#ammonoid

[transparentfossil]

20pcs 5-8mm Pleuroceras AMMONITE Germany Fossil lot

[geologyjohnson]

Work in progress on a goniatite painting. What other critters should I add?

[daily-cephalopod]

I arrogantly demand a cephalopod (<- joke I'm making since I just saw the "humbly request" ask from a few days ago) (please do pick out a cephalopod to show me tho, that part's sincere)

Check your ego 😡😡😡😡😡😡 (also a joke)

You get an ammonoid because I'm feeling spicy

[kiabugboy]

Straying from the prompt list to finish rigging models from the other project. This flat dude is Artinskia artiensis, an older ammonoid from the Carboniferous to the Permian!

[greatwyrmgold]

Cephalopod Pokemon

There are Pokemon based on all sorts of things. Inanimate objects, folkloric beasts, primal elements, pollution. But most are based on animals, to varying degrees.

And to the series's credit, it harvests fruit from many boughs of the tree of life. It has a bias towards mammals, of course, and towards animals that are widely recognized as "cute" or "cool". But it also has lampreys and toads and barnacles. Bugs aren't some niche afterthought, they're a core type. These unpopular clades aren't given as much prominence in the marketing or anime or merch, but they exist, and as much work went into them as went into the mice and dogs and tigers. No matter what your favorite animal is, there's probably at least one pokemon based on a closely-related species.

What about my favorite animals? Cephalopods, especially octopi, are objectively[citaton needed] the most interesting animals on the planet. You could probably make an entire monster-catching game where all the monsters are cephalopods, though its franchise potential would be extremely limited. How are these fascinating critters represented in the world's most popular

Well, there are seven or eight different cephalo-pokemon, spread across 3½ evolution lines, between generations I and VIII. Their visual designs are usually dominated by circles and curves, but aside from that they're all wildly distinct.

I'd like to share my thoughts on all their designs, focused on how well they resemble (stylized versions of) their real-world counterparts.

Omanyte & Omastar [Gen 1]

The only cephalopod pokemon in the first generation is an ammonoid fossil. Ammonoids (also called "ammonites," though technically that only refers to one prominent order of ammonoids) are an extinct subclass of cephalopods mostly known from their fossilized shells. Soft tissue fossils have been identified, but none were known in 1996, which complicated reconsctructions.

It would be unfair to judge Omanyte and Omastar on their fidelity to modern ammonoid reconstructions, so I checked whether I could find some reconstructions roughly contemporaneous to Red & Blue's release. In the paper "Life-restorations of ammonites and the challenges of taxonomic uniformitarianism" by Warren D. Allmon, I found this:

The upper-right and lower-right reconstructions look vaguely like Omanyte, except less cartoony and with longer tentacles. The tentacle length is the thing that bothered me the most, even before looking this up; it looks like 1¼ very small octopi wearing an oversized shell. These tentacles make a cuttlefish's look imposing.

Omastar's tentacles are longer, and its slit pupils are closer to what you see in cephalopods than Omanyte's googly eyes. But the tentacle anatomy looks off; a few big tentacles in front, with a bunch of stringy ones in back? And the tentacles at the bottom, which look like they're designed to stabilize Omastar on land?

And the beak bothers me. Even in the 90's, paleontologists thought aptychi may have been jaws, and they look nothing like that four-part beak. It looks a little like a cartoony stylized modern-cephalopod beak, maybe, but those only have two mandibles, not four. And what's with those shell spikes?

It's cool that the first Fossil Pokemon in the series were marine invertebrates and not something cool like dinosaurs, but this isn't a terribly accurate reconstruction. But all things considered, it's not bad, so...let's give it a C.

Remoraid & Octillery [Gen 2]

Obviously, I'm deducting points because remoras (or possibly trigerfish?) are not cephalopods. Supposedly Remoraid was supposed to be even revolver-ier and Octillery was supposed to be a tank, which would tie the line together and also be cool but would also make the line even less cephalopod-ish.

But we have what we have. Octillery is a pretty standard cartoon octopus, with some pretty standard stylized features. For instance, it has fewer tentacles (because more makes them harder to draw), with suckers that are just big circles, and the mantle is interpreted as a head, and the siphon is in the middle of that "face"...I hate the nose-siphon.

Even by the standards of cartoon octopi, this doesn't look much like an octopus. Octillery would get an F even without the remora around its neck. With Remoraid in consideration, I want to disqualify this line entirely.

Inkay & Malamar [Gen 6]

No, I didn't skip anything. I doubt I would make a list like this if there were a reasonable number of cephalopokemon.

Inkay and Malamar are somewhere in the squid/cuttlefish zone. Inkay looks more like a cuttlefish and Malamar more like a squid, but they're both stylized enough that you can't really tell the difference between the two without dissecting them and looking for the cuttlebone/pen.

Inkay is...ugh...fine. The two long tentacles look weakly-attacked, and sticking the beak between its eyes bothers the hell out of me, but...I get it. They want Inkay to look appealing to children who haven't learned that non-mammal animals can be cute. Inkay is a cute cartoon face with a squid-shaped cap that trails off into tentacles. Within those design constraints, it's as cuttlefish-like as can be reasonaby expected. It probably deserves a C, like Omanyte.

