Thia's Thesaurus @thiasthesaurus - Tumblr Blog

Videodrome (1983) concept art / Rick Baker

Renders of the eel's full body by molly brown

Here’s some sketches exploring one of my ideas for the creature from “The Terror” by Dan Simmons, and how I imagined it could work as a supernatural element while still able to be mistaken for a polar bear at a glance or in the distance.

poligon-sticker

a knight who was once a witch

doctordune

canmom

I've had trouble tracking down the original photographers, but these mostly appear to be pictures of the blast furnaces in Belgium (called things like Haut-Fourneau 4/6/B etc.); here are some other pictures of HFB, of HF4 Charlenoi, and some of HF6 Seraing, by other urban explorers. the first picture is probably cables for an arc furnace, I saw one Instagram post claim it was in Canada but it didn't seem to be the original.

ozth

found this three year old draft buried in my files. is it funny? I don't remember

wispsofwhimsy

no no you’re on to something don’t leave this in the notes!

themaniacisinthemailbox

muffinpines

The short was made by MelodySheep

jareckiworld

Teofil Ociepka (1891-1978) — The Eye of Providence [oil, canvas, 1962]

fishwife-hiwaaranit

I genuinely feel like I’m going insane sometimes

fishwife-hiwaaranit

Some more of my thoughts and a sketch page of myself because I love me

1five1two

titleknown

mrevaunit42

The lovers, the dreamers and me:

animentality

#the vast

grozat

unicorn sticker sheet!

a-dinosaur-a-day

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

parttimepunner

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

a-dinosaur-a-day

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

a-dinosaur-a-day

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

adeptarcanist

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

a-dinosaur-a-day

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

im-flashtoo

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

a-dinosaur-a-day

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

i-draws-dinosaurs

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

ferncube

Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!

Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??

a-dinosaur-a-day

Anxiety over all the prehistoric organisms we’ll never know, meet your big sibling: anxiety over all the prehistoric ECOSYSTEMS we’ll never know