vickysaurus-art - Tumblr blog

[vickysaurus-art]

My takeaway from the Arlecchino anime: Capitano wears the most normal-ass shoes. Here he is shopping for them.

[vickysaurus-art]

Furina trying to adjust to normal human life.

[vickysaurus-art]

A knight errant riding a Styracosaurus. Brought on by these recent* thoughts I had about dinosaur-mounted knights.

[vickysaurus-art]

Hey all, despite everything I don't have concrete plans to leave here yet, but if you do, you can find me on Mastodon at https://sauropods.win/@Vickysaurus . If you wanna join Mastodon but don't know a good instance, pick that one or kind.social.

[vickysaurus-art]

On a moonlit night in the early Carboniferous, two Pulmonoscorpius do a mating dance in the Lepidodendron swamp. Although the giant scorpions have little interest in prey right now, a Balanerpeton amphibian wisely decides to swim away, while several Casineria sleep through the night in the copious tree litter.

[vickysaurus-art]

My art in 2023

January

Microraptor and the Flowers. I started this year out making paleoart watercolours and never really stopped. This one is about a Microraptor investigating the first flowers she's ever seen. The flowers are Lingyuananthus, a lovely little fossil flower described in an even lovelier paper that was not behind a paywall for once.

February

Orthocones Descend. Having moved into a new apartment and made a timeline covering the walls, the paleozoic looked awfully empty, so I made a big effort to expand my horizons and do art showing creatures I'd never drawn before. Showing orthocones descending vertically on their prey made for a fun composition too.

March

Sinosauropteryx does not want to share its tree. I still can barely believe we know the colours of both Sinosauropteryx and Psittacosaurus. Dinosaur colours always felt like something we'd never figure out without literal actual time travel before we figured them out.

April

Hadrocodium's mossy home. I got the idea for one of the tiniest mammals of all time making its home in some moss on a tree while hiking in Switzerland and coming across some truly impressive moss beards.

May

Procompsognathus's cliff climb. Although the foreground cliff itself and the contrast between foreground and background didn't come out quite as well as I'd hoped, I still really like this art featuring the three main branches of archosaur (dinosaur, pterosaur, and pseudosuchian).

June

Anomalocaris, Dragon of the Cambrian. The realisation that most Cambrian creatures were tiny gave me the idea of a whole bunch of them hiding from a 40 cm long Anomalocaris while in positions reminiscent of a D&D party facing off against a dragon.

July

Caihong and the Kalligrammatids. Kalligrammatids were neuropterans that superficially resembled large butterflies, but unlike them their wings were transparent! I combined them with the gorgeous iridescence of Caihong and backlighting for a fun experiment.

August

Spring on the mammoth steppe. When the time came to do some art set in the Quaternary, I decided to depict a real life location and how it would have changed in the past few hundred thousand years. This spot is just west of Baden-Baden (which is in the glacier valley to the upper left), on the edge of the Schwartzwald. I also enjoyed depicting an ice age spring. It wasn't always snow and ice.

September

Darwinius and Geiseltaliellus's stare-off. The Paleogene was the last remaining Phanerozoic period I hadn't done any art of, so I drew this little scene in the Messel Pit formation.

October

Inostrancevia family at sunrise. I hadn't drawn Permian synapsids in a while at this point so they were overdue for a paleoart. I also felt like going absolute ham with my reds. The sunrise and Permian volcanism made for a convenient excuse but really, this is just for me.

November

Wind, Courage, and Wings. This one's a birthday gift for my friend, depicting a lovely fable in Genshin Impact about how the wind god Barbatos taught the first birds to fly.

December

The Zanclean Flood. 6 million years ago, the movement of the continents cut the Mediterranean off from the oceans. Since more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than it receives from rivers, this resulted in the sea drying up and becoming an incredibly deep, dry, salty lowland. Until 5.3 million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar formed and the entire sea was refilled in a massive flood. This depicts the early days of said flood seen from the tip of the Rock of Gibraltar.

If you've enjoyed my art this year, consider leaving me a tip! Or have a look at last year's art too.

[vickysaurus-art]

Yesterday, an earthquake shook the narrow coastal lands between the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the great dry abyss to the east. A landslide allowed the water to break through the narrow strip of high land and begin flooding in. The incredible power of the ocean violently widened the gap and eroded the lowlands beyond, creating an ever growing chasm and the biggest waterfall on the planet by the next day.

