#anatomy and evolution nerds that are here somehow dont come for my throat ✝

[spotsupstuff]

heyy how do the feeding tentacles work for your ancient interpretations? I saw the recent sparrows art and got curious

well ORIGINALLY i just forcefully shoved them in there cuz yanno how our real life sea anemones (sasanky...) consist of a Tube and at the Beginning of the Tube there's a Hole that is both a Mouth and a Shit Dispenser and then around That are Tentacles and all That funny kush can Retract in some cases... so the Ancients have basically two kinds of tentacles in the head region

the feeding ones:

and then the Funney Ones (these are capable of paralyzation. with the bipedal body plan, only on the head, they are kinda useless but o well):

this is all old drawings but like the concepts are stayin n evolvin for now

the tentacles are mostly leftovers from their time of properly living in water for the better part of their lives in the past (bitches upgraded from Atlantis to land-livin n then sky-livin when the iterators came around). i'm thinkin of doin the higher circle thing with them where the feeding tentacles are forcefully extracted from the genome/operated out, now

the ancients' skull prolly looks smth like this (with some teeth variants, usually according to the part of the world they come from, ya kno the deal):

the cheeks are a mix of muscle and little pouches for the tentacles:

i suppose they should be able to get quite long, now that i think about it! their role is basically to be the tongues of the Ancients, since they don't have any business having ones like us (i like to think their language consists mostly of clicks and then peculiar sounds made in the throat. n i Do know i've drawn Sparrows blepping at least once but can you blame me it's hard to let go of cute bleps). so they taste stuff with them and also can move food deeper into their mouths thanks to the tentacles pushing inside from within their pouches. just like real sea anemones, these things Can grab and move a thing into the mouth, but since the Ancients aren't in a place where the food floats around and have developed hands they don't usually do that anymore

i find the idea of them quite fun overall cuz they remind me of Spearmaster's tail