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jurassic-tales · 4 years

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JURASSIC TRANSFORMERS (Jurassic Park) Name: ‘WHIRLWIND’ Affiliation: Autobot Alt. Mode: Agusta A-109A - InGen Helicopter N293G During the run-up to Jurassic Park’s planned opening, InGen were tight on resources and were unable to procure the vehicles needed to give the assessment team a full tour. The Autobots offered two keen volunteers to assist with operations...One of whom was an aerial-bot called ‘Whirlwind’. Whirlwind generally had an easy-going, laid back attitude, often going with the flow where ever the winds of change took him. So much so, that he nearly let the opportunity to work with an island full of dinosaurs slip by him...Only on a second look did he see that InGen needed a helicopter to take teams to and from the island. Having casually browsed through humankind’s history of aviation, he was fascinated by how helicopters operated and was keen to try it out himself...’why not’, he thought to himself. Whilst Expo arrived at Isla Nublar a day before the assessment team were due, Whirlwind was needed sooner; he took several days to transport key members of staff to and from the island, Costa Rica and the classified island known only to him as ‘Site B’, the latter of which he was asked to keep quiet about...But that didn’t phase him; he went with the flow and was happy with only what he needed to hear. Amongst his VIP passengers were Dr. Henry Wu, Dennis Nedry, Ray Arnold and the Lockwoods, a father and daughter duo who knew Hammond well, but were not heard from again after their one visit...Another temporary case of curiosity for Whirlwind but as with Site B; if he needed to know, they’d inform him. But it was a trip to the United States that gave him his most important role yet; transporting the assessment team, along with John Hammond himself. During the journey to the island, Whirlwind was amused with the conversations aboard, especially between Hammond and the eclectic Dr. Malcolm. But as Isla Nublar came into view, Whirlwind was guided by the pre-planned route that Hammond designed, rather than the quickest and most efficient, so the visitors could have the best views possible for most dramatic effects...Hammond was ever the showman before they even landed. After dropping the team off at the helipad, Whirlwind immediately set off to pick up his next couple of passengers from the airport in Costa Rica; Hammond’s grandchildren, Lex and Tim Murphy. Their journey to the island wasn’t overseen by Hammond, so this time he took the less extravagant, more direct route...A decision he was glad he made; the kids were too excitable for him and the snacks they had for the trip made a bit of a mess in his interior...! Whirlwind remained on the Isla Nublar helipad. After the support crew helped to clean out the interior, the Autobot didn’t have much planned until it would be time for the assessment team to leave. He was able to kick back and share stories with his human colleagues, who in turn let him know how Wrangle, who had been on the islands for several years at this point, was a valued member of the team. They also encouraged Whirlwind to scan through radio stations so he could check out some (human) music...He was especially taken with psychedelic and prog rock... The chill would come to an abrupt end when they learned that Hurricane Clarissa was fast approaching the island...Air travel was going to be far too risky and the majority of staff were going to be evacuated by boat. The order came through for everyone to get to the dock as soon as they could...Whirlwind encouraged his crew to go on ahead, as he would be able to take the beating and catch up with them later. That very night, the worst of the hurricane had passed, but the rains were still strong; Whirlwind was selecting appropriate music to play, such as ‘Riders on the Storm’, when he saw that the lights surrounding the helipad had gone. He transformed and scanned the area; no power...Not even from the nearby perimeter gate. Something was wrong. He tried to reach someone through his radio; dead...He wanted to stay in case anybody would need to reach the helipad, but he also wanted to take off to find out what was wrong, despite the poor weather... ‘This is why I prefer to go with the flow’ he thought, flustered by his dilemma. Whirlwind ended up making a decision; he took off. The heavy rain was starting to ease, but it wasn’t ideal flying conditions...All across the island, his scanner picked up lifeforms in various places, hardly any of them human. ‘This is bad’ he thought, comparing his scans with the layout of the facilities... ‘all the dinos are going where they ain’t supposed to be’. He also checked on the Energon signatures of his Autobot comrades, Wrangle and Expo...Until one started to flicker...It was Expo at the Tyrannosaur paddock. Whirlwind picked up speed and fought the storm to try and get there as fast as he could, but lightning struck him; he span out of control towards the ground below... The following morning, Whirlwind had washed up the bank of the lake in the Brachiosaur enclosure...He was jolted awake by a Parasaurolophus blaring its morning call, like a rooster with a trumpet. Whirlwind crawled up onto the grass and inadvertently scared the Parasaur herd away. He checked his scanner; only one Energon signature...He transformed and took off towards where he last saw Expo... Whirlwind hovered above the remains of the Tyrannosaur paddock; the fence was destroyed, a restroom was obliterated and the only vehicle visible, Tour Vehicle 05, had been abandoned. He scanned over the fence and detected traces of Energon...He swooped down the drop and on the ground, Expo’s body lay in a mess, savaged by the Tyrannosaur. He saw human footprints leading away from the car...In his sorrow for his comrade, he was glad to know that Expo protected humans until the very end. Whirlwind payed his respects; ‘Til all are one’ he mournfully recited, before he took off to seek out the other Energon signal. At the garage near the Visitors’ Centre, Whirlwind arrived to find Jeep 12; Wrangle. He was happy to see Wrangle alive, but had to tell him that Expo had gone...This didn’t help Wrangle’s mood, who was still upset at being somewhat responsible for a human death...Whirlwind tried to convince him to help out the other people that are still in danger. After a moment, Wrangle agreed to track down the Velociraptors, as it was the smaller carnivores he knew could be the most dangerous for humans. Whirlwind tracked the T. Rex and found her finishing off a Gallimimus. Three human signals were being picked up but he couldn’t tell exactly where they were as they were already deep in the nearby jungle...As such he made sure that the Rex didn’t follow them by being a distraction, as a vulture is to a lion. But eventually Whirlwind heard a power surge over the radio; electricity had been restored to the park. He tried contacting people again; on channel two he picked up a woman’s voice; it was Dr. Ellie Sattler...She sounded distraught and out of breath. Whirlwind wasn’t sure if she knew about the Cybertronians, so he just said that it was ‘the chopper team’...Ellie told them to have the chopper ready to go. And then her radio signal dropped...Whirlwind told Wrangle to get to her position ASAP. Thankfully Wrangle was nearby; he found Ellie’s radio, which looked like it had been ditched...And then he found Robert Muldoon’s savaged corpse. Wrangle took a moment to rip off his soft Jeep-roof (therefore his ‘cape’) to cover his fallen human comrade. And then, finding Velociraptor tracks, radio’d Whirlwind to tell him that the Velociraptors are tracking the humans to the Visitors’ Centre. Whirlwind still had eyes on the Tyrannosaur and then had an idea...He told Wrangle that they need to lure the Rex to the Centre...Wrangle fired a flare into the air. Success; the Rex saw the bright red light in the distance and started heading towards it with an almighty roar. Whirlwind told Wrangle that it’s working and to make sure she’s heading in the right direction. He also told Wrangle that according to the radio chatter, there are two survivors (Hammond and Malcolm) in an underground bunker that need a pick-up and one of them’s incapacitated with an injury. Meanwhile, Whirlwind himself would take off and fly as fast as he could to the helipad. He found that his ground crew decided to remain on the island after all, which was handy, as the survivors would need all the human help they could get. Sure enough, he saw Wrangle speeding towards the helipad with all the surviving humans available; the ground crew helped Malcolm board the helicopter with his broken leg. Hammond took one last look at his dream before Wrangle transformed to tell them he’ll look after what’s left of the place. Whirlwind took flight with the six survivors on board...The humans had been through a lot and, despite some of them being absolutely filthy from their time in the jungle, Whirlwind didn’t mind...Especially since the kids were fast asleep.

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 6 years

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Deinonychus antirrhopus

By Ripley Cook

Etymology: Terrible Claw

First Described By: Ostrom, 1969

Classification: Dinosauromorpha, Dinosauriformes, Dracohors, Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoromorpha, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Dromaeosauridae, Eudromaeosauria, Dromaeosaurinae

Status: Extinct

Time and Place: From 115 to 98 million years ago, from the Aptian of the Early Cretaceous until the Cenomanian of the Late Cretaceous

Deinonychus is known from the Little Sheep and Himes Members of the Cloverly Formation of Montana and Wyoming, the Middle Member of the Antlers Formation of Oklahoma, and the Ruby Ranch and Mussentuchit Members of the Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah.

Physical Description: Deinonychus is a Dromaeosaur, or “raptor” dinosaur, and one of the best known of this group. Like other raptors, it looked a lot like a modern bird - fully covered in feathers, with large wings, a fan of feathers on the tail, and a triangular head. However, unlike a living bird, it was unable to fly, did not have a beak, and had a bony tail. Raptors are also characterized by their huge sickle claws on their feet, positioned on the second toe.

By Dinoguy2, CC BY-SA 2.5

Deinonychus specifically was fairly middle of the road in terms of raptor size, reaching up to 3.4 meters in length, and only coming up to about a meter in height. It would have been fairly lightweight, due to the air sacs present in the bones (like living birds). This would have made it about the size of a small wolf or a large dog - still smaller than the raptors in Jurassic Park. It had large openings in the skull to help keep it lightweight, and these were larger than those of other raptors; and it also had a more robust skull roof compared to other raptors. It had a long, narrow snout, which flared rapidly at the eye portion of the skull to give Deinonychus 3D vision.

Deinonychus had a long body, with a relatively short torso and extremely long tail. This tail was stiffened, to keep it very straight and only allowing a little bit of side to side movement. In addition, Deinonychus had a pelvis like a modern bird, giving more room to the gut for digesting food. As for limbs, Deinonychus had particularly long bones in its wing, which would have supported large wing feathers, much like wings of birds today. This is supported by the fact that most raptors found with feather impressions - Microraptor and Zhenyuanlong, notably - have full sized wings. Deinonychus also had a large fan of feathers across the tail. The legs of Deinonychus were fairly short compared to the rest of its body. It would have been warm-blooded, and an extremely active, birdy animal.

By Emily Willoughby, CC BY-SA 4.0

Diet: Deinonychus was a meat-eater, and a predator to boot, associated with animals such as Tenontosaurus and other medium-sized herbivores, though it probably also ate smaller animals such as mammals as well.

Behavior: Deinonychus has been the subject of extensive debate on the behavior of predatory dinosaurs, due to the fact that a large number of Deinonychus were found together with the herbivorous Tenontosaurus. This lead to the natural conclusion that Deinonychus was feeding on Tenontosaurus, and that the group had brought down the prey together - as a pack.

By José Carlos Cortés

This has sparked a lot of controversy, as Deinonychus are significantly smaller than Tenontosaurus, so one taking down this dinosaur alone is rather unlikely. However, most archosaurs don’t actually do cooperative hunting - though crocodilians and living birds might work together on bringing down food, it isn’t usually done in any coordinated fashion, but rather out of convenience. This lead to the idea of pack hunting not being particularly likely in Deinonychus, since living dinosaurs don’t really do much of it either. However, there are birds of prey, as well as crocodilians, that show gregarious pack hunting behavior, though not anything to the complexity seen in mammals. In addition, there are trackways that are parallel, with similar pacing of footprints, indicating that Deinonychus were living in social groups that traveled together. This would have allowed them to bring down larger prey.

In addition to this, Deinonychus probably utilized raptor prey restraint to hold down prey. Raptor Prey Restraint, or RPR, is a behavior seen today in living birds of prey, that would have been possible for Deinonychus and other Dromaeosaurs to do. With this method, Deinonychus would pin down it’s prey with its foot claws and, while holding it down, flap its wings rapidly in order to keep balanced as the prey moved around and tried to escape beneath it. This would have allowed Deinonychus to feed on the prey while it was still alive. This is supported not only by Deinonychus having long arms to support large wings, but also by its foot claws being similar to those of living owls, giving strong foot strength for holding onto prey.

By Tas on i-draws-dinosaurs

It’s entirely possible, therefore, that Deinonychus could have grouped up with others of its kind - probably a family grouping - and attacked herbivores much larger than itself, with some members of the group leaping onto the backs of these herbivores and holding on using RPR. The large sickle claws were not quite built for slashing at the prey, but rather for pinning down the prey and stabbing strategically at the animal, allowing it to bleed out rapidly. In addition, Deinonychus could have used the claws on its hands for slashing when it wasn’t using the wings for flight, as well as for grasping food. Like the modern seriema, however, Deinonychus could probably have torn apart smaller prey animals with its feet when eating a solo meal, if necessary.

Though raptors are commonly portrayed as being extremely fast (to quote a movie, “cheetah speed”), this is unlikely given the length of the bones of the leg in Deinonychus and other raptors. It had short bones in its foot as well as its leg, indicating that it was not very fast at running, and probably would have been more of an ambush than a pursuit predator. It might have been very good at leaping, however, and could have used its wings to generate a little lift to take the jump farther, and pounce on its food. Thus, Deinonychus could leap onto large prey such as Tenontosaurus, to get into a position to use RPR and feed upon it. The strong bones on the foot would have aided in handling the stress from such a jump. Deinonychus would have also been able to use its jaws in taking down prey, able to bite through bone if needed with a very high bite force. However, it did not do this habitually, like Tyrannosaurus, and instead used this bite force for defense and the capture of prey, rather than feeding.

By Ashley Patch

Though Deinonychus was too large to fly, it could generate enough lift to utilize another behavior of living birds - wing-assisted incline running, or WAIR. WAIR involves the flapping of wings fast enough that, with a hop and enough speed in the hind limbs, a bird is able to run up a steep surface such as a tree trunk, a wall, or a cliff face. Deinonychus might have been able to use WAIR to run up the surfaces of trees or after prey going up a tall feature such as a mountain and a hill - while Deinonychus was not a fast runner, WAIR could have helped it to gain some lift in these situations and go faster up the mountain or hill to catch its prey. Deinonychus also had a very stiffened tail, which would have helped it to keep its balance as it utilized WAIR and RPR in hunting and movement.

All in all, these traits - family groups, ambush predators, bursts of speed rather than long periods of speed, and pouncing - indicate that Deinonychus and other raptors like it were more like bird-cats, rather than bird-dogs, in terms of similar ecologies and behavior. You know what would have been bird-dogs? Tyrannosaurs. But more on that another time.

Interestingly enough, juvenile - young - Deinonychus are a bit different in proportion than the adults, namely by having longer arm bones and more sharply curved claws. This might mean that juvenile and baby Deinonychus actually went into trees, for safety or to help get food. It is even possible that young Deinonychus could fly, and grew out of it as they got bigger, but that is a hypothesis that has generated quite a bit of controversy and requires more extensive research.

By Kevin on Jurasicore

Deinonychus took care of its young, and eggs have been associated with Deinonychus fossils. Deinonychus would have brooded its eggs like living birds, protecting the nest with its large wings and sitting on top of the nest to aid in keeping the eggs warm and protected. It’s possible that the family groups of Deinonychus would have worked together to protect the nest until the young hatched. We know that Deinonychus laid blue eggs, helping to camouflage them in the foliage and against predators, a trait that evolved in Deinonychus and stuck around through modern birds. Deinonychus young then probably would escape to trees and other high locations whenever the parents weren’t around to protect them; as they got bigger they were probably able to get their own food, but they could have worked together to get large herbivores such as Tenontosaurus.

As we have seen, Deinonychus had a lot of reasons to have the large wings - for hunting, keeping itself and its young warm, and for movement. In addition to this, however, it’s likely that the wings were used for display - and, indeed, this is probably why complex feathers evolved in the first place. These large wings would have been perfect for complicated patterns and colors, which could have then been shown off to other raptors in mating displays. The large tail fan would also have been a good display structure, and could have been lifted and raised in situations of communication between members of the species, as well as in mating displays. By fluffing out its wings and raising up its tail, Deinonychus would have made itself look much bigger, which could have been used to express that it was threatening another animal, or that it was looking for sex. This is, of course, speculative, but based on behavior of living animals with similar structures.

