#pakicetidae

[onlyscarcelyscaly]

While I work on getting my major projects to a stage where I think they're worth sharing, here's some very loose sketches of five Archaeocetes staring straight down the camera, obviously looking most dignified from this angle. Drawn from memory, probably not quite accurate, nonetheless fun.

Mechanical pencil on paper from Reese's cup packaging, 2025

[whiteleech]

Pakicetus Don't take it too serious. I'm not a paleontologist. It was just for fun! (ancestor of today’s whales)

[mintytrifecta]

[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.

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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.

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Sources:

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