My other constant companion

During those dreary Sydney days, while Aquiline carried my spirit, my car carried my body. It is a character, having colletcted many names over time including "The Little Red Terror," "Little Red Devil" and "The Red Velocipede." This beast here is a 1985 Nissan Pulsar:

I am the third generation of the family to own this car. My great Aunt and Uncle bought it off a friend when it was 6 months old and they kept it until they died in about 2008, after which it was passed onto my Uncle Darryl in their will. My Father bought it off him for a grand and gave it to me. It had spent the vast majority of its life in a garage and was generally only used to go to the shops and back. It has hardly a rust on the body and the paint is hardly faded. However, it had a lot of aged parts that I have had to replace over time. It had no functional handbrake, cracked exhaust manifold gasket, leaking rear brake cylinders and ball joints so worn that you'd have to be a weightlifter to steer it. I have had grown men asking me how I manage with it. As I have gone through with repairs, it has become very reliable and it only broke down on me once because the original 25 year old radiator packed in. It did not have reliable indicators when I got it and the culprit was copper corrosion on the connections in the hazard light button. I also had o glue the frontpassenge window back onto the bracket because the glue had perished.

Whenever I felt stressed I would go out and sit with the car and perhaps give it a wash or do some other work on it. To me the car represents safety. I survived a fair amount of domestic abuse by housemates during my time in Sydney and if I did not have the car, I would have been dead by now because wouldn't have the ability to escape fom these dangerous situations. For me, this little old car that no-one else wanted and many people told me to dump, was my ticket out of the wretched place called Sydney. I was born in Sydney but I did not belong there. The Sydney I was born into did not exist anymore anyway. Back in the late 80's and early 90's people stil had pet sheep in their backyards. When people are alone they tend to personify things and to me there is no experience more isolating than being in a sea of people. My Little Red Terror grew eyes and ears. I do swear that driving it is more like managing an animal because you have to understand the sound of the engine closely to know when it wants to shift gears. It is noisy for its size and has a good thoaty purr to it.

This is the cockpit of my red rocket. The only modern feature it has is an automatic choke. It only has an AM radio, no cassette player even. There is no air conditioning, so it roasts in summer by virtue of its greenhouse inducing sloping frontand back windcreens. My late uncle bolted the mini fan to the floor and it does help a bit. The fuel gauge gave up at about 17,000 km. I can tell this because there are notepads in the glove box that record the mileage so that one can calculate fuel consumption. I am still doing that now because it has no trip meter nd I have not found a spare fuel sender unit.

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 Filippino chicken breeds there. They oven 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 causght my attention was the Japanese O-Shamo. This drawing was done in the Science Library of the Sandy Bay Campus of the University of Tasmania. This was when I was doing my bachelor's degree. The year was 2008.

My constant companion

I did this drawing in 2011 when I was writing my Honours thesis: ,

It actually took me two years to complete because of my workload. Honours was a torturous time for me. The only thing that drove me forward was my dreams and aspirations. Drawing is the process by which I consolidate wh I am. The drawing is a process of my being. This was not being respected during my time in Sydney and this is the major reason why I am not living there. Aquiline is my alter ego and in this life, which has been a solitary psychic struggle until quite recently, Aquiline is my inner shadow self, a large part of my spirit. When I draw Aquiline I feel what it is like to be Aquiline. I feel the power in his muscles and the fluidity of his movement. His body taut like a coiled spring and ready for action, is pelt glimmering and metallic like flowing thick water. Aquiline's eyes are forever watchful, missing nothing inthe darkness in the void that is the underbelly of human nature, and challenging what is dangerous with their firey crimson hue. I feel unity and harmony within myself. I kept looking at this drawing regularly to remind myself of my personal power and that no-one could beat me into submission or make me become anything that was not true to my nature. I gave the original away but I did scan it before doing so. I printed out a copy and pinned it to a kitchen cupboard. In the morning it looks really awesome because I made kitchen curtains out of shock which is an aquamarine colour with a yellow metallic sheen. During this time,the kitchen is bathed in the colour and energy of Aquiline. It feels good to see that my psychic self has a physical expression, a space were it can be visible without having to fight for the right to be.

Riversleigh-Where Nimbacinus came from

I thought I'd give a word about the fossil site where the Nimbacinus skeleton I studied was found. The Riversleigh World Heritage Area is in northwest Queensland, in the Gulf Country. Not many Australians know about it, but it is one of the most significant fossil sites in the country. The rocks literally bristle with bones out there and the level of preservation is exceptional, being three dimensional. There is little evidence of distortion. Many small, delicate fossils that often don't preserve, are very abundant, like these bat bones, below. In the centre of the photo, you can see a bat jawbone:

