A long-running love affair

Since finding out about the Liang Bua hominid way back in 2008 or so (when National Geographic put out their special on it), I've had a continual obsession with Homo Floresiensis - a tiny human who shared it's isolated island home with Komodo Dragons, dwarf stegodons, giant storks... an un-endingly bizarre and fascinating world! Like any good romance, my relationship with Flores Woman has it's moments of intense passion, but generally is a a slow burn of idle fascination.

This romance heated up recently for a school project, where I painted some pieces for a dummy magazine article. The opening spread: A band of Homo Floresiensis fend off a Giant Maribou Stork from their kill, a stegodon calf.


The inside spread is also an infographic, an attempt on my part to explore some of the fascinating anatomical weirdness of Homo Floresiensis.



If any of that tickled your fancy, I've included a link to a slideshow of all my homo floresiensis sketches and such from my photostream:

Fun with the bird-men!

These are three dinosauroid illustrations I've just been doing for fun. They might end up being part of a set of pieces, each showing a different stage of technological development. 

They've been a lot of fun so far...

ART PARTY!

Alright folks! I've been drawing a lot lately... check it out.

First up, its DINOSAUR CAVE ART WITH NEMO RAMJET! 

Next up, adventures with the world's smallest hominids!

More later.

Evolution of an idea...

So, late last August, I had just moved to Calgary. I had gone to Drumheller with my family that same month, home to the Royal Tyrell Museum, the pre-eminent Paleontological museum in western Canada, as far as I know. Now, most of my friends had gone to Drumheller at some point in their childhood - for whatever reason, I hadn't. Our family had a bunch of other great trips, but never to Drumheller. So when I went there, deeply suppressed feelings of paleo-wonder swept over me. I had never exorcised those prehistoric demons from my little-boy subconscious, and they began to nag at me. In early september, playing around with pen and ink, it started. I began to draw lizard-men, vaguely dinosaurian in appearance. Oh, how innocent it was. I hadn't even thought of evolutionary history or encephalization quotients yet...

Then I ran into Darren Naish and Nemo Ramjet in my journeys for a better dinosauroid. The full experience can be found at this post here, but needless to say, the seed was planted. I began to try to put together a more realistic intelligent therapod dinosaur. These following images are two of the very first corvid-like dinosauroids I drew.


The body plan was slowly changed and refined, but I simply ran out of steam. It was looking like the end result would just be a hooded crow with a deinonychosaurid tail and sereima's feet - not quite what I had been looking for. It all came to a head in december, where I flushed my system of dinosaurian thoughts with the construction of a feathered, three dimensional troodontid sculpture. I thought it was over.




But it wasn't. At the beginning of February, it all started again. After a week or two fiddling around with evolutionary history, I found a beast that I could be proud of. After a bit of chatting with the illustrious Nemo Ramjet (whose site is down right now, but when it resurrects itself, it's REALLY worth a look), I decided to dive in head-first (conceptually), and start working on developing a culture.

The results can be seen here, at my deviantart account. So here's the question:


WHAT in the FUCK am I going to do with this world once I've created it?

A comic, maybe?

AWWW YEAH! KNAP THAT FLINT!

I had the uncomfortable realization that having such limited tools of manipulation on my speculative animal would make a bit of a boring material culture. So, in the interest of trying to still pretend that I'm being scientific, the dinosauroid has forelimbs of increased but still limited dexterity. Evolutionarily, the dinosauroid's ancestors would need to be at least partially arboreal - maybe scavengers of the forest floor, nesting and occasionally hunting in the lower levels of the forest canopy. There is a species of dromaeosaur on the fossil record (named hilariously enough "bambiraptor") who did have an opposable thumb, of a sort. Now, of course, there is no real way to know a fossil animal's ecology - but they figure that bambiraptor was probably an arboreal hunter, using it's opposable fingers to snatch up fat insects and little tree-dwelling mammals. It's nice to have an actual case of dinosaurs with dextrous forepaws - it makes what I'm doing a little less of a stretch.

In terms of visual culture, I'm starting with this design - a war mask/helmet/fighting beak - suggested by the illustrious Nemo Ramjet. I'm heavily cribbing from Meso-american cultures with this one, using obsidian blades set into the fighting edges of the mask, much like an aztec sword or spear. I'll start doing more development of dinosaurian material culture - clothes, architecture, etc - soon enough.

The previous direction I was going I like, but was quite materially uninteresting. Without more dextrous hands, I would have been stuck with a dinosaur whose only technology was this:

...which I still think is sweet. I just wanted to have more (and crazier) shit to draw, which takes this from a scientific approach to a more fantastic one.

Is that so selfish?

They're BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

Honestly, I'd though that I had this problem licked. But apparently, I don't. 

This picture is another try at the dinosauroid. This picture is of two adults, one with throat pouch full. 

One of the big problems I was having with the dinosauroid was the evolutionary line. Because we came from arboreal ancestors, it was hard to think outside of those evolutionary restrictions. Still riffing on Darren Naish's ground-hornbills as models for post-cretaceous maniraptorans, I was caught with the paradox of a creature who would have very capable forelimbs - from the arboreal lifestyle - but yet, used the bill as the main manipulator. The two didn't fully go together. An arboreal creature would most likely have very capable hands, with a comparatively underdeveloped oral manipulator.