With the very ground under their feet unsure and brittle and the sea rushing in ever faster, some of the local animals have fled to the top of a large nearby rock outcropping that will one day be named Gibraltar. The only ones who don't seem disturbed are the Pelagornis and other sea birds, who have discovered some aerial acrobatics let them catch the fish being swept up in the flood. Though even for a bird the size of Pelagornis, an unfortunate humpback whale is way too big of a catch.

The vast, dry salt plains beyond continue much further than any of the watching animals can imagine, yet a thousand Amazons worth of water will fill up the abyss within a year or two. In the process, the Mediterranean Sea, which had dried up completely a million years before, will be reborn.

[vickysaurus-art]

Four Buitreraptors feast on an Andesaurus carcass they found left behind by a Giganotosaurus, while two azhdarchids quarrel over their own prey.

Based on a photo I took of some magpies stealing the vultures' lunch at the zoo!

[vickysaurus-art]

Three Deinonychus play around while resting in the underbrush. Inspired by the way crows sometimes lie on the ground to play together.

[vickysaurus-art]

'When the first wisp of wind brushed across the land

Birds that yearned for the sky had wings

But no way to fly

They asked the Anemo God:

"How can we reach the heavens?"

To which the Anemo God replied:

"You have yet to find that which is most important"

As the God spoke, the wind thrust the seeds of a dandelion

High into the sky

The birds thrust out their wings

But the breeze was all too mild

Leaving them to stumble across the earth

So they went to the gorge

Where the wind showed off its wild and incomparable strength

They threw themselves off the cliff

And flapped their wings amongst the howling winds

Until they were able to fly freely in the sky

To the Anemo God they went, to gleefully say:

"We understand now! All we needed was a stronger wind to fly"

In reply the Anemo God said:

"What you lacked was not wind, but courage"

"It is courage that has allowed you to become the first flying birds of this world"'

--

A birthday gift for my friend @wander-yet-wonder depicting the fable of how the wind god Barbatos taught the first birds to fly. Happy birthday!

[vickysaurus-art]

With recent fun news about how things are going with Tumblr, know that I'll be on here until the ship goes all the way below the waves, but you can also find me on Mastodon at sauropods.win/@Vickysaurus .

Incidentally, if you face the problem of 'wanna try out Mastodon but you have to pick a server' and you're into paleo stuff, then just join up with that one, sauropods.win . If you wanna join a bigger and more generalist server with lots of nice queer folks and chill vibes, go for kind.social . They're both good places.

[vickysaurus-art]

If you want fluffy dinosaurs having a good time, I got more where that came from.

A Troodon playing in a pile of leaves, as suggested during the Prehistoric Planet watch party! I only recently learned how common angiosperms had become by the end of the Cretaceous!

[vickysaurus-art]

A recent series of volcanic eruptions causes the Sun to rise in astonishing colours over the vast Pangaean deserts. An Inostrancevia family gets ready for the day, the cubs playing with everything in sight, from their mother to a very dismayed Dvinia. A little way away, a Vivaxosaurus browses a shrub for breakfast.

[vickysaurus-art]

One paleoart for each period since the Cryogenian

Thanks to the timeline on my walls that I've been trying to fill in with my art, I have now reached the point where I've done paleoart for every single period of the Phanerozoic, plus the Ediacaran and Cryogenian! That is to say, every period of the last 700 million years. So with that milestone, I thought it'd be fun to go through those periods in order and show off one paleoart of mine for each!

Cryogenian

In the Cryogenian, the Earth completely froze over. Twice! Life wasn't much to look at yet, but I enjoyed drawing what our planet might have looked like at the time. The girdle of lakes at the left is the equator, which may have had ice-free patches.

Ediacaran

When the ice retreated, animals first began to blossom into their endless forms most beautiful. Ediacaran life was strange and quite unlike the creatures that would come later, but it was nonetheless an incredibly important chapter in life's history. Here we see the Ediacaran weirdos washing up on shore after a storm.

Cambrian

The Cambrian explosion brought much more recognisable creatures. But one thing that's easy to miss is that they were all tiny! All of them? No, Anomalocaris was, with a length of about 40 cm, the dragon of the Cambrian.

Ordovician

Life continued to diversify in the Ordovician, and among this diversity were the cephalopods. They produced the largest animals yet to exist, the orthocones, who hung vertically in the water column and decended upon their prey like a claw game.

