[introduction]

[introduction]

hello, and welcome to my blog!

I am firestorm_shiba, you can also call me Fig (not my real name, but it’s time I grab myself a cool internet nickname…) or G :)

decided I should make a little(ish) introduction post, so here we go!

[quick summary of my blog]

I post a lot of dinosaurs + paleoart, but in the future I hope to include some more of my hobbies, interests and just little life things along the way! That may include lots of fantasy stuff, such as D&D, character design, and plenty of dragons, and I’ll likely start posting some of my fandom-related art stuff such as fanart of the Legend of Zelda, HotD/GoT, Wings of Fire, and the Witcher.

Maybe some little craft posts, and little random gremlin-y things

page tagging quick search:

my post = posts by me. