And now the final species for the Walking with Dinosaurs redux series, very fittingly the ancestor of the protagonist for the first episode of Walking with Beasts, the first of the lepticidans. That said, lepticidans are now thought to be paraphyletic and Gypsonictops is known only from teeth, so the entire thing is su...
2023-08-20 23:05:35 +0000 UTC View Post
This one moves slightly beyond Walking with Dinosaurs into its sequel, Walking with Beasts. Not the entire series though, just the prologue that uses stock footage from WWD to show that mammals were oppressed by dinosaurs until the asteroid hit. One of this small mammals shown living alongside Tyrannosaurus and Ankylos...
2023-08-20 22:58:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The pugnacious, Tasmanian devil/badger/dog stem-marsupial animal thing that is a continuous and ever increasing presence in the episode. Of course, now we know that it wasn't nearly as Tasmanian devil/badger/dog-like in appearance as initially believed, as they only had teeth and a disassociated skull to go off of at the time, and more complete ...
2023-08-20 22:17:22 +0000 UTC View Post
This represents the small dead mammal that was gassed to death by the volcanic fumes in that one scene. Not species was given so I just picked a smallish, possum-like mammal from Hell Creek. This genus also appeared in the Walking with Dinosaurs movie.
2023-08-20 22:12:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Making a short appearance in the episode is an early snake (played by a modern day boa constrictor), its appearance has nothing to do with dinosaurs, but it's just to show that snakes were one of the newer groups of reptiles to appear on Earth (comparatively speaking). Indeed, early ophidians were beginning to experience their first true radiati...
2023-08-20 08:24:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Because I want to be comprehensive, the fish that the Quetzalcoatlus catches is included here too. If the scene were remade, the pterosaur would be catching the fish like a wading stork or heron in the shallows rather than plucking it from the water mid-flight. The fish isn't identified, probably because it was just meant to be a generi...
2023-08-20 06:47:40 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the more unusual choices for this episode was the random insertion of a giant unnamed crocodilian that just appears to menace the lake shore. Supplementary material identifies this crocodilian as Deinosuchus, but there are a few issues with this. For one, Deinosuchus isn't known from the Maastrichtian, it's a strictly Ca...
2023-08-20 04:47:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Another one of the series' recycled animals and probably the laziest one yet; it's the Othnielia from the Morrison Formation episode, and they didn't even bother to change the colour. It isn't even identified on-screen or in any media (the American dub states they're Hypsilophodon, but that doesn't make any sense given the vast...
2023-08-19 10:42:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Here we get into taxa which were not known to have existed at the time of original production, the unnamed dromaeosaur of the episode (a palette swap of the Utahraptor, itself an enlarged Deinonychus), which was identified in supplementary media as Dromaeosaurus. It was probably not called that by name in the episode b...
2023-08-19 05:22:48 +0000 UTC View Post
With a wingspan of up to eleven metres across, standing as tall as a giraffe, and potentially weighing more than seven-hundred pounds, this is one of the largest animals to ever take flight, only rivalled by a few closely related (and contemporary) azhdarchids like Hatzegopteryx and Arambourgiania. Its skull alone was about eig...
2023-08-18 08:29:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The species depicted in the show as Anatotitan, but the name has since been sunk into the genus Edmontosaurus, joining a long line of dubious hadrosaurs, such as Trachodon, Anatosaurus, and (later) Ugrunaaluk. Which is too bad because Anatotitan was a pretty good name. This was the most commo...
2023-08-17 08:02:12 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most famous dinosaur genera and extremely successful and widespread during the Mid to Late Maastrichtian across Laramidia. This was possibly the very largest ceratopsian species, reaching up to nine metres in length and over ten metric tonnes. Every stage of life is known, from near-hatchlings to gigantic old adults, with skulls 3 met...
2023-08-16 06:06:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Young Torosaurus have never been discovered, so this one is based primarily on baby Triceratops, with slight modifications (namely a smaller nose horn and longer frill). Interestingly about Triceratops growth, the babies hatch with nubs that grow into upward-curving horns, which then begin to curve downwards as they approach ad...
2023-08-15 03:12:27 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the last and largest of the ceratopsians, Torosaurus had a massive frill, and the largest known skull of any land animal in Earth's history, at up to three metres in length. The genus has a complicated taxonomic history regarding its potential synonymity with Triceratops, but most recent research supports its status as a...
2023-08-14 21:26:28 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most heavily-fortified animals to have ever lived, this was probably the largest of the thyreophorans, with size estimates ranging between 7-11 tonnes and up to 9 metres in length. Even its eyelids were augmented into bony shutters, and of course its tail ended in a heavy, bony club which could be more than two feet wide. The tendons ...
2023-08-13 06:21:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Since the T. rex babies are also a not insignificant part of the episode, I'll include them here too. Despite tyrannosaur babies commonly appearing in popular dinosaur media, disappointingly little is actually known of them. In fact, the only verifiable tyrannosaur infant fossils were only described in 2021 and consists of an isolated j...
2023-08-11 21:54:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Here we move on to the sixth and final episode of this seminal series. The age of the dinosaurs draws to a close, a cosmic haymaker is on its way to bring an explosive end to the Mesozoic Era. So what other choice was there than to focus on Hell Creek, the locale with the most recognizable dinosaurs ever? And of those, they just could not resist...
2023-08-11 07:33:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Once a frozen wasteland, the south pole of Serina is now a lush, subtropical rainforest enjoying continuous heavy precipitation and twenty-four hours of sunlight a day in the summer (at the cost of twenty-four hours of darkness in the winter). Enjoying this bounty are the countless organisms which have rafted, flown, or swam to this unspoilt Ede...
2023-08-11 02:04:05 +0000 UTC View Post
At the apex of the hothouse age there roam herds of the largest animals that have ever tread upon Serina’s surface, mountains of flesh and bone unmatched in scale by any terrestrial vertebrates since the Mesozoic Era on Earth. This has resulted in the evolution of truly massive carnivores to take on such immense prey; during this period, the t...
2023-08-09 22:29:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Concept art of a bone-crushing skuorc predator primarily inspired by Erythrosuchus (particularly the very large head in proportion to its body), and secondarily by sebecosuchians. This sketch was done on March 6th, 2022, and became the basis for both the skuagator and the skuyena.
2023-08-08 09:07:38 +0000 UTC View Post
This was the initial drawing of the snake-necked pretenguin done back in November 30th/December 1st of 2021, but I thought the pose was really awkward and it wasn't that interesting looking as a concept, so I redid the whole thing (although the gupgop stayed the same). I'm not even sure it was called the "snake-necked pretenguin" back when I dre...
2023-08-08 08:57:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Sponsored commission for a vultrorc species known as the blue devil (seen in the background of the Dragon Attack illustration, commissioned by the same guy). Illustration shows one adult facing off against two adolescents over a skulossus carcass.
(it got cut off a bit in some parts, since paper is only so big and a fixed size, but t...
2023-08-02 08:38:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Pufferpus (Sepiavis pernix)
The jetsquids are one of the more recently evolved groups within the subterranean biosphere (by the sluggish evolutionary standards of this environment), and have have only split off into two different species in this time, the larger jetter and the smaller pufferpus, which together occ...
2023-07-31 20:23:01 +0000 UTC View Post
A number of initial pencil sketches which were used for Diyu. As you can tell, some of the designs ended up being revised, many pertain to organisms which were never shown, while you can probably recognize several others which did get used for the final product (including a large number of dartfish, brachiopods, the moasquid, and the planimals)....
2023-07-30 06:42:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Due to their jet propulsion-based method of locomotion, the jetguppies are inherently at a disadvantage compared to other fish and snarks in flowing freshwater environments, limiting them to the ocean. However, there is one unique species which has managed to escape the sea, and not in the way that one might expect, as it has in fact escaped the...
2023-07-29 08:42:32 +0000 UTC View Post
