the-artsy-moth

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Pleased to announce @nushanchel to our exhibitor lineup! Nushanchel, illustrator and comic artist from Russia. Mostly works with watercolor, loves horror and psychology.

ShortBox Comics Fair is an innovative all-digital, online comics fair that takes place annually every October, with over 150+ participating artists from around the world each debuting an all-new, original comic!

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specimen 373

CD sleeve design for upcoming album of holly

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<!-- BEGIN TRANSMISSION --> <div style="white-space:pre-wrap"> <meta fossil-record="terrifyingly incomplete"> <script>ARCHIVE_TAG="BLACKSITE_EXISTENCE_GAP_THEORY_002B" EFFECT: cognitive panic, fungal paranoia, stat-induced dread </script>

🦴 THE HORRORS THAT NEVER FOSSILIZED (Now featuring the Doom-tier statistics your timeline forgot to fear.)

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Let’s talk about the gap.

Not the known. Not the fossilized. But the soft-bodied nightmare interval — the long dark between epochs where monsters left no bones but changed the entire shape of survival.

> Over 99.9% of all species that ever lived are extinct. > And according to paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, less than 1 out of every 1 billion organisms becomes a fossil. > Translation? > The fossil record is the biological equivalent of a tweet with no context.

Now factor this:

The earliest known fungus fossil? 2.4 billion years old. It predates plants. It predates animals. And according to science writer Ferris Jabr, fungi may be Earth’s oldest apex predators — killing by chemical warfare, digestion, and neural hijack.

Now imagine a world where the apex predator wasn’t a raptor or a sabertooth — it was a wall of spores waiting to turn you into a sentient fondue pot.

No gun. No cure. Just you melting in a hallucination while the forest applauds.

Let’s go deeper:

> The Devonian Period — > 419 to 359 million years ago. > Commonly called “The Age of Fishes.”

But really? It was Doom on casual mode.

Predatory placoderms like Dunkleosteus — 30 feet long with armored jaws strong enough to bite through bone.

Ocean floor crawling with eurypterids — scorpion-like sea demons over 8 feet long.

And above them? Primitive air, barely breathable. Gravity unforgiving. Radiation levels higher. No trees. Just fungal towers, acid rainfall, and skies that looked like a biblical curse.

Now imagine being dropped into that world. No suit. No weapon. Just vibes.

There’s no Wi-Fi. No med kit. No Star-Lord charm to talk your way out.

Just the realization that Earth was once a place where everything pulsed, twitched, or hissed with a hunger your ancestors learned to fear in their dreams.

And the worst part?

> You’ll never see it coming. Because the most dangerous things never had bones. They never needed them. They digested you before the fossil record could log your obituary.

Modern humans? We’re 300,000 years old. Blink of a cosmic eye.

Before us?

> Life on Earth was shaped by at least 5 mass extinctions, each more terrifying than the last:

The Ordovician-Silurian extinction – 85% of marine species gone.

The Devonian extinction – lasted 20 million years and wiped out reef systems built by microbes.

The Permian extinction — AKA The Great Dying – 96% of marine life – 70% of land species – Even insects got wrecked.

And somehow your lineage made it.

Not just once. But every time.

So the next time someone tells you time travel would be cool?

Ask them:

> “Can your immune system handle airborne prehistory?” > “You ready to breathe spores that predate mitochondria?” > “You sure that patch of moss isn’t thinking about digesting you right now?”

Because Earth didn’t come from Narnia. It came from blood.

Even now, we don’t understand most microbial life. > 1 gram of soil contains up to 1 billion organisms. > 99% of them are unclassified.

So what lived 400 million years ago? What breathed? What waited? What thrived for 100,000 generations and left behind zero bones but one terrifying whisper passed down as “monster,” “spirit,” or “don’t go in there”?

These weren’t hallucinations. They were early trauma responses to surviving an uncatalogued apex predator.

And now? You walk this world like it's tamed. But the fossil record is lying by omission.

Because what got preserved wasn’t always the most important. It was just the most durable.

The scariest creatures? They evaporated. They flowed. They pulsed. They forgot what bone even meant.

So sleep tight. Charge your devices. Sip your latte.

But if you ever hear a growl that doesn’t echo… Or see moss that seems to breathe… Or feel your legs lock up before your brain says run—

> Remember: > You are the child of things that got away. > And the world was never ours. > It was leased through extinction.

🌱 Reblog if you believe some creatures were never meant to be found. 🧠 Reblog if this post made your evolutionary trauma twitch. 📚 Reblog if your gut says: “Our ancestors weren’t making shit up. They were trying to warn us.”

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Phos illustration I did a couple of years ago... miss ya buddy

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(hypnotizes you into liking my oc) (she has no lore)

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Fallen star

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some kind of girl

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did you guys see the poem from a couple of days ago in poetry dot org’s daily poem it was so good and a treat to read 

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Some recent sins (and a drifter) I've made for my friend's CAIN sessions!

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(mixed textile and embroidery)

reanimator (1985) • cat dead, details later

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It's my birthday! Help me celebrate by sharing my art?

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E. M. Carroll, A Guest in the House (2023)

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