The Bearded Vulture Is The Only Known Animal Whose Diet Is Almost Exclusively Bone.

The Bearded Vulture is the only known animal whose diet is almost exclusively bone.

The bone-eating giant bird which coats itself minerals like copper to get its rusty hue for unknown cosmetic reasons, most likely to show dominance. The brighter the hue, the more dominant the male.

They probably need the copper because its anti-bacterial properties. useful if you’re a carrion eater.

The bird has a 9 ft wingspan.

Bearded Vultures provide an indispensable service to the ecosystem, checking the spread of disease by consuming corpses. But the bearded’s diet is 95 percent bone. It can wait for the other scavengers to strip the body clean, then stroll in at its leisure to take its fill.

Happy Saint Patrick's day!

Just getting this in in time this year!

Please all stand for the (new) national anthem! ☘️

Godsh I wish that were me...

Redraw of the Godzilla version cos now it's canon that Minus One likes Monsterverse MV the most!

Link

why is it called shoegaze? is it because you have to keep looking at your ridiculously massive pedalboard to tippy tap on all your silly little guitar pedal switches?

anon that's actually literally the correct answer

The garrulous Slagzogg

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge from @maniculum

A little rough this week, but wanted to get it out there (perfect is the enemy of good :p).

Jinhao shark fountain pen with fine, hooded nib, with Monteverde Raven Noir ink, over initial 5.6mm HB pencil sketch.

Process and resoning notes below the cut...

"The Slagzogg marks the watches of the night by its constant cry. No other creature picks up the scent of man as it does.  There are two kinds of Slagzoggs, domestic and wild. Wild Slagzoggs fly high, in a an orderly fashion, signifying those who, far away from earthly things, preserve a rule of virtuous conduct. Domestic Slagzoggs live together in villages, they cackle together all the time and rend each other with their beaks; they signify those who, although they like conventual life, nevertheless find time to gossip and slander. All wild Slagzoggs are grey in colour; I have not seen any that were of mixed colour or white. But among domestic Slagzoggs, there are not only grey but variegated and white ones. Wild Slagzoggs are the colour of ashes, that is to say, those who keep apart from this world wear the modest garb of penitence."

Okay, we know they fly. We know they have beaks. Hence, it's pretty obvious what kind of creature this is...

A pterosaur! Er... Well, there's no mention of feathers (which is probably reasonable...), perhaps I'm just tickled by the thought of medieval domesticated pterosaurs? I probably spent way too much time trying to draw a wattle fence, too. We have a farmer feeding her flock of domesticated miniature azhdarchid pterosaurs, while a few wild slagzoggs fly high overhead, looking down on their cousins below.

I went with azhdarchid pterosaurs since I felt that would be more visually distictive, and fit better in the picture given their more upright and distinctive method of locomotion on the ground. I also love the idea of a slagzogg 'village' cackling (like the one spreading its wings on top of the fence), clacking beaks, preening themselves, and generally making noise!

We also know that 'no other creature picks up the scent of man' as well as the slagzogg... We do know at this point that the bestiary authors love their superlatives almost as much as Pokedex descriptions, but we have no reason to doubt it. So, looking at modern archosaurs with a great sense of smell... Apparently, crocodiles actually have a fairly good sense of smell, but we're looking at birds to work out how best to represent this in a creature with a beak. Now kiwis have nostrils at the end of the beak, vultures also have a great sense of smell (though they completely slipped my mind until I was most of the way through), which left me with petrels... Petrels are diving seabirds with a distinctive 'tubenose' (their nostrils form a tubular nasal passage atop the beak), and use their sense of smell to detect prey (and their colonies) at sea. It's definitely a distinctive look!

What do they use their great sense of smell for (apart from identifying their keepers, one assumes)? Maybe these are truffle hunting pterosaurs? ;)

Actually, my first thought on reading the description was the dog vultures from the Judge Dredd comics (unfortunately I can't find any pictures online), until I re-read the description and noticed the reference to beaks!

This all raises an interesting question about how I (we? I don't want to assume too much) approach these challenges.

I feel like most of the time, I'm trying very hard to approach the prompts with a completely open mind; in many ways, a lot of the fun of these challenges is seeing what designs we come up with compared to the bestiary illustrators, given the same prompts.

Occasionally I'll have a pretty good idea what the creature is meant to be, in which case I will sometimes exercise a form of 'malicious compliance' where I'm either sticking as closely as possible to the description, or more rarely pursuing a parallel direction that I know is not the 'correct' one, in order to avoid drawing anything too close to the animal I believe the prompt is referencing.

Most rarely, I just have a cool idea from the prompt (like the Blisheag) and head off in that direction instead.

Guess which one this is :D

So what I'm also learning here is that I need more practice drawing humans, and drawing pterosaurs!

As an aside, this week I discovered this site;

larsdatter.com

The Linkspages at Larsdatter.com

Learn about the material culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including clothing, tools, and artifacts.

It's basically a giant repository of links to various images and sites relating to medieval life and culture (so for example, I looked up the links for straw hats to get some medieval straw hat references this week...). There's so many links in here that some of them will inevitably have moved or expired, but it's potentially a really good source of references! I was able to find this image (partway through drafting the drawing) that I ended up taking heavy influence from;

it’s crazy how much diversity there can be in one species…these are all pictures of the same bird species (red-tailed hawk)