A matter of mammals…

Here for this second post I bring two studies on fossil mammals from Argentina:

First Callistoe vincei (a fantastic proborhyaenid from Salta Province) wich has been published in 2002 By babot et all

Callistoe challenges my understanding of carnivore as an introduction of bohyaenid anatomy.

To reach a fine reconstruction I make a multi referenced approach trying to not fall on pure Lion-like beast or Dog-Bear-Canid-collage  being no one truly related to a big nasty marsupial !

Although there’s not much on marsupial musculature in special, I find a good book to work it : Animal Anatomy for Artist, The elemens of Form. by Elliot Goldfinger (Oxford University Press 2004) wich was very useful by its wide range of mammal disections.

The other mammal of the day is Theosodon from the Eocene of Santa Cruz, which was part of a bigger work and for reasons of time I could not make as good as I like,
so after a several sketches looks like this:

Theosodon was a basal macraucheniid, with the size of a lama or a big deer (around 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length).

The most striking feature of these ungulates is the caudal retraction of the nares and the infered elephant-tapir nose.

But in the case of Theosodon such retraction is not so well developed as we can see on his skull, so I follow my client suggestion and apply to him a cute snout, not big enough to be prensil but… you see.

 

 

 

 

First post, and how (and why) I challenge my mind making a blog in english!

After many delays and doubts, I decided to create a blog that can be seenworldwide. Since my previous experience short-lived (and almost family audience) or too public to be taken seriously (Faceb.. an old Spanish Fotolog …other  blogs … etc etc) and following the advice of several friends here we are, squeezing the brain to write in my rusty English, and testing the limits of the google translator to make me understand.

And since this is an exercise in patience and skill, I ask my apologies forfuture mistakes of language and are therefore welcome any corrections!

But as this blog is not about this issue is the last thing I will say about it…

To heat engines and show what I mean with illustration, here’s an example of my work:

This is a plate I have made for a scientific illustration contest last year. The main basis of this work is the skull of the fossil penguin Icadyptes from Peru.
Data and images of the material was stolen (err taked!) from:
Ksepka, D. T., Clarke, J. A., DeVries, T. J. and Urbina, M. (2008), Osteology of Icadyptes salasi, a giant penguin from the Eocene of Peru. Journal of Anatomy, 213: 131–147. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2008.00927.x

The reconstruction of the skull was made putting together the figured bones, helped a lot with the CT scanned sulls of various penguins from Digimorph (thank you very much University of Texas-Austin for free access) and the life restoration is a mix of the Gannet  (Morus bassanus)  with the Emperor penguin in honor of the phylogenetic relationships of both groups and the mix of features that has Icadyptes.

This “simple” image took me several hours of research and a lot of literature that now I can not list (because I do not remember all) But in future I would like to post pictures with bibliography to show how distant is the scientific illustration of the misnamed palaeoart which needs no justification to be good itself.