Then there's Malamar. In case you didn't know, all Pokemon are assigned one of fourteen "body shapes," none of which have official names outside the internal data of a defunct 3DS app. All the other cephalo-pokemon have the "multi-leg shape," but Malamar has the "upright torso shape" (or "arm shape" when Mega-Evolved). And that's the biggest problem with it. Malamar doesn't just have a human-like face; it's human-shaped.

(Well, that's "Two legs and human form shape". But it's more human-shaped than Inkay, or than most "upright torso shape" pokemon.)

Its fins are twisted into dinky little legs. Its tentacles droop down into shoulders and arms. Its arms (squid arms, not arm-analogous tentacles) stay small and spread out to become a wild hairdo. It's a squid contorted into the shape of a person.

And Mega Malamar, like most Mega Evolutions, is a big 'ol tokusatsu monster. Which is fine! It's a normal and fine thing for a pokemon to be. Same deal with humanoid animals. I even like how Malamar turns a squid into a kid.

But there are a total of eight cephalo-pokemon in the entire franchise, covering all orders from Ammonitida to Octopoda, if we count Malamar and Mega Malamar separately. Three of them are basically people in funny costumes. And the best a cephalopod fan like me has is a cartoon face with tentacles.

D, I guess. Or D+.

Clobbopus & Grapploct [Gen 8]

Starting on a positive note: I like octopi! They're my favorite animals. And unlike some mons I could name, Clobbopus and Grapploct both have one siphon on the left side of their bodies, which is how octopi work. Putting an octopus siphon on top/front is like...putting dog ears on the snout or something! Ugh.

I don't like Clobbopus very much, as either a pokemon design or an octopus design. It's a cute cartoon creature, even less octopus-like than Omanyte was ammonoid-like or Inkay was cuttlefish-like. But it's not even appealing; it's just lumpy. And why does it have boxing gloves when it evolves into a wrestler?

Speaking of which, Grapploct starts off strong with a very octopus concept. Octopi aren't physically imposing, but they are flexible and have great grip strength. A fighting monster based on an octopus should be a wrestler rather than a striker. And the luchadore mask is a fun touch, both for its own sake and because of how colorful octopi can be.

The design makes a good first impression, too. Its "head" actually looks like a stylized octopus mantle, not like an octopus drawn by someone who only knows octopi from video games that use them as marine turrets. And while its stance does make it more "humanoid," it still clearly has an octopus-like body plan. It doesn't have legs or feet, it has three tentacles holding onto the ground.

...but then you notice that the tentacles have two suckers each, big undefined circles. And worse, its body plan isn't actually octopus-like. It clearly has an elongated torso between the head and tentacles, a solid mass which is clearly not the mantle. That moves it from "octopus mimicking a human stance" to "person in a funny costume".

Grapploct is still my favorite cephalo-pokemon design. But it still has too many details which bug me, because Game Freak isn't willing to commit to what makes cephalopods different from other animals. Grapploct and Malamar and especially Octillery think of them as having "heads" in front and "bodies" in back, while Inkay and Clobbopus are basically just heads with tentacles attached.

The latter is closer to the truth, but it still refuses to accept the truth: That cephalopod body plans do not cleanly map onto tetrapod ones! Only Omanyte and Omastar figured that out, and I suspect it's because of the shells. There's something snail-like about how their tentacles flow out the bottom of their shells, and I guess that familiar land mollusk helped them ground those designs.

...anyways. Despite everything, I want to give Grapploct a B+, maybe an A-. The issues are easy to overlook if you don't pay too much attention. But Clobbopus being so mediocre (and also having nothing in common with Grapploct except "martial octopus") drags the whole line down to something like a C+ or B-.

Would I ever give any cephalopod pokemon an A grade? Well, it's possible. It should be possible to make an octopus or cuttlefish or nautilus that actually looks like a real cephalopod while also looking like a pokemon. Omanyte is almost there; make its tentacles longer and drop the evolution, and I think it would be an A-grade ammonoid.

And it's not like the series has run out of cephalopod ideas. The evolution lines so far have been "ammonoid," "???," "squid that evolves by turning upside-down," and "wrestler octopus". There are many other options!

I would love a good psychic octopus. And Psychc-types tend to look weird, which is a perfectly good excuse to double down on everything that makes octopodes seem alien to us. Or you could do something with a mimic octopus, or a Poison-type blue-ring octopus, or even something that isn't an octopus.

Anyways, let me know what you think. But before you bring up a cephalo-pokemon you think I forgot, jellyfish are medusazoans (not even bilaterians!) and Shelmet is called the Snail Pokemon.

[alex-fictus]

My Carboniferous!

Meganeura - Arthropleura - Tully Monster

Falcatus - Edestus - Acanthodes

Stethacanthus - Squatinactus - Rhizodus

Megarachne - Pederpes - Edaphosaurus

Diplocaulus - Goniatitic Ammonoid (Goniatites) - Conodont

Crinoid - Rugose Coral - Conulariid

Stickers || Phone Wallpapers Masterlist

Planned or in the works: Cyclida, Essexella, Ophiacodon, Allenypterus

[cartooningsss]

[tff-praefectus]

Famennian ammonoids