#hexapod

[herpsandbirds]

Globular Springtail (Dicyrtomina ornata), family Dicyrtomidae, Montfrais Eboulures, Franconville, France 

photograph by Alexis Lours

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

My mom bought me this book for Christmas

The Resurrectionist by EB Hudspeth, a fantasy field guide full of anatomical illustrations of monsters and cryptids.

The musculoskeletal systems are fun to look at, but not nearly as in-depth as I would have liked. If you have more than a passing knowledge of taxonomy (or in my case, access to Wikipedia), a lot of the details fall apart under scrutiny

The harpy has four upper limbs connected to one shoulder girdle; it shouldn't have arms, only wings

The sphinx is not classified as a mammal, but is still somehow in the family Felidae with cats (and like the harpy is also drawn with only two girdles despite having six limbs. I will give the author credit for giving the sphinx a keel for the wing muscles to attach to)

It lists the Hindu deity Genesha as a cryptid, which is a no-no.

Cerberus is also explicitly not a mammal, but somehow still a canine (literally in the species Canis with wolves, dogs, and coyotes)

Both mermaids and dragons are listed as members of the order Caudata; the only extant members of Caudata are salamanders, which kinda makes sense for dragons, but not so much for mermaids (also, the author keeps playing it fast and loose with cladistics; both mermaids and dragons are in the same order despite being in different classes, and while dragons are explicitly said to be amphibians, mermaids are given the fictional class mammicthyes, which means mammal-fish. At that point, why not just call mermaids amphibians? Why make up a fake latin hybrid name?)

But what bugs me most of all is the classification of the Minotaur as its own order of mammal when in mythology it is explicitly described as a hybrid of two known species (made possible only by the cruel machinations of the divine, but still)

To use actual taxonomical nomenclature, the minotaur's species would be B. taurus × H. sapiens (specifically B. taurus♂ × H. sapiens♀; there are, to my knowledge, no legends of H. sapiens♂ × B. taurus♀). That's how ligers, tigons, mules, zorses, pizzly bears, narlugas, etc., are described.

If I had written this book, I would have leaned more into evolutionary biology. Most land animals have four limbs because they all evolved from boney lobe-finned fish, which split off from the boneless sharks and rays millions of years earlier, so any six-limbed vertebrates would need to be descended from a fictitious category of six-finned fish which would either be an offshoot of boney fish/tetrapods (I guess they'd be hexapods, though that term refers to insect arthropods), OR a precursor to boney and cartilaginous fish that both clades split away from much earlier (it's easier to lose structures than to gain them, so it makes more sense for a six-limbed ancestor to spawn four-limbed descendants than the other way around).

Think about how different elephants are from humans, and humans are from aligators, and aligators are from penguins, and remember that they all evolved from the same ancestor tiktaalik, an amphibious fish that existed some 375 million years ago. Imagine a precursor six-limbed species and how diverse all its descendants would look after 400 million years. Save for the occasional instance of convergent evolution causing two unrelated species to independently evolve similar body plans to fill the same niche, tetrapods and hexapods would look nothing alike. There would be very little recognizable overlap between the two. A six-limbed "pegasus" would not look like a real world horse, and a six-limbed "dragon" would not look reptilian/dinosaur-ish, for much the same reason that giraffes don't look like frogs; they're just too distantly related. Bonless sharks and boney fish and whales/dolphins all have similar looking bodyplans only because their environment requires the same hydrodynamic shape, while terrstrial vertebrates are much more physically diverse.

[bornulhu]

MS paint alien.

Squishy Hexapod from a salty world. It has two pairs of three legs and 6 eyes to scan the environment for danger and food. From the sides of its face emerge two orange tendrils with which it picks up lichen growths which it feeds on. Its mouth is directly above the 3 front legs. And as it walks, the motion helps it chew the tough foodstuffs.

[hi-im-kaybee]

anatomical imagining

[kaneidae]

Monster form of my sona

[cuicuit]

Little lovely springtails 😍

[gatorstims]

A cybernetic/android stimboard for Anon! With glitchcore stims and Agender colours!

®️ ™️ ®️ | ™️ ♻️ ™️ | ®️ ™️ ®️

[talos-stims]

robot transgenderism!!!

🏳️‍⚧️|🏳️‍⚧️|🏳️‍⚧️

🏳️‍⚧️|🤖|🏳️‍⚧️

🏳️‍⚧️|🏳️‍⚧️|🏳️‍⚧️

[onenicebugperday]

@firekitten830​ submitted: I understand if it’s not possible as these photos are. Very low quality dhsjgsjd (I’m hoping to get an actual camera soon so I can take nice pictures of bugs instead of trying to wrangle my phone into focusing on them) but an id for these pals would be rad (location is Virginia)

Yeah definitely hard to ID from these photos. How small was the first one? If it was very small, it might be a springtail. Otherwise I’d need to see more detail. The spider...maybe som ekind of cobweb spider in Theridiidae.

[solvramwendi]

This is when it all spiraled, and the point where this future would belong to the Wilva ghosts.

[herpsandbirds]

Globular Springtail (Dicyrtomina ornata), family Dicyrtomidae, Thuringen, Germany

photograph by benjamin_fabian

[bruneburg]

“Mother of Two”, 2017

[hi-im-kaybee]

doodles and studies from last week

[cryptic-science]

YELLOW MOTHERFUCKING GLOBULAR SPRINGTAIL !!!!!!!

[descriptive-isopods]

[id: a fluffy Bombus ternarius bumblebee walking down a concrete sidewalk. She has two orange bands on her abdomen. end id] Strangely the map of B. Ternarius's range given on Wikipedia excludes Saskatchewan. But Bees of Canada does include Saskatchewan in their range.

@bees-in-disguise @beemojis

[artapir]

Hexapodal mobility suits for amphibious transhuman giants. These almost look (to me) like something specialized for a higher-than-terrestrial-gravity environment. Please keep in mind that these are from an era of light and strong materials technology and possibly even limited gravity control to reduce the operational weight of the machine.

Hexagen