Silurian

Although fungi and bacteria had already made forays onto the land deep in the past, things began to get busier there in the Silurian. But these horseshoe crabs, and their larger cousins the sea scorpions, have not come to the shore to stay, but to mate and lay eggs. Unfortunately for the horseshoe crabs, they have come to the very same shore.

Devonian

Our own vertebrate ancestors, like Tiktaalik, were pretty late to the party, only taking their first steps on land in the late Devonian. That's no knock against them - there was plenty to do underwater! This Tiktaalik is busy guarding his eggs while his mate is busy hunting, for example. Who has time to step on land?

Carboniferous

The end of the Carboniferous saw some quite large bugs, like these two Mazothairos chasing off an interloping Meganeura. They're representatives of a pretty interesting group of basal insects called the Palaeodictyoptera, who have a set of weird little extra wings on their thorax.

Permian

Among the many fantastic creatures of the Permian were our own cousins, the synapsids, like these lovey-dovey Moschops. As you can see, this picture and the previous one are done in coloured pencils instead of watercolour, because they're the oldest images I'm including in this post. I only very rarely used watercolours before this year. I think it means I should do some more Permian art, it's such a cool and underexposed period.

Triassic

One mass extinction later, the archosaurs are diversifying all over Triassic Pangaea. Here we have the three main groups of them: Paratypothorax, a pseudosuchian in the background; Peteinosaurus, a pterosaur on top of the cliff; and Procompsognathus, a dinosaur climbing the cliff.

Jurassic

I had three different option for Jurassic paleoart to showcase, so I picked the most experimental one. These backlit insects are not butterflies, but kalligrammatids, a group of large-winged neuroptera, some of which even mimicked maniraptoran dinosaurs like this iridescent Caihong with their patterns.

Cretaceous

The Cretaceous featured some of life's most gorgeous crescendos of diversity, like the Yixian formation, where a Psitaccosaurus wants to visit the favourite tree of a group of Sinosauropteryxes, who are having none of it. This is still one of my favourite pieces I've ever drawn.

Paleogene

The Paleogene featured some of the highest global temperatures of all time, leading to tropical climates all over the planet, including at this lake in what will one day be Messel, Germany. Darwinius, a close cousin to our own ancestors, is having a staredown with the lizard Geiseltaliellus.

Neogene

The world turned colder and dryer in the Neogene, leading to the spread of large grasslands, like these South American ones. Phorusracos, a large terror bird, has caught a Thoatherium on the edge of the forest they both live in. South America was an isolated continent for the duration of the Neogene, leading to a quite unique fauna.

Quaternary

The Quaternary, our current period, is marked by the cycle of ice ages regularly freezing the northern hemisphere. But even during the ice ages, spring would come to the mammoth steppes, and these steppe mammoths are happy to celebrate its coming with a bath in the river.

[vickysaurus-art]

On a lovely evening 47 million years ago, Darwinius and Geiseltaliellus are forced to share their favourite lakeside tree. They do not particularly enjoy each other's company, but are unlikely to do something about it. Their tree has also become the grave of a couple of Titanomyrna infected with a cordycipitoid fungus, the giant ants spreading the fungus in their death grips. Meanwhile, a pair of Gastornis enjoys the evening Sun while a Eurohippus takes a drink, safe in the knowledge that these giant birds are herbivores. Archaeonycteris hunt insects above the lake, while various crocodylians hang out and get ready for the night.

[vickysaurus-art]

350000 years ago, just beyond the western edge of the icy Schwarzwald, spring has come to the mammoth steppe. A raven flies over a group of steppe mammoths enjoying a cold bath in the Oos river, while a Megaloceros grazes on some choice plants growing on the riverbanks. With the harsh ice age winter in retreat for a few months, a flock of greylag geese migrates north, a buzzard hunts, and a small pack of wolves observe a herd of steppe bison and some roe deer.

[vickysaurus-art]

On a rainy Devonian day, a Tiktaalik father guards his eggs in a small forest river. Meanwhile, his hunting mate has her eye on a Bothriolepis. Another Bothriolepis is eating something buried in the river sediment, drawing the attention of a Coccosteus.

I've wanted to draw Tiktaalik for a while. It's easily the most depicted creature of the Devonian, but it always seems to get shown boldly pulling itself onto the land. While that was of course extremely important in hindsight, surely they spent much more of their time living quite happily underwater. So here's some interesting behaviour some lungfish do: the dads guard their eggs after they're lain in water plants.