But thinking of non-primate intelligence helped a lot when trying to build this creature. Hyenas have monkey-level intelligence and social complexity, yet they never had to come down from the trees to attain it (not to mention elephants). So the dinosauroid didn't need to be arboreal, or ape-like at all, to be intelligent. And in terms of beak as primary manipulator, forepaws don't necessarily equal hands. For full-time bipedal mammals, like the kangaroos, the forepaws are great for digging and smacking other kangaroos, but they're not dextrous. (Thusly, this dinosauroid is tentatively placed in a strictly terrestrial evolutionary line of beaked troodontids, this line breaking from the previously illustrated herbivorous line sometime in the eocene and developing into a highly social family of terrestrial omnivores - this troodontid being one of the most intelligent of this family.)

So for the dinosauroid, the forelimbs are great for combat and grasping prey, but perhaps rather terrible for flint-knapping and the like. They are stuck with the versatile but still self-limited beak as the main tool. This creates an interesting problem for me as an artist, though - if they can’t devise human-esque tools, like spears and hand axes, etc, what visual signifiers of intelligence can you draw them with? Elaborate basket traps?? 

Termite sticks?

MMMMMM! SLAVIC BREAKFAST!

In the interests of compartmentalizing things, I've set aside a piece of internet only for my russian-insanity related projects. I've started with a project from earlier in the year, so have a look. 

And another Dinosaur.

and yet more Dino-Saurs...

Peep game!

More madness where that came from here...

I don't think I can stop...

dinosauroid - adult
Originally uploaded by povorot

More dinos.

I swear, this shit is an unhealthy addiction. I just can't stop myself....

FORGET K-T

I'm putting all the drawings I'm doing on this dinosaur obsession into this set on flickr. 

DINOSAUROIDS! (biggest post ever)

(above picture from this guy's photostream)

Okay. So back in 1982, one of Canada’s greatest paleantologists, Dale Russell, conducted a thought experiment. The idea had been thrown around before, but Ol’ Dale took it to the next level. What if the age of the dinosaurs had not ended with an asteroid in the late creataceous, but had kept going? Would it be ridiculous to posit that intelligent life would develop?

So, with that in mind, Dale grabbed Ron Séguin, taxidermist and artist, and had him make two models. One of Troodon, a maniraptoran dino who appears to have one of the largest brains of any known dinosaur - aka the intelligence of an equivalently sized flightless bird - and one model of what Troodon perhaps would have evolved into. Thus, the dinosauroid, a dinosaur hominid, was born. The eyes grew larger and more binocular, the head larger to accommodate the brain, and the body upright to support the big brain.

However, plenty of people thought that this was arrogant at best, and ridiculous at worst. Why would a non-avian dinosaur abandon its horizontal form in favour of a body type so specific to mammalian primates?

So here’s where I pick it up. I read a post by Darren Naish, a great paleontologist from the UK, about some of his thoughts on the matter. After visiting the Tet Zoo and looking at the Hornbills there, his reflections ended in this interesting conclusion: 

“Of course you don’t need to compare ground hornbills with Cretaceous predatory dinosaurs, or with hominids or other primates, to make them interesting. But I can’t help coming back to Russell & Séguin’s ‘dinosauroid’ hypothesis. No, post-Cretaceous maniraptorans wouldn’t end up looking like scaly tridactyl plantigrade humanoids with erect tailless bodies. They would be decked out with feathers and brightly coloured skin ornaments; have nice normal horizontal bodies and digitigrade feet; long, hard, powerful jaws; stride around on the savannah kicking the shit out of little mammals; and in the evenings they would stand together in the trees, booming out a duet of du du du-du, a deep noise that would reverberate for miles around.”

Inspired by this, the Turkish artist “Nemo Ramjet” came up with this design.

(The coolest thing about this design is that he also made a series of cave paintings, using spit and charcoal (etc) and his mouth to hold the brushes he made.)

Intrigued by all this, I started to look into avian intelligence, and came upon something pretty fucking cool. It turns out that crows - most specifically, the New Caledonian Crow - have been found to be at least as clever as the great apes. Moreover, these little bastards are as good at tool use as the chimps - and they only have beaks and feet to work with! The clever dinosauroids these fellows have been talking about already exist - and they're eating our garbage, luckily, instead of killing us off and conquering the world. (update - after more reading, it seems that they can learn all types of advanced behaviour - an evolutionary psychologist in Israel witnessed a hooded crow successfully bait-fish using torn off pieces of bread - cool, huh?)

That being said, instead of being discouraged to find that evolution had beaten me to the punch, I’ve been basing the intelligent dinos I’ve been drawing on the corvids, and their tool use on the tool use of the new Caledonian crow. These are the nicer drawings I’ve been doing…

 

(There are some rougher sketches, but not many are as nice)

Now, in conclusion, the idea of intelligent crow-raptors learning to fish may not be as exciting as green scaly men - but green scaly men are cliché and look fucking dumb.

PEACE OUT.

What I've been drawing lately...

Aside from the comic, I've been drawing these little fellas - lizard men from the stone age.

Also, I've posted up a few more pages for the comic.