Common Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula)

This a typical back of the envelope scribble. Sometimes I think about the form of an animal so much I have to draw it. Here I was thinking about the underlying anatomy and how the possum holds itself with that hunched back. It's kind of like a permanent crouching position. They always look alert with those protruding eyes focusing on multiple distances. Sometime I will have to study these possums better to draw them more realistically, but as yet I have been short of time. As you can see there is significant water damage to this drawing because I spilled a cup of tea onto it! That's the sort of respect my drawings get! :-)

The Common Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) is a very widespread marsupial and it as been able to adapt to an urban existence, adopting any dark cavity for a tree hollow substitute for nesting during the day. The space between the ceiling and the roof is typical. This is an animal the people seem to either love or hate. Some people feed them apples in the night and others evict them from their houses and shoot them. There is great phenotypical variation with Tasmanian animals being larger, woollier and darker. Possums in the north are brighter coppery colours, smaller in size and have shorter fur. In recent years Trichosurus vulpecula has undergone a range contraction in the arid centre of Australia but occurs in high population densities in New Zealand where it is feral.

Various Images of Aquiline

I know that Aquiline has not much to do with pure palao-illustration but this is my reality. I got into palao-illustration because of my alter-ego called Aquiline. I wanted to create a world for him and it has to be believeable. Also, I think this is a great opportunity to boost public awareness of Australian palaeontology! :-) I think people are smart enough to tease apart mythology and truth. Afterall humanity has always needed a legend to make sense of reality. Aquilin is an Imperial Diallonyx (Diallonyx melanofelis imperialis). Being what he is, his relationship with Reddiegonians and the Kadimakara which are the extinct animals of Australia are quite complicated. For every palaeo-illustration I might do nine drawings of Aquiline.

The two drawings above show Aquiline with Rose, the person I am roleplaying with on My Space (http://www.myspace.com/mistyvaleintheforest). The uppermost image is of Aquiline sitting on a rock. I could not concentrate on it so much because I was really supposed to be studying for that Environmental geology exam. I was really focused on how the claws would grip the rock. I was full of tension that day and this is how I release it. I've had a brainwave lately and figured out how the phalanges are positioned under the flesh of the paws. I think it's actually quite similar to possums. The one below that shows Aquiline taking off. He has wings that are quite like swift's wings. At rest they are housed in pouches whose intterior is located in a different dimension. That is why they are not visible when a Diallonyx is on the ground.




These are various pictures of Aquiline's face. It can be difficult to draw him because his face can so easily look vicious but yet there has to be a hint of kindness to him. I suppose the best place to put this is in the eyes. Here you can also see a little picture of the head of a Muttaburrasaurus langdoni. I really like this animal, I think it has equine grace. I look forward to working on it more. You can also see the skeleton of a drawing of a person on the left.



Here I was trying to illustrate the very odd shape of a Nothosaurus to a friend. I could not really remember it well and I've put the wrong number of temporal holes in it's skull. I didn't have any reference at the time, I was on an Environemental geology field trip. That was the most depressing trip I went to. We went to the Strahan and saw the King River delta. It was totally dead. There was no sign of life anywhere and it was totally silent. Everything had been killed by the toxic acid mine drainage and the entire area was covered in a moonscape of tailings orange due to the rusting of iron. There was not even a single bird call or a scrap of algae. n some places an unknown white substance oozed out of the ground like pus from a wound on the face of the Earth. I really hated that subject.

In this picture, on the right, you can also see a top view of Aquiline's head comeplete with his whiskers.

Prodraco reddiegoniensis

The Reddiegonian Dragon or Reswobian Swift Crocodile (Prodraco reddiegoniensis) are animals the occupy the North West of Reswobia, where they live in a gigantic caldera and the surrounding desert with it's shifting sand dunes. Visibility is very poor here because of the volcano puffing aways as well as the dragons themselves producing oily fumes due to the actions of their fire breathing apparatus. They are the genetically modified products of Flickertongue whose main purposes are to dig up the global crsut and allow the magma to take over the land and evaporate the sea. That is the way the legend goes anyway, whether Flickertongue and Psycorn exist is a matter of contention. Most in Reswobia don't believe this to be true.

Prodraco has long legs rather like a horse with a long tail that ends in a whiplash. There are spines that line the back and they have an erectile spiky frill. they not only have bat-like wings but bat-like ears and a nose leaf. Due to the limited visibility of their home they do tend to make use of echolocation to navigate their world. They have throat pacth with has an eye spot for display purposes. Generally they are red all over but it tends to fade into yellow on the underside. Above is an image of a young dragon. (The other creature below it is an ornithomimosaur complete with a beak). It is another set of images I produced when I was stressing over a maths assignment. The image below is one of an adult dragon that I did back in 2005 that I have included her for comparison. There is a volcano in the background.

My Lecture Folder Scribbles

Ah ha! Now we are getting closer to the core of the psychology of why I do palaeo-illustrations. These drawings are ones I did on the front inside cover of my binder folder that I use to take notes from my lectures. I've had it since I was in grade eight but I was drawing in my lesson notebooks back then. My grade nine maths book is basically an alphabetical treatise on Diallonyx! But that is probably a story for another day if someone wants to hear it.

When I started to go to university I had no lecture books but I do have binder refill paper, which many of my scribblings on ruled paper have been done on. The inside of the folder had a plain white paper liner. Now that blank whiteness was just too tempting, so naturally it has been covered in drawings! Most of these were done during 2006-2007 and generally I guess you could say that it tells the tale of the relationship between Psycorn and Diallonyx. You could say that Psycorn is a Dragon but that is not really an accurate description for what he is. He is a being composed of plasma, super-heated gas. Pure energy. Hence they are often known as "plasma beings." Plasma beings are very ancient and most believe that they have been around since the Big Bang itself. They are also very insecure because they don't have a well defined barrier between themselves and external reality like we do. They don't have cell walls or skin. For this reason they often hide in planets so their energy doesn't dissipate so easily. The plasma being that took up residence in Earth underwent massive trauma when a foreign body approximately the size of Mars collided with the earth 4 billion years ago. The earth was blasted to pieces and when it reformed it had a moon. The plasma being was also split into pieces that took up residence in different parts of the planet. Here they started to feel threatened by the presence of each other and started to fight because each thought the other was trying to steal its energy. After some time they discovered the uses of genetic modification and started to manipulate animals to fight each other with. The Diallonyx melanofelis species complex is the animal that Psycorn toys around with. Prodraco reddiegoniensis is the plaything of Flickertongue, the other major plasma being in the Reswobian universe (not pictured here).

On the bottom of the page is the dicynodont, Kannemeyeria. Dicynodonts were therapsids or mammal-like reptiles that lived during the Permian and Triassic Periods, a time span between 298 and 205 million years ago. The name dicynodont means "two-dog-teeth." This comes from one of their defining features which is what resembles a pair of fangs on the upper jaw in the position canines would be on a dog. In this case they were on either side of a beak. They are believed to be herbivores and the "canines" or tusks were used to root around for tubers or other subterreanean plant foods. They could have also been used for fighting or defense against predators. Kannemeyeria has been found in South Africa, Argentina and India and in 1985 a quadrate bone was recovered from the early Triassic Arcadia Formation of south-east Queensland showing features similar to Kannemeyeria. This is truly a Gondwanan genus. :-) I find the therapsid body plan a bit akcward to draw at the moment. Their stance is semi-sprawled and they have rather peculiar shoulder pectoral girdles that I can't quite figure out yet. I need to do more research on these animals.

In the bottom left hand corner you can see the skeleton of a therapod dinosaur. This is the framework over which I reconstruct the animal.




This is the back of the folder's inner cover. It is really a lot of random thoughts with a small Dromornis that you can see in the left hand side of the picture. On the far right is the framework of a Diallonyx that I didn't complete because I wasn't happy with it. The legs felt wrong to me.

Dromornis meets Rose

Now that I have Dromornis on my brain, it's going to pop up in random places. I'll be drawing something else and I'll have a mental shift. Then I'll be drawing Dromornis again. Practice makes perfect and I have to be drawing this creature repeatedly. Most of them won't be masterpieces. In this one I didn't like the feet and I thought it felt out of balance. The humanoid that you see here is the character of someone I do a roleplaying game with on My Space which you can see at: http://www.myspace.com/mistyvaleintheforest The name of the character is Rose and she's supposed to be a shadow angel with some elf blood. I have to learn how to draw humans at some stage and I feel more comfortable in fantasy worlds than trying to sketch people's portraits in real life. I have had to fix Rose's image up because I have been told by her creator that she hasn't got pointy ears and she does have lips. She isn't your classical anime type girl it seems. I have publish many other pictures of Rose in my My Space profile at http://www.myspace.com/reswobia However, you do have to have an account yourself to see those pictures.

Dromornis in profile

This is one of the Dromornis stirtoni profiles that I am more pleased with. The haughty expression might suit the bird because if it was carnivorous it would have been on of the largest ones in the ecosystem. It would have been at least the tallest and probably would not take any nonsense from other animals. I imagine it with a vulturine head with bare pink skin that can flush bright scarlet when the bird is angry and blanch when it is frightened. You can see this in living vultures and in turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) gobblers whose bumpy heads can change colour every few seconds with shifting moods. We are going to have a lot of fun!

The O-Shamo

I was roaming around the Science Library looking at random books, as you do, when I happened across a book that was a Catalogue of South-East Asian Poultry. I was quite intrigued. The shape and form of Asiatic chooks seems to be quite a bit different to the rounded bulk of European fowl. My Mother had described the chickens she had grown up with and they had pictures of Filipino chicken breeds there. They often have very long legs and tighter plumage. They are actually more similar to the ancestral red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) which is still reputed to be widespread in the wilds of South-east Asia. One particular chicken breed that caught my attention was the Japanese O-Shamo. These birds were imported to Japan from South-East Asia during the 16th century and their name, Shamo is thought to have been derived from "Siam," suggesting their origins. There are two size classes O-Shamo. The O-Shamo are the large birds which weigh about 5 kilos or more and the Chu-Shamo is the smaller bantum type of bird. This chook is a very savage looking creature. It has a skull that juts forwards and presses down on the eyes, giving them a bullish expression. It has a very upright posture thought to give it an advantage at kicking high and hard. They are very muscular and have that lean, mean appearance. The drumsticks are very meaty and the shoulders are broad with the wings held out slightly. It has a small walnut or peacomb and it has no wattles on its throat. Gamefowl generally don't have these and if they do sometimes they are cut off by the owner because they get ripped during fights (cockfighting is a very cruel sport). When I saw this bird I automatically thought "dromaeosaur." I sketched this bird from that book. It was not a clear photo and I wanted a better view of it. Unfortunately my brother showed up wanting to go home so I couldn't finish this sketch. The expression its face would also give some insights into how I design the eyes of Dromornis. You can see that I have added Dromornis profiles on the bottom left hand corner and played around with these ideas.