In short, this was a medium-sized, active and agile predator, extremely birdlike in both appearance and behavior. It probably showed fairly complicated social behavior, and utilized its wings for complicated predatory actions. This makes Deinonychus - and other raptors - important keystones in our understanding of the complexity of Mesozoic dinosaurs and the evolution of birds.

By Scott Reid

Ecosystem: Deinonychus is known from the distinctive environments of the “middle” Cretaceous of Western North America, a snapshot between the iconic ecosystems of the late Jurassic and the late Cretaceous - indeed, many of the same environments as Sauropelta, who we learned about earlier this week.

In the Cloverly Formation, Deinonychus lived alongside the Western Interior Seaway as it grew through North America, and the dinosaurs present in this ecosystem such as Deinonychus would have been associated primarily with the floodplain and river system there. The flooding rivers caused mass burials of animals, and then eventually fossil formation. The plains were forested and covered with a variety of conifers and cycads. Deinonychus is known from both the Little Sheep and Himes Members of the Cloverly Formation, and thus was able to persist in this environment even as the Western Interior Seaway grew, and it turned from muddy to more sand based.

In the earlier, muddier Little Sheep ecosystem, Deinonychus lived alongside the ankylosaur Sauropelta, the ornithopod Tenontosaurus, the fast-moving Zephyrosaurus, the oviraptor Microvenator, and an unnamed large sauropod. There were also lungfish, sharks, and many bony fish, frogs, salamanders, and turtles. Mammals were also extremely common in this ecosystem and were probably a good source of prey for Deinonychus - animals such as Atokatheridium, Gobiconodon, Oklatheridium, and Paracimexomys. There were also plenty of crocodilians and lizards.

By Fred Wierum, CC BY-SA 4.0

In the later, sandier Himes ecosystem, Deinonychus still lived with Microvenator, Sauropelta, and Tenontosaurus, but also the large sauropod Sauroposeidon and the poorly known sauropod Rugocaudia, the nodosaur Tatankacephalus, and the larger predator Acrocanthosaurus which would have been a major threat to Deinonychus. There was also potentially a proto-bird in the ecosystem. There were many different kinds of lizards, frogs, salamanders, crocodylomorphs, turtles, fish, and sharks, as well as many mammals for Deinonychus to eat in addition to Tenontosaurus.

Deinonychus is also known from the Antlers Formation, from slightly more east in North America. It is known from the middle member of this ecosystem, and from about the same time as the Cloverly Formation to the west. This was also a floodplain ecosystem, which was periodically flooded with sources of water. Here, there was the tall sauropod Sauroposeidon, the ornithopod Tenontosaurus, a variety of mammals such as Astroconodon and Atokatheridium and Oklatheridium and Pappotherium, sharks and bony fish, and many types of Crocodylomorphs. There was also the large predator Acrocanthosaurus which, again, probably would have been a major predator of Deinonychus. Unfortunately, no plant fossils are known from the Antlers Formation to better piece together details as to the foliage Deinonychus would have lived among.

Finally, Deinonychus is also known from the Cedar Mountain Formation, which was an ecosystem that immediately followed the famous Morrison Formation of the Late Jurassic. Deinonychus is known from later time periods in the Cedar Mountain Formation than right after the Morrison, of course, but this ecosystem does represent a transitory time period between the Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous. Here, Deinonychus is known from the Ruby Ranch and Mussentuchit members, which were the two latest occuring ecosystems in the formation. During the Ruby Ranch period - the earlier one - there was an extensive amount of mud, created by a large number of river channels forming due to the growing Western Interior Seaway. Here there were a lot of ferns, magnolias, conifers, and cycads, indicating a mainly forested ecosystem surrounding these rivers. Deinonychus was accompanied by the ankylosaur Gastonia, the ornithopod Tenontosaurus, the sauropods Astrodon and Brontomerus, the large predator Acrocanthosaurus, and a variety of crocodilians.

By Emily Willoughby, CC BY-SA 3.0

The later Mussentuchit Member was still covered in ferns, magnolias, conifers, and cycads, so the actual foliage didn’t seem to change much. However, there does appear to have been a volcanic explosion, leading to more detailed preservation of the animals and plants present - and most fossils from Cedar Mountain come, as such, from this ecosystem. Here, Deinonychus was accompanied by the ankylosaurs Animantarx, Cedarpelta, and Peloroplites - so, unfortunately, Gastonia went extinct. There were other ornithopods besides Tenontosaurus, though Tenontosaurus was present - such as Eolambia and the fast moving Zephyrosaurus. The only known sauropod from the Mussentuchit is Abydosaurus, indicating a drop in sauropod diversity that would continue in North America throughout the Cretaceous. The larger predator Siats was present, as well as the mysterious theropod Richardoestesia and a potential aquatic birdie dinosaur. There was a variety of sharks, bony fish, and lungfish; salamanders and frogs; turtles, snakes, lizards, and crocodilians; and many kinds of mammals present in this ecosystem as well.

Other: Deinonychus was of vital importance to the understanding of the evolution of birds. As a definitively active and bird-like dinosaur, Deinonychus showed researchers in the middle of the twentieth century that dinosaurs were actually the most likely candidates for the ancestors to modern birds. As research went on and more birdie dinosaurs were discovered, this became more and more certain - a path started by Deinonychus. In addition, Deinonychus in conjunction with Maiasaura helped to transition our understanding of dinosaurs from “slow, stupid, big lizards” to “active almost-birds”, a transition in perception that was cemented by the Jurassic Park Franchise. Deinonychus was a fairly derived raptor dinosaur, closely related to some of the largest members of the group such as Achillobator and Utahraptor.

~ By Meig Dickson

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tyrantisterror · 6 years

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Anecdotes from Neosaur Park: Regina’s Family

Another one of these? Another one of these. I guess it’s now a thing since I named it. It’s significantly longer than the last one, so I’m putting a cut here to save people’s dashboards.

I said Tyrannosaurus wasn’t the most dangerous animal in the park. That doesn’t mean she never caused trouble.

Back when this whole thing started out - when it was just an experiment, before we made it a zoo - we bent over backwards trying to account for every possible problem we might face. And yes, it was because of that damn movie. So many people thought this was doomed to fail from the outset, all because some hundred year old piece of media made such a large and lasting impression on the populace.

The One Specimen rule was particularly well enforced. Despite all the strides paleontology has made, we still can’t learn most of a creature’s behaviors and biological needs until after they’re created. To keep things from getting out of hand, we would only clone one specimen of a given species, spend at least five years to study its biology, and then and ONLY then would we think about creating more. We thought we were being smart, and in some ways we were - there were some early hiccups in the project that definitely would have been worse if we had made more clones at the time. On the other hand, there were some problems we faced later that could have been avoided if we had thought of these animals as social creatures from the outset.

Of course, we couldn’t have known this at the time. We were working with what science could tell us. The average dinosaur’s brain is more like a crocodile’s than a bird’s. Therefore it was a safe assumption that most dinosaurs would be fine as solitary animals - that whatever social instincts they had would be rudimentary, and that they could easily adjust to life without company. This felt like a particularly safe assumption in the case of the Tyrannosaurus.

I mean, what’s the pop culture image of the creature tell you? The Tyrant Lizard King. King. Tyrant. A king is the sole ruler of a land, A tyrant even moreso. We have always considered Tyrannosaurus to be a loner, a solitary hunter. I mean, the creature was so goddamned huge - it would take miles upon miles of territory to sustain a beast that size! Sure, there were herds of similarly sized Triceratopses - herds that numbered in the thousands, mind you - and hadrosaurs and other prey animals, but still, this is a seven ton carnivore we’re talking about!

Now, you have to understand that none of our creatures are 100% authentic. Dinosaurs lived in a vastly different environment than our current world, even in the wake of the 21st century’s climate change disaster. It was a lot hotter, and there was a lot more oxygen. Disease back then and disease today had millions of years worth of evolutionary differences. The technology that allowed us to recreate these animals is the same technology that allowed us to restore biodiversity during the climate change disaster - to properly bring these creatures back, we had to alter them in a few key ways so they could adapt to this climate. It’s why we call it Neosaur Park, rather than Dinosaur Park. They’re not quite the beasts their ancestors were.

But, as far as I’ve been told - I’m not a genetic engineer, mind you - we did not intentionally set out to modify their behaviors, and especially not their intelligence. All we changed was some of their biochemistry, adapting them to a cooler, less oxygen-rich earth. Maybe that had a ripple effect we haven’t realized yet - maybe their hormones are off, who knows. This is still a developing science - we’ve only been at it a few decades, there’s a lot of new ground still to break.

We didn’t choose Tyrannosaurus as our first specimen out of popularity, as some have claimed. We chose it because the DNA samples were plentiful. Tyrannosaurus has a remarkable presence in the fossil record, and as a result we have a wide variety of T.rex genes to choose from. Since our Neosaur would be genetically altered, we had to give it a new scientific name: Tyrannosaurus regina. And, being sentimental, that’s what we named the first successful hatchling: Regina.

Everyone was as nervous as they were excited when she was born. This was one of the most terrifying predators ever to walk the earth, a creature with enough bite force to rend steel, the end product of an evolutionary arms race that produced some of the most heavily armored herbivores of all time just to counter it. It was the villain of hundreds of stories, the ultimate predator.

And she was as timid as a creature could get.

Regina was a fretful baby. The smallest things could spook her - she once jumped a full foot into the air at the sound of a snapping twig. More than anything, though, she was afraid of being alone. While she had one preferred handler - the one whose face she saw first after hatching - she was fine so long as at least one of us was within sight at all times. If she lost sight of us, though, she’d begin calling out with this strange, gurgling, peeping sound. You couldn’t leave her for even a few seconds without her panicking, and for the first few years we literally had her under a twenty four hour watch.

Eventually she grew out of that, exploring her paddock as a gangly adolescent. But she didn’t become as independent as we expected. Again, we were thinking this would be like a crocodile - that once she started out on her own, she’d lose the bond she had with her “parents” and begin treating us more coldly, if not outright viewing us as prey. Instead, she would routinely interact with us - greeting us with a hissing bellow, following us around for a bit, even leading keepers to her food trough and, upon seeing us stand there looking at it, taking a few slow, deliberate bites as if to show us that the meat was edible. It had us all puzzled - this wasn’t the Tyrant Lizard we were expecting.

It was when she hit her late teens that the puzzle became a problem. Tyrannosaurs take roughly twenty years to reach their full size, but like a lot of birds and reptiles, they’re sexually mature a bit earlier than that. At sixteen, Regina began to do something new. She’d walk around the edges of her paddock, sniff the air, look around, and then release this horrible bellow - some deep, booming hiss from the bottom of her gut. It was so loud and such a low pitch that it actually made the leaves of the trees shake. And she would do it for hours, traveling round and round the perimeter of her paddock while making this bone rattling noise. We had been open to the public for about four years at this point, and Regina was already a bit of a celebrity - everyone wanted to see the Tyrannosaurus, even if she was far from the hyper-vicious predator they expected.

This behavior went on for three months, and then she went back to normal. Till the next year, when she came back with a vengeance. The searching was more frantic. Regina was too big to run at this point - when she was younger and smaller, her legs were proportionally longer, and she could get one hell of a sprint. At seventeen she was far bulkier, and the best she could do was a sort of power walk. If that gives you a sort of comic mental image, well, you’re about on the mark - a frantic Tyrannosaurus power-walking as fast as she can does look pretty silly, at least until she heads for the paddock gate.

We weren’t dumb. Every inch of her paddock’s perimeter was surrounded by insurmountable natural barriers - steep pits filled with sharp rocks that stretched down eighty feet deep and were sixty feet wide. Most of the entrances to the paddock that crossed these pits were human sized. There was only one gate she could fit through, and that was only by necessity - there had been occasions where we needed to transport her to a sterile environment for medical assistance. This gate was thick, heavy steel, and a guard was always posted to it. By this point, we had doubted we needed one there - in seventeen years, Regina had never once tried to escape. As far as we could tell, she liked it here.

This would be the exception. Now a five ton carnivore, Regina trotted up the gate and released that bone-chilling howl. Her mammoth head peer over the walls. Her nostrils flared as she smelled the air. She released the bellow again, then watched. The gate guard was spooked, but this had happened the year before, too. Eventually Regina would move on to another part of the fence.

But she didn’t. She looked at the gate, snorted, stepped back, and rammed it with her head. The big carnivore reeled back, howled for a bit in pain, and then looked at her handiwork. The thick, heavy steel had dented. She snorted and rammed it again. The guard started radioing for help, but he was too late. With a third strike the gate gave way, and Regina was loose in the park.

The crowd panicked as they saw her stalking freely among them. Many thought that the inevitable had come to pass - that our experiment had finally gotten out of hand, and our man-made monsters were finally biting the hand that resurrected them. Most news outlets certainly painted this as such, and the bad publicity alone almost shut us down.

But, as I told you, Regina wasn’t a man-eater. She really wasn’t much of a predator at all. Whatever chase instinct she might have had was thoroughly smothered by her pampered upbringing. Regina ignored the patrons running from her, ignored the paddocks containing other prehistoric fauna - many of whom were her ancestor’s natural prey items, I might add - and instead kept issuing that deep, unsettling bellow while slowly wandering the park grounds.

Though the death toll was nonexistent and the property damage minimal, we still had a hell of a time figuring out how to get her back. A couple of solutions were offered - she was still traumatized from her brush with the struthiomimids a couple years back, so we could always try to scare her off by playing a recording of their shrieks. That seemed unnecessarily cruel, though. Tranquilizing her was on the table, but at her current size that could take a long while, especially given how thick her skin was getting.

One person saved the day: Regina’s preferred handler. Even after all these years, there was still a bond between those two. In a ballsy move, she called out to the tyrannosaur and slowly led her back to the paddock. All in all, it was the best possible end we could hope for, given this was one of our nightmare scenarios.

We eventually realized that Regina’s bellow was a mating call, and that her panic had stemmed from the fact that there were no other Tyrannosaurs in the area, and hadn’t been since, well, since long before she was born. We assumed she would be fine with that, but apparently not.

Luckily, we had long since prepared genomes for the next few Tyrannosaurs - again, we had an abundant supply to choose from, and the, well, let’s say “quirky” nature of Regina made our genetic engineers decide the try different profiles. We still thought she might be “off” - an anomaly, far too friendly to be the real thing, perhaps even a little “slow.” At the time we also thought that twenty years was the maximum Tyrannosaurus lifespan, so it was likely we would have to replace her soon anyway. Two different gene profiles were selected, and the next generation was born a bit earlier than planned.

We waited a few weeks before introducing the babies to Regina. Again, we didn’t know much about how Tyrannosaurs interact with their young. It was assumed that, like their close relatives, they would take care of their offspring, but these young Tyrannosaurs weren’t ACTUALLY hers. For all we knew, she might try to eat them. To be safe, we took them in a jeep, along with a good handful of keepers armed with tranq rifles.

Regina came to us within seconds. I think she could smell them before she could see them, as the big gal immediately headed for the jeep. She didn’t bully her way through, though, stopping about a yard off to give a loud bellow. When we felt confident the Tyrannosaur wasn’t going to get uncharacteristically violent, her preferred handler made the official introduction by carrying the male hatchling out of the jeep. Regina’s eyes went wide, and soon the baby made the same gurgling, peeping noise that she had made seventeen years ago.

The bond was immediate, and it was all we could have hoped for. Regina doted on the hatchlings, nuzzling them with her snout and watching over their every move. When they cried out for food, she led them to her trough. And when we tried to take them back, she followed us, soon developing the desperate panic we had seen before. We ended up leaving the hatchlings with her, and they’ve been with her since.

By my count, the young ones should be about thirteen now. Regina’s ten years older than we thought she’d live, and doesn’t show signs of slowing down - every year she puts on a few more pounds and grows another inch or so in length and height, and we’re beginning to think that Tyrannosaur lifespans may be akin to their crocodillian relatives. As for whether her behavior is natural or a result of her strange upbringing, well, we can’t quite say. The young tyrannosaurs both have their own personalities in contrast with their adoptive mother. The male, who we ended up calling Machiavelli, is a bit of a shit starter, to be truthful. He likes to start fights with his sister, though they’ve never gotten very serious - play fighting, as far as we can tell. He also chases the zookeepers from time to time, though he’s never actually tried to catch one of us, and Regina generally gives him a gruff talking to for it. The female is a bit colder - she doesn’t antagonize, but she can get oddly territorial, and is prone to sullen moods where she strikes off on her own, only to rejoin the other two a few hours later.

Both of the young ones seem a great deal bolder than their mother - perhaps because they grew up knowing the giants they would one day be, rather than thinking that a bunch of hairless apes were their parents. They’re still pretty easy to manage, but who knows. Maybe a few generations down the line we’ll actually get that Tyrant Lizard we’re all expecting. For now, though, we’re content with Regina and her kids.

#Anecdotes from Neosaur Park

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damnit-samnit · 6 years

Text

Chapter 12 Teaser!

Hello friends, here’s a teaser for the next chapter of Attachment, due out tomorrow night.

As this is a WIP, please excuse any spelling/grammatical errors!

“What’s wrong?” you asked with a sigh, eyeing his prominent frown.

He refused to answer you, uttering a soft ‘tch’ as he turned his head, his irritation clearly in danger of being exacerbated by your prying.

He was upset, you realized, battering down a dangerous smile. Slowly but surely, you were becoming more aware of his little… quirks, for lack of a better term. Small cracks in his personality that revealed his actual inner thoughts.

Like this -- his scowl and obvious annoyance. Those emotions were a result of something, not just because he was All Might and that’s what his behavior defaulted to. No, you had a strong inclination that he was annoyed because you were going to be working with heroes. What you weren’t quite sure of was if that annoyance stemmed from jealousy -- was he jealous that you’d be spending most of your days working with his perceived ‘enemies?’

For any other person, you would have believed your suspicions rang true.

But All Might was not a normal person.

Rather than get too ahead of yourself and unintentionally dig a hole you might not be able to get out of, you decided it was best to calm down, to diffuse rather than goad.

You knew from experience he had short fuse when he was in a poor mood.

“You don’t think I’ll start liking heroes more than you, do you?” A smirk was playing on your face and started an almost saunter toward him, though you couldn’t prevent humor from dancing in your soft tone.

Surprised, his head turned back in your direction, frown loosening. You stopped just short of touching him -- gaze trailing over the great expanse of his chest before returning to his face.

You had All Might’s attention.

“You shouldn’t worry so much!” you said brightly, dropping your bedroom persona as you placed your hands on his torso, tapping the rigid muscles there lightly. He was still staring. “Who cares if I start working at a real lab? It won’t impact you in the slightest! In fact, it’ll probably be beneficial to you!”

You moved to smoothing out the nonexistent wrinkles of his too tight shirt.

“I’ll be much happier,” you said. “I won’t be worrying about money so much. My nights will still be free -- though there’s some work I have to finish. Besides, it’s not like you visit me during the day, anyway. I’ll still be around.”

You were raising your hands up, gesturing him to lean down toward you.

To your genuine surprise, he did as you asked almost immediately. Though his face was still impassive, his frown was almost entirely gone.

That was a good sign, right?

You smoothed his hair, stroking his forehead as you pushed back a couple odd flyaways from his face. Eventually, your hands came to a rest on either side of his head, thumbs smoothing down his bristled eyebrows.

You shifted your jaw.

A thought was on your mind but you weren’t sure if you were brave enough to speak it.

Say it.

“You know…” you paused, unsure how he’d take your oncoming admission -- a large part of you was warning you not to own up to anything. But the moment was right. “You know I’d never do… I’d never do anything to hurt you, right?”

He went still.

You swallowed, wanting desperately to tear yourself away from him and laugh off your emotional openness. But a part of you wanted to reaffirm to the villain that, well… you liked him. Despite all the frustration and aggravation he lodged at you constantly, there was just something about him that you had grown attached to.

And it wasn’t anything carnal.

“I know that the lab works with Endeavor…” You lowered your hands so your thumbs were stroking his cheeks instead of his brows, hands cupping his face “And a bunch of other heroes. But I wouldn’t ever sell you out or mention you. I just want you to know that, okay?”

He didn’t answer and you weren’t sure how to take his lack of response. Was he pissed? Disgusted? Were you coming off as too much? It was your turn to frown and your gaze flickered focus between the shadows of eyes, silently asking him to give you something.

Nothing.

Fuck it. Too much.

You threw your arms around his neck.

“Don’t assume the worst of me!” you murmured, nuzzling against the side of his head, warm breath striking his ear. “I like you too much to do something like that to you, honey bunny.”

It was undeniable. You felt his body vibrate as he released shaky, unexpected exhale.

He had shuddered.

No…

There was no way.

All Might--

You were pulling away, confused, looking for some kind of explanation to his reaction. Surely the great All Might, Japan’s demon of discord, hadn’t just shuddered at your sweet-talk.

“Did you--”

You stopped your question at seeing his face. His jaw was visibly clenching and nostrils flaring as glared at you.

Now that reaction, that made sense -- that was what you expected from All Might.

“Shut up,” he snarled, pushing in toward you, thick arm bracing your backside when you stumbled backward. He was lifting you off the ground and you were laughing.

Clearly this was how All Might handled embarrassment -- by falling into a rage.

Common sense told you laughter would only worsen the situation, but you couldn’t help it.

He was pressing you against your living room wall, his teeth bared centimeters away from your face. He expected you to shy away from him and his anger, not reach out to run your fingers along the curve of his chin.

“What was it?” you cooed at him, drunk off his chagrin. “What did you like?”

A hand was placed at your throat but there was no pressure, its only purpose was to tilt your face up toward his and prevent your head from moving.

“That I like you?” you continued, eyes dancing as he leaned in closer.

He bit your lips, tugging at them as he applied the slightest pressure to your throat. He released his teeth so he could properly align his mouth with yours, to start an actual kiss--

But he didn’t do it fast enough.

“Was it… honey bunny?”

Hesitation.

You pulled away from his hand so you could throw your head back to properly handle the raucous laughter rocking your body.

Honey bunny.

No. No there was no way.

Honey bunny!

Not All Might. It was…

No.

Impossible.

But it was possible. Clearly, it was possible. In fact, he essentially confirmed it when he released a loud growl and attacked your mouth, trying to get you to shut up.

So it wasn’t ‘Master’ or ‘Sir’ that sparked a fire in the villain’s gut -- something that seemed almost a guarantee for a baddie with such an ego. Nothing that implied his power or was demeaning for you to utter.

No.

It was honey bunny.

“If you don’t stop…” He was snarling a warning at you, incensed by your cheek. But the moment was too good. You’d gladly face the consequences in order to keep the memory.

“Oh honey bunny, don’t you like it?” you purred at him, cupping his face before pressing a series of quick, soft kisses against his lips.

Your actions were snagging and slowing the thoughts in his brain -- you could almost see the turning of the gears in his head as he tried to determine an appropriate response.

There was no doubt by that point.

Honey bunny!

But then it was over. Your influence was lost, your snag in his mind undone. Realization, coupled with recognition, returned to All Might. The slightly dumbfounded look on his face fell away, a cruel smile taking its place. He tilted his head to the side, peering down at you like a Tyrannosaur eyeing something worth eating.

An electric blue eye had you in its sight.

“Darling,” he purred, voice dangerous molasses. “That was a mistake.”

And then, you were tossed over his shoulder.

#v!Might #all my chapter teases end the same #with some sexually charged All Might line lmao #i'll have to switch up the formula for next time #hmmm #next time is the halloween story that's basically just straight smut #so maybe NEXT next time #mywriting #attachment #all might x reader

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fossilsandfeathers · 6 years

Note

(Here’s a random starter from Godzilla :>) There’s a deep, primal sound emanating from the depths of the ocean - not necessarily a roar, but rather a distant rumble. If one were to look out from the shores of the island or a suitable vantage point, one could see what looked like narrow mountain peaks rising over the waves of the ocean. Except they were getting closer, and closer, and closer...

At dusk the lean gray raptor lay sunning himself on a stout dune, patiently overlooking a two-mile crescent of white sand, utterly deserted, the ground grainy and moist beneath his belly. Behind him, the shade of the palm trees that fringed the beach inched closer as the sun drooped toward the flat horizon of the ocean. Ranged along the beach in front of the raptor were ten slim, red flares he had scavenged from the now-abandoned tyrannosaur paddock. They were the last flares anywhere on the island, and he had struggled for hours to light them. Now their bright red glare sparkled hotly against the darkening blue of the ocean waves.

Time passed, and the raptor waited patiently as the tide came in, the feathers on his head and neck fluttering lightly in the salty breeze. One by one he watched the flares go out, and the waves cream around their discarded ashes. Then, just before the sun swelled red and finally set, he caught sight of something out at sea. He shifted in the sand, suddenly alert, and saw fish, millions of them, all sizes and varieties, swimming towards the coast, turning the water a churning, glittering silver in an ichthyic stampede. The raptor stood up anxiously. Could this be it?

He scanned the waves again, straining to get a better look. It seemed almost like the fish were trying desperately to outrace something. The raptor watched, taught with anticipation, as the water humped suddenly, cresting over a huge, shadowy shape, like dorsals. The shape rose and fell, breaking the surface of the water. The raptor stared at it in silent awe, knowing exactly what he was looking at. His pupils contracted and dilated like the lens of an autofocus camera. It was a reaction of excitement – and joy.

The monster from the sea had seen the flares, and was now approaching the beach! The monster, biggest of all the dinosaur, big enough to blot out the sun with it’s forepaw and quiver the ground with its feet. The dinosaur that breathed lightning and roared thunder, that carried islands on its back and swallowed up mosasaurs and megaladons without a care. If the tyrannosaur was queen of Isla Nublar, than this creature was surely God of the world.

And if the raptor could convince it to, maybe, just maybe, it would stop the volcano from erupting . . .

#savior-of-humanity #jurassic park rp #jurassic world rp #velociraptor #godzilla #jurassic park #king of the monsters #post JW #pre Fallen Kingdom #isla nublar #{hope this is okay!}

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antediluvianechoes · 6 years

Photo

Tyrannosaurus, Doug Henderson, 1998

The silence of a body of its size seems paradoxical. Footfalls and the gentle hush of leaves against hide are the only sounds the dinosaur makes. Birds within the trees’ foliage make their presence known with constant singing, but Tyrannosaurus does not sing now.

In the morning it did, drumming out a rhythm of guttural croaks and rolling moans, deep sounds like the tremor of an ocean-covered continent or the pulse of a distant dying star. Others of its kind made their territorial dronings, too, and then, when the morning’s cool flared into the day's heat, the tyrannosaurs went silent. There was no more need for singing. The circles of each’s daily sovereignty imprinted, they do not cross into another’s hunting ground.

Now is the time of deadly speechlessness, the time of mute stalking. A song would ruin the surprise.

#tyrannosaurus rex #dinosaur #Douglas Henderson #doug henderson #paleontology #paleofiction #cretaceous

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kagaya-homoraisan · 6 years

Text

hello

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.

The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Black eyed angels swam at me," Yorke sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe.

The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Criep!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Egyptian Song," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Creep?" I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.

For further testament, Chip Chanko and I both suffered auto-debilitating accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Airbag" in our respective Japanese imports. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my car, just as I'd feared passing 18- wheelers after nearly being crushed by one in 1990. With good reason, I suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Kid A-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered.

Even the heralded OK Computer has been nudged down one spot in Valhalla. Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as "rock" (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it's jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don't come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world. Ransom, the philologist hero of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet who is kidnapped and taken to another planet, initially finds his scholarship useless in his new surroundings, and just tries to survive the beautiful new world.

This is an emotional, psychological experience. Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Radiohead hated being Radiohead, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Radiohead record yet.

"Everything in Its Right Place" opens like Close Encountersspaceships communicating with pipe organs. As your ears decide whether the tones are coming or going, Thom Yorke's Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue. "Everything," Yorke belts in uplifting sighs. The first-person mantra of "There are two colors in my head" is repeated until the line between Yorke's mind and the listener's mind is erased.

Skittering toy boxes open the album's title song, which, like the track "Idioteque," shows a heavy Warp Records influence. The vocoder lullaby lulls you deceivingly before the riotous "National Anthem." Mean, fuzzy bass shapes the spine as unnerving theremin choirs limn. Brash brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Yorke screams, begs, "Turn it off!" It's the album's shrill peak, but just one of the incessant goosebumps raisers.

After the rockets exhaust, Radiohead float in their lone orbit. "How to Disappear Completely" boils down "Let Down" and "Karma Police" to their spectral essence. The string-laden ballad comes closest to bridging Yorke's lyrical sentiment to the instrumental effect. "I float down the Liffey/ I'm not here/ This isn't happening," he sings in his trademark falsetto. The strings melt and weep as the album shifts into its underwater mode. "Treefingers," an ambient soundscape similar in sound and intent to Side B of Bowie and Eno's Low, calms after the record's emotionally strenuous first half.

The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Optimistic" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs. The lyrics seemingly taunt, "Try the best you can/ Try the best you can," before revealing the more resigned sentiment, "The best you can is good enough." For an album reportedly "lacking" in traditional Radiohead moments, this is the best summation of their former strengths. The track erodes into a light jam before morphing into "In Limbo." "I'm lost at sea," Yorke cries over clean, uneasy arpeggios. The ending flares with tractor beams as Yorke is vacuumed into nothingness. The aforementioned "Idioteque" clicks and thuds like Aphex Twin and Bjork's Homogenic, revealing brilliant new frontiers for the "band." For all the noise to this point, it's uncertain entirely who or what has created the music. There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin. This is part of the unique thrill of experiencing Kid A.

Pulsing organs and a stuttering snare delicately propel "Morning Bell." Yorke's breath can be heard frosting over the rainy, gray jam. Words accumulate and stick in his mouth like eye crust. "Walking walking walking walking," he mumbles while Jonny Greenwood squirts whale-chant feedback from his guitar. The closing "Motion Picture Soundtrack" brings to mind The White Album, as it somehow combines the sentiment of Lennon's LP1 closer-- the ode to his dead mother, "Julia"-- with Ringo and Paul's maudlin, yet sincere LP2 finale, "Goodnight." Pump organ and harp flutter as Yorke condones with affection, "I think you're crazy." To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album's overall theme, Yorke bows out with "I will see you in the next life." If you're not already there with him.

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.

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spinslash165 · 10 months

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Haven't really done any full-body SRB2 stuff for super Flare/Chaos Narlare in a long time (the OST vid art comes close ig?), and I wanted to give him something akin to the art in the credits.

#artwork #ocs #WildFire (sonicverse)#flare #narlare #chaos narlare #super flare #flare the tyrannosaur #flare srb2 #srb2 #sonic robo blast 2

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apieters · 3 years

Text

The clash of steel rang on the streets of the Magic Kingdom as a furious duel erupted in New Orleans Square. In the midst of a band of soldiers all the way from Agrabah, lead by Captain Razoul, two swordsman stood their ground, slashing and thrusting back-to-back against superior odds—in other words, it was a fairly average Friday afternoon for Christopher “Chris” Carnovo and André Caron, the Swashbucklers of the Magic Kingdom.

A stranger duo couldn’t be found from the Frozen lands of Arendelle to the Primeval World. Chris was a young, greyish-blue tyrannosaur, dressed in a blue pirate’s coat belted with a white sash, wielding a rapier with lightning-fast thrusts. André was a young man with shaggy brown hair and a black padded jacket, slashing violently at his foes with a sabre. The soldiers of Agrabah pressed hard on every side, but the odd pair had two things in their favor—they were both masters in the art of swordsmanship, and they had been fighting together since childhood.

Chris and André had a long and colorful career—starting as privateers in their youth, the two had almost single-handedly cleared the seas of pirates such as the notorious Captains Nathaniel Flint, Henry Morgan and “Black Bart” Roberts, before taking up service as fight choreographers in their young adult years. The two friends had choreographed almost every fight scene in almost every movie made in the Magic Kingdom, a land of princes and princesses, wizards and witches, pirates and knights, talking animals and other motley characters. Under the leadership of Mickey Mouse, the protégé of the late Good King Walt, the Magic Kingdom was a land of art, culture, and storytelling, producing some of the finest movies in the world. But while some made their names on the silver screen as actors or served the Kingdom as statesmen and captains of industry (often all three), others made their names behind the scenes. Chris and André belonged to the latter category, but their work had made them many friends all over the Magic Kingdom—friends that sometimes had need of their special set of skills.

“Just once, I’d like to be called in for a favor that doesn’t involve the risk of getting stabbed!” André Caron snapped at the tyrannosaur as he slashed up, knocking a sword out of a soldier’s hand.

“We’re professional swordsmen, André,” Chris shot back as he spiraled his rapier, sending another scimitar flying out of a soldier’s grip. “What kinds of favors do you expect people need from us?” He lunged to the side just as a soldier was trying to flank his friend, arresting the attack. The two shifted positions effortlessly, their efforts coordinated like a dance. “Besides,” he smirked, parrying a wild cut from another soldier, “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I left it at home with the good book I was reading!” André shouted. A soldier rushed him and he grabbed the soldier’s wrist, wrenching his arm back before kicking him into his comrades.

“So, you don’t think we should be out here rescuing our friend?” Chris asked, spiraling his blade to intercept a cut and slashing at a second swordsman before thrusting over his shoulder at the first.

“I never said we shouldn’t be here,” André said, smashing his guard into a soldier’s forehead before parrying another incoming strike. “Just don’t expect me to be happy about it!” He swiped wide, left and right, whirling his sword in a dangerous dance of steel. He plowed through the soldiers, knocking them this way and that, clearing a way for the tyrannosaur. “Alright, Chris, I’m holding off as many as I can. Find Razoul and work your magic.”

This is the opening scene of a Disney fan-fiction story I’m rewriting. I started writing it for a couple reasons:

1) Chris needed a home. I’ve been drawing this swashbuckling tyrannosaur and his human companion (yes, André is named after me—there aren’t enough characters with my name, and that needs to be fixed) for just about 20 years now, and figured he needed a proper story. But what kind? Well, as I looked back, I realized that he was always sort of inserting himself into whatever I was interested in or reading at the time—piracy, Disney movies, books, etc. He was always a fan-fic character. So he needed to be in a fanfiction story. And as I tend to prefer a Disney-esque/traditional Western cartoon style, I decided he needed to be a Disney character—just one who works off-screen.

2) I really want to write original stories. I have at least 3 or 4 solid concepts, but when I decided in college that I wanted to write, I figured out I SUCKED at dialogue. And pretty much everything else. I had some raw talent, but of course that’s never enough—and being a perfectionist, I wasn’t going to waste an original story as my first attempt at learning the craft of writing. So I started exploring blogs about writing fantasy and credible, published authors all said the same thing: they started by writing fan-fiction. The reason they gave was that it was motivating because you already love the characters, and the world building and character creation is done for you (you can learn those skills later), leaving you free to focus on more fundamental aspects of writing craft—things like dialogue, pacing, plotting, planning, description, active vs. passive voice, all that jazz. So I decided to follow their advice.

I said earlier I was rewriting it—well, I got a little more than halfway through and the story just ran out of gas. The characters, I realized, would never and could never do the things necessary to advance the plot without breaking character, getting themselves killed, or using a dues ex machina. There were too many dangling plot threads, too many unnecessary characters, and after five years of intermittent drafting (I was in college, then I’ve had a day job or been job hunting ever since—I’m busy) I had gotten to know my characters (or my interpretations of several preexisting Disney characters) well enough that I could see major inconsistencies across the 200+ pages I had written. So I decided to go back to the beginning and rework the plot, making it a lot more consistent and focusing on a tighter core of characters. This scene was not in the original draft, and I think it establishes my characters far better than what I’d written before (which was essentially an info-dump of exposition—classic mistake).

Artist Behind the Scenes

Illustrating the picture presented several difficulties—one, I absolutely loathe myself for constantly choosing ground like grass or—in this case—cobblestones, which require a lot of repetitive, regular shapes. But that’s what the picture required, so I decided to make the cobblestones a little scribbled and blurry, and made the background lines thicker and fuzzier too. The biggest challenge was drawing multiple opponents—each guardsman is a unique person and requires individual attention to meet my minimum visual quality standards, and I can’t get away with vaguely soldier-looking blobs (as I’ve done in other pictures) since they are an integral part of the action that is the main focus of the piece.

The solution was to remember the adage, “the essence of the picture is the frame.” By positioning Chris and André just right in the frame and filling up as much space as I could using them, I could get away with only drawing parts of most of the guardsmen to give the effect of an outnumbered, chaotic street duel. I ended up framing the two characters with a ring of enemies, with Razoul appearing in the back to round out the impression of being surrounded on all sides.

The scimitar sabres (“scimitar” is a European butchering of the Persian shamshir) were a compromise between the way the Agrabah guards’ weapons appear in the movie Aladdin (where they are comically short and fat and have a clipped point) and real weapons. No actual Middle Eastern sword, to my knowledge, ever had a clipped point, which was actually a common feature of European single-edged swords like falchions and messers (which probably were the real inspiration behind Western artwork’s depictions of Eastern sabres); few sabres were ever as fat as the cartoons make them out to be; and most Middle Eastern sabres have straight, not recurved quillons. Most real sabres were relatively narrow, light swords meant for slashing/draw-cutting from horseback, not percussive chopping, and instead of a clipped point Turkish sabres often had a flared, double-edged tip called a yelman. I was thus faced with an artistic dilemma: integrity to reality or integrity to the source I was emulating. These are supposed to be the same guards as appeared in the “One Jump Ahead of the Breadline” musical number in Aladdin, armed with the same weapons; yet the action is taking place in “real life,” off-camera. I ultimately decided on a compromise: the scimitars would retain the same shape and features as in the movie, but I edited the dimensions to look a little more like real swords instead of meat cleavers.

(Disclaimer: Chris and André belong to me—everything else belongs to Disney).

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virovac · 8 years

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Create a Kaiju Contest Entry 2

Bajingis

Place of Origin: Gobi Desert

Date discovered: April 17,1956,

Date of awakening: May 1, 1956

Notable stomping Grounds: Coldouthere (a newly emerged Antarctic Island), Austrailia

Height: 80 feet

Length: 145 feet

Powers

Aside from the standard kaiju abilities, she posses the “angry eye”: A beam of searing green light mixed with an less visible heat ray blasting from from the bone filled eye-socket on her left side. The outer layer of armor is lased while also cooking the endodermis of an enemy.

Biology:

Almost a fitting reversal of how primitive retrosaurs gave rise to species similar in build to the synapsid pelycosaurs that preceded them, Bajingis is a synapsid with a build similar to the True tyrants that came long after. In body-plan Bajingis is similar to a true tyrant, except for her plantigrade feet, and the fact she is covered in tannish brown hair (which has raised many questions about where in synapsid evolution such coverings first appeared). A patch of dark brown hair occurs on her throat, almost as if an alternative to a dewlap. Her back posses three small dark grey stripes. While her ancestors probably had a coat of hair,her sheer woolliness seems to be more of a disorder than an actual adaptive feature: as she shows no other adaptions for a cold climate; and her flaring nostrils would be extremely vulnerable to frostbite if she were not a kaiju. However, her kaiju metabolism has allowed her to survive quite well in her chosen home: the recently unsubmerged island Coldoutthere.

While her head is reptilian, it lacks any of the bony crests common in retrosaurs; and the synapsid features of different specialized teeth are apparent, with both slicing and crushing teeth present. Her whiskers are small and undeveloped.Some kaijuologists have described as her head similar to that a Dimetrodon but with eyes more ventral to the and teeth more like a dinogorgon. However, a more accurate comparison is probably a Titanophoneus with less prominent canines on the upper jaw and a more robust lower jaw. Her powerful forearms are similar to those a kangaroo, but more muscular, and with slight traces of webbings in the paws. The tail can best be described as having a shape somewhere between a crocodile and an otter’s, tipped with a vestigial, black tadpole-like paddle.She lacks either the ability or creativity to use her tail in combat, except as a counterweight for a kangaroo-like kick, an appropriate ability for a kaiju who treats Australia as a vacation spot.

Due to, like monotremes, lacking mammaries, she was first referred to as male by the press; and with her tendency to attack human vehicles and structures in her island home, it took a long time for kaijuologists to get close enough to investigate.

Bajingis’s most well known aspect is her left eye socket.The eye socket is completely encrusted with yamaneon infused bone,from which she can fire a terrifying beam of green light that can leave horrible , if not very deep wounds on other kaiju. What circumstances could have caused this unique growth is of great interests to kaijuologists.

A strange quirk of her regeneration is that, for any wound not along her belly, the injury will first heal with wrinkly gray-green scales, then changing to a more mammalian covering. The time for the change is inconsistent between wounds, and a fierce enough battle can leave her patchy for several months. Still, she has shown a demonstrated preference for cold environments, only moving into Australia occasionally when the mood suits her, but prolonging her time there if a fight leaves her waiting for hair to grow back.

History

Many kaiju have been discovered in Yamaneon caverns they almost certainly did not originate Bajingis is one of them. Discovered hibernating in a relatively small Yamaneon cave along the border between Mongolia and China, her discovery became a matter of tense negotiation between the two governments. Parties of both governments debated hotly on how to deal with the slumbering kaiju, only made worse by how China had just three years earlier blocked Mongolia’s recognition by the United Nations. The argument would become moot. A Beyonder Alliance scouting party awoke her, either accidentally or intentionally, and she made a mad rush south all the way to the ocean. During her island hopping, she gained her name in the Philippines as a corruption of of Bungisngis, a giggling gigantic cyclops of folklore that was said to once menace what is now Orion,Bataan. She somehow found her way to Antarctic Ocean; perhaps following an internal compass dreadfully out of date with the shifting of continents and the repeated flippings of the earth magnetic field. Eventually she made herself at home on the island of Coldoutthere, an island recently brought to the surface by one of the several megaquakes caused by atomic tests hitting yamaneon deposits.

From her home of Coldoutthere ,she mainly feeds off the wildlife she can get on other nearby islands, however occasionally she makes her way into Australia for no apparent reason except her own curiosity. In this way she has come to be an irregular party in the conflict between Australia and its resident kaiju. Thankfully she avoids cities, preparing to stick to the wilderness or ranching territories.

A relative of mammals so similar to retrosaurs has brought into question into the paleontological community what made retrosaurs so successful in comparison. Dr. Wilhelmina Lerna has opined such comparisons are not advisable due to three reasons: that Bajangis relatives have not yet been found in fossil record, it is not known what type of ecosystem they lived in, and that it is not even clear what size its nonmutated kin tended to be. Still, people cannot help but draw comparisons and ask why no mammalian land predators ever reached the sizes of predatory retrosaurs. Her hunting and territorial instincts are linked to a mammalian metabolism, actually makes her less social than many reptilian kaiju because her instincts often tell her there is not enough food to go around (despite the fact yamaneon in her body chemistry making this incorrect). If her ancestors had survived the Permian extinction, they would easily have been outcompeted by retrosaurs. Still, Bajingis is an animal evolved to “live fast, die young”that has been granted near immortality, making her a terrifying combatant.

Personality:

Bajingis does not make friends easily, nor does she particularly desire them. With a roar like the shrieks of a thousand tortured mice, or a hiss like a steam vent, she will bellow challenges to even the weather itself. Like a hyena, her main way of showing affection is to go “see I could hurt you, but I didn’t”, or her unique method of greeting of gently locking her jaws with those of another kaiju.

While willing to tolerate humanity in their territory , she attacks any vehicles or built structures within her own Antarctic domain. Most peculiarly, she seems to have a strange sense of kaiju solidarity:she assumes humans are at fault in any kaiju-human conflict and will instantly side with the other kaiju present. In fact she will instantly come to the aid of any kaiju under military attack, even if normally she would consider then a prey item. This has gained her several friendships among Australian kaiju in her visits and she seems to honor this comradery in return by making no attempt to feed upon them. The main other way she tends to form relationships is through cooperative hunting, be it it herding clusters of smaller prey into traps or ganging up on another kaiju. She is one of the few kaiju to use her “special abilities” regularly in hunting, using her eye to blast away armor or thick hide and then focusing her attacks on the wound she has created. A partner makes thing much easier for her since she is blind in the eye socket she shoots her beam weapon from. However bonds developed through hunting are not as strong, and she will turn on former allies if she feels they are declaring too large a share of the spoils.

A simple carnivore, humanity would find her tolerable if she stuck to her own domain. Failing that, if she was willing to work cooperatively with humans to hunt kaiju harming the Australian ecosystem, it would well be worth the loss of the occasional herd of livestock. However the fact she will side with kaiju against humanity in any conflict has made her neutralization a top priority for the Australian government. Unless she comes to a revelation that humanity is not always in the wrong in its conflicts against kaiju, she will need to be captured or killed.

Meta:

Homage to the Old One Eye and her ally, the leader of ”the furry tyrannosaurs from the north” from Flesh comics. Old One Eye led an army of carnivorous dinosaurs against time traveling cowboys, and this inspired Bajingis’s combination of viciousness yet willingness to dedicate herself to a cause of what she perceives to be the greater good. She was also somewhat inspired by the “T-rex” superman fought,and Attack of the Killer Shrews.

The Day and month from her year of discovery comes from the date the feathered tyrannosaur Yuutyranus was named and published.

For the “Kaiju War” of Australia, a sort of homage to the Great Emu war, she acts as a sort of foreign mercenary, coming and going as she pleases.

Originally I was going to have her in the Siberian Monster zone, and have her try to assemble the kaiju there into a sort of militia to keep out human interference following the Beyonder invasion, but I then realized the Siberian monster zone might be on its last legs by that time. Eventually I decided to put her in Austrailia with Artilleron.

I considered first having the crew that discovered her attacked by kaiju lice, in an homage to Rodan, but ultimately felt it was too distracting. Also I was unable to find any pictures of Permian parasites in amber.

All prehistoric life referenced in her biology section was checked to make sure they were known in the era ATOM takes place.

Her slight aquatic adaptations are partially an explanation for her willingness to travel between land masses, and also a reference to how all modern day egg laying mammals are either aquatic (platypus) or descended from aquatic ancestors (echidnas).

The fact her name is based off a Philippines myth is from me looking for inspiration for names wherever I can, and plotting her course from Mongolia to Australia realizing it worked. It also plays on the fact that reporters in Tyrantisverse come up with hilarious names for kaiju. Still, like how Promythigor is a better name than Prometheus, Bajingis is a much better name than that of a mythological figure that is only alike in having fangs and a single eye. So good on you, fictional culturally insensitive reporter that named her..

For some reason, I imagine that if she were in a movie the puppet for the closeup shots would be noticeably inconsistent with her stop motion models, and the stop motion models also being inconsistent in their features.

@tyrantisterror

#atomic time of monsters #ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest

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