I went to Riversleigh in 2008 and took these photos. The fossils found date from the Oligocene to the present and the processes that preserved those fossils are still continuing today. Riversleigh is a karst system. This is a geological term for caves. Among the oldest rocks in the area are Cambrian (about 500 million year old) limestones that don't appear to have fossils in them. The rainwater, being slightly acidic due to the carbon dioxide in it, which when dissolved in water becomes carbonic acid. This is the same stuff that makes your fizzy drinks fizzy. It is quite good at dissolving calcite into solution, which can be observed if you drop one your baby teeth in a glass of Coke and leave it there for a very long time. It will eventually disappear, not because the tooth fairy got it, but because the calcium in the tooth has gone into the solution. This creates cavities underground where groundwater flows The calcium in the water gets redeposited in other areas, often on other calcite surfaces. This is how all those amazing structures in caves grow and when the calcite gets deposited over bone, it eventually covers it over and preserves in in three dimensional form. Over time the cave may get filled up by this process or the process of dissolving the limestone may cause the roof of the cave to collapse, creating a sinkhole. Animals may fall into these holes where they perish and their bones get preserved this way. This is the likely way that the Nimbacinus skeleton was fossilised. Nimbacinus was recovered from a massive sinkhole. There are many sinkholes and other fossil deposits in Riversleigh, which are all considered different fossil sites and each site has a name. The site where the study skeleton was found was called AL90. but on the tireless quest for fossils using sledge hammers and explosives, Nimbacinus was found. It was isolated in a large rock of its own, from about 30 Nimbadon lavarackorum skeletons of all ages and sizes. It was found curled up like a sleeping dog, like as if it has realised there was no escape from the sinkhole and had given up. Nimbadon were sheep sized wombat-like creatures, one of the now extinct zygomaturine diprotodontids. The site was originally a flat, level surface, but is now a massive hole in the ground, which is affectionately called "The Swimming Pool;" which you can see below:

This photo (above) also illustrates what Riversleigh looks like in present times. When Nimbacinus was alive it was a lush rainforest, remnants of which can be found clinging to the nearby Gregory River:

Nimbacinus dicksoni

Until now, life has moved at such a violent pace that I have not been able to return to this blog until now. I am nearly 26 and my life is completely different to the circumstances I was living in back in 2009. It feels like another world. In April 2008, my Mother died and my immediate family entirely fragmented. Since that point, until quite recently, I was very much alone in my struggles. At the end of 2009, I gradated with a Bachelor of Science with majors in geology and zoology from the University of Tasmania. I then relocated to Sydney to complete my Honour's year in vertebrate palaeontology, which will be the subject of this post. The course is only supposed to take a year, but due to untold dramas including assault and homelessness and the general incompetance of people and the system, I emerged, at the end of 2011, in triumph with a grade of 2nd Class 1st Division and this reconstruction of Nimbacinus dicksoni:

Nimbacinus was a 15 million year old thylacinid, which are a group of carnivorous marsupials that resembled canids because they evolved to follow similar lifestyles, not because they were closely related. They only became extinct fairly recently, in 1936, when the last Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. (I used to drive passed the remains of this zoo every time I went to university in Tasmania.) The Tasmanian tiger, (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the largest Australian marsupial carnivore and was approximately the size of a German Shepard dog. It was called a tiger because of the dark stripes it bore on its hindquarters. Here is a photo of the late Tasmanian tiger:

The title of my thesis is Postcranial morphology of Nimbacinus dicksoni (Thylacinidae: Marsupialia) and a discussion of the functional morphology of the limbs. That may seem like a daunting mouth full but all it means is that I described all the bones of this animal except for the skull, which was already described by Steve Wroe and Anne Musser in 2001, and I discussed how it may have used its limbs when it was alive. I also did a head reconstruction of Nimbacinus based on figure 3 of Steve Wroe and Anne Musser's cranial description.

A large part of the requirements of the work was that I produce stippled drawings of all the bones of Nimbacinus and of the Tasmanian tiger and described them anatomically in the text. Here is the ventral vew of the pelvis of the Tasmanian tiger:

Overall, I had to produce nearly 60 of these such images, each bone was illustrated in anywhere from three to five different angles to demonstrate their significant features. I did an average of three drawings a day for nearly six months. I concluded that Nimbacinus was not just a miniture Tasmanian tiger. The former was about the size of a fox. Proportionately, Nimbacinus had stronger forelimbs, so whatever it did in terms of hunting, it was consuming different prey than the Tasmanian tiger and possibly doing a lot of grappling with it. The Tasmanian tiger, on the other hand, was more of a pursuit predator that chased small wallabies.

The CAVAPS logo for 2009

This is the logo for CAPVAPS, the Conference on Australasian Vertebrate Evolution, Palaeontology and Systematics. The design is by Katie Huang but it is based on the Thylacoleo I drew on my zoology practical book back in 2007. You can see the original in it's context below.

I was invited to attend these event and listen to palaeontologists talk about their research but unfortunately I was not able to go because it clashed with my exams. It was a real pity because I lost an opportunity to put myself forward as a future palaeontologist and a palaeo-artist. I regard this as my first big break and I don't get to promote myself!!!! I hope that Henk Godthelp will be kind to me and put in a good word for me. Henk has been so good to me as my contact in the University of New South Wales.

Prodraco reddiegoniensis

I am perfect.
Your thoughts are irrelevant.
You don’t count.
I am a mighty Reddiegonian Dragon.

Point is,
you can’t sway me.
See my crocodile jaws,
I can snap a horse in half.

Must admit,
Frying you would amuse me more.
Smell the pungent aroma of singeing live meat,
with smoking, flared nostrils.
Hear shrill, uncanny, moribund squeals,
with sabre-shaped ears.
See the dying writhe in flames,
with blood hued eyes.

Why?
There is no why.

I Kill, therefore I am.
Purposeful, just Lord Flickertongue
gifted me as embodiment of Death.

A predator?!
No!
I am more!
Predators kill to eat.
I Kill because I can,
because it’s ecstasy.

And I will Kill and Kill and Kill,
until nothing remains.
For I am more than Death.
I am Total Destruction.