discusses the animal in so much more detail than I did here, and is pretty much required reading for anyone who’s interested in paleontology. In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and say it is required reading. If you haven’t already, get on it. I promise you’ll love it.
Oh, and another reason I like Tiktaalik is because it’s so charming. I don’t think we could have asked for a cuter, goofier-looking fishapod. The image of it flopping around on land is both hilarious and really, really interesting to me. One day I want to commission a beautiful oil painting portrait of Tiktaalik like rich people do with their dogs.
That’s about it for this post! I hope I’m not too rusty. I can’t promise a daily post anymore, but I want to post at least semi-regularly.
SOURCES (this is also something I want to start doing btw):
