#cynodontia

[roygattero]

Ischigualasto Formation Ink Illustration Series #2:

a probainognathid cynodont is NOT happy with his nap intrusion.

[extinctworld-ua]

Bonacynodon

Bonacynodon — вимерлий рід цинодонтів, що мешкав на території сучасної південної Бразилії в тріасовому періоді (ладиній-карній). Рід монотипний, містить лише типовий вид Bonacynodon schultzi.

Повний текст на сайті "Вимерлий світ":

https://extinctworld.in.ua/bonacynodon/

[synapsidgirl]

So... I’ve been very busy. I still am busy, and don’t really have time for drawing. But I thought I’ll let you guys know I didn’t leave this blog completely. So here’s the last completed artwork I did, back in October, when I thought about doing inktober. Well, that didn’t work out. This guy is Miracinonyx trumani, based on, IIRC, Mauricio Anton’s skeletal reconstruction of this guy, and inspired by a photo of a cheetah running at top speed.

And here’s something I started about two or three weeks ago. I’ve been working on it on and off when I have a bit of spare time, but now I really don’t have any time to finish it, so it’ll probably be quite some time before it’s done.

And that’s, of course, another Thylacoleo carnifex, because I’m just never happy with how I restore this guy. Plus, it’s one of my favourite extinct creatures of all time, so I keep coming back to it. All that said, I think this one is going to be my favourite reconstruction of it once I’m finished, unless I royally mess up in the process.

So, there, I’m alive, I just don’t have any spare time for art :(

Oh, and hello to all my new followers! Somehow there’s over 1000 of you now. I don’t know when that happened, but thank you!

[synapsidgirl]

So here are the newly described Maiopatagium and Vilevolodon. You know, those gliders everyone is talking about lately. Depending on where you place haramiyids*, they can be the first non-mammalian synapsids with gliding adaptations we found. And there’s also third gliding haramiyid, Xianshou, but I haven’t yet gotten my mitts on any reference material on it, so it’s missing from the picture. I’ll try to add it at some point to those two. It’d help the composition, at least.

And I’m sorry, but I’m too discouraged, and feel like someone hit me over the head with a baseball bat, to write anything longer, or even useful, about those two.

*haramiyids are either mammaliaformes, or crown group mammals related to multituberculates.

[synapsidgirl]

Lazy drawing of a miacid Vulpavus. Miacoids were basal carnivorans, and probably ancestors of all living carnivorans. Which makes this guy a (many, many times) great-grand-uncle of cats and dogs*.

Vulpavus lived during the early to middle Eocene in what today is North America. It was a rather small (weighting between 3.9 and 6.6kg), arboreal predator. It seems that at least some Vulpavus species could hunt prey close to them in size: there’s direct evidence, in the form of tooth-marks left on the skull, that Vulpavus hunted an early primate Notharctus (about 4kg), belonging to the stepsirrhini suborder (which includes extant lemuriforms).

All restorations of this guy I saw showed him with kind of weasel-like, short fur. I wanted to make him more fluffy, so here he is. Fluffy Vulpavus. At first I was wondering whether the amount of fluff made sense, considering the Eocene temperatures, but then I remembered that today, there certainly are surprisingly fluffy creatures, living in surprisingly hot places, so I just rolled with it.

Here’s also an equally lazy gif showing how I got from a skull to the fleshed-out creature:

Sources: (x),(x)

[synapsidgirl]

Thylacoleo carnifex going somewhere at night, for some reason.

One way to take the pain out of painting environment: paint night scenes. Preferably on a moonless night :P

[synapsidgirl]

That’s my... probably the fifth, if not the sixth, attempt at Pakicetus. I keep changing the colour scheme, length of fur, shape of the ears, you name it.

Now I’ve decided I don’t want to restore it hairless, or with sparse hair, but with tapir-like coat (as far as the length of the hair is considered). And then I decided to play with texture on the whole painting and didn’t bother with the fur at all.

Pakicetus is one of the oldest known whales, from early Eocene of what’s today Pakistan. It was a piscivore. It displays some adaptations to semi-aquatic lifestyle:

- its eyes are located near the top of the skull

- it has heavy, thickened limb bones, similar to raoellid Indohyus, and modern day hippos. Such heavy (pachyosteosclerotic) bones in modern animals help them stay submerged in deep water, and are usually seen in deep water waders.

- as all cetaceans, it has thickened auditory bulla

Despite thickened bulla, its ears worked like those of terrestrial mammals, with sound waves reaching the eardrum through external opening of the ear, and not traveling along the mandible, as is the case in modern whales. In other words, their ears are a nice example of transitional form: showing some adaptations to underwater hearing, but also sharing some aspects of the hearing mechanism with terrestrial animals.

***

And I’m guessing that’s not the last time I restore that guy, because I’m already thinking about alternative version, with sparser hair.

***

Sources:

(x), (x)

[synapsidgirl]

I’ve been playing with animation lately, and this is the first half-decent one I made. Although I have no idea why the background is sort of glitchy... I also mixed the sound for this (which was pretty fun in its own right).

Basilosaurus doing important, prehistoric whale stuff. At first I wanted the whale to stay in the middle of the screen, and have the illusion of it moving forward created with the background, but... this proved to be far more difficult than I imagined, so I moved the whale instead. Probably shouldn’t have chosen water for my first animation...

I already have an idea for something a bit more complicated, but no clue when I’ll have time to do this.

And as a side note, for some reason the software I’m using doesn’t render video files properly (though it should, and it does for other people), and I have to render every single frame as png and then make them into a movie. Bit annoying.