Meiolaniidae
So honestly I'm relatively new to digital painting. I sketched a little here and there, made skeletals, but actual painting I've done very little. But I ended up putting this together for my work on the Wikipedia page for meiolaniid turtles. (Yes the Ninjemys colours are a reference to it being named after the TMNT)
I've rambled a bit about them before, but basically, meiolaniids are weird stem-turtles thought to be outside the two main modern groups we have. They were decently large animals, their shells alone range from 1 meter to 2 meters in length (3 to 6ft I believe?), they were land animals, had some crazy horns and tails that were encased in spiky armored rings and tipped with a tail club. Here some photos with paleontologist Victoria Arbour, a Ninjemys tail club photographed by Serjoscha Evers and a Meiolania tail club illustrated by W.H. Wesley.
They were found throughout almost the whole Cenozoic, with the oldest form dating to the Eocene of South America and the most recent ones living from the Pleistocene to Holocene in Australia and on various South Pacific Islands. They are honestly pretty cool animals and super underrated, which is why I decided to give their wikipedia pages upgrades in the first place. Which also meant doing a bunch of other illustrations (that I was more in tune with) and pulling a bunch of public domain photos and putting them on wikimedia. Here some skeletals and charts I made, open the last pic, it shows multiple different Meiolania species atop each other.
The results were pretty mixed tbh. Some of the most recent forms, Gaffneylania, Warkalania and even Ninjemys had relatively little to write about. But things were more exciting with Niolamia (if you remember my rant about its messed up history). Meiolaniidae itself was just a big summary of all the other stuff, but easily the most extensive was Meiolania itself, which took AGES to research and put togehter. Tho I'm pretty happy with the result. Here's a little side by side, old and new.
