albertavenator

[albertavenator]

If anyone wants to know what a leopard seal sounds like 🦷🩸

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Living the good life on Lake Lucerne

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Picture of John trying to trick Arthur in killing Oscar, because he didn't like how close they were growing. Arthur will later rationalize it saying that it was not John's fault because he was not understanding the weight of his actions. This is extremely toxic and I love it. I wish there were more instances where John would try to get Arthur to do fucked up things.

Image ID under the cut

[Image ID: Arthur is wielding an axe with two hands. John is behind him. He covers Arthur’s eyes with one hand and with the other points down at something outside the frame of the image. END ID]

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Flirting bastards

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Finished sketch commission!! I've realized I love drawing stuffies they're so fucking CUTE!!

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Other sketch requests from discord, insta, and bluesky that were filled on stream! As I said I was a bit bombarded with last minute requests (which is fine! I’m happy about that!) but I think what that means is that I’ll be doing a second stream this coming Thursday at the same time (4pm est) to get through the rest of them.

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horf shenanigans for @elodieunderglass

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✨Pigeon penits✨

Love how these turned out!! They'll be in our drop this Thursday 💕

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Oh shit one of our mowers got stuck in the mud.

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Nest of Pikachu by Diane Özdamar

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A desperate Allosaurus fragillis trying to figure out how to take down a full-grown Supersaurus vivianae without dying in the process. Late Jurassic Colorado

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Oh BOY! Story time! All the way back in 2016, on our way back from Munich for a EAVP meeting Sven Sachs got a mail by Georg Göltz, attached were some first images of an incredible specimen. That evening we went over the material again and again...

I remember saying, "well, that looks like a large owl feather" and oh boy... Some time after Sven got Johan Lindgren and Dean Lomax on board who likewise recognized the importance of the fossil and made it happen that all the necessary tests were done to ensure that...

We would get as much information out of the specimen as possible! Now, quite a few years later we can finally show what has been brewing behind the academic curtains for a while.

Temnodontosaurus is a ichthyosaur taxon that is nearly as old of Paleontology itself, and yet, after more than 200 years of research history new details still reveal themselves. This flipper that Georg Göltz found not only showed the flipper outline that was unexpected...

But also revealed completely novel structures that have never been found in a living or extinct animal. Already, kind of, known where the parallel skin grooves that are very visible, even under normal light, but more important are the tiny, light structures on the back of the fin...

These are not bony but cartilaginous in nature and get the new name, chondroderms. These tiny spikes, embedded in the skin, supported a serrated trailing edge that stretched over nearly the full length of the flipper. As closer inspection revealed that these weren't just...

...impressions but that large portions of the skin structure were preserved. Which this wealth of data the researchers were able to do something pretty cool, they could build a digital model of a Temnodontosaurus flipper and test it's properties.

While not that efficient in improving the hydrodynamic properties these structures seem to reduce noise, similar to owl feathers! A puzzle piece that was so far completely absent from any considerations about the livestyle of these early Jurassic predators!

However this fits well to what we already knew. Large eyes, long but robust jaws and stomach content that consists of other fast prey like belemnites and other ichthyosaurs speak for a ambush predator, in this case a silent one.

I became part of this project first as a interested observer but only a few month before it went into review Johan asked me to make some artwork of the press release. As I had a rather tricky perspective in mind I actually build for this a model of Temnodontosaurus.

Eventually a took a shot of the model in a way that satisfied me and I went to finish it digitally. We decided to show it swimming into a swarm of belemnites. The specimen has a small flipper injury to show of better that structure of the fin.

There is much more to say about this fossil but thankfully the paper, published in Nature, is OPEN ACCESS! have a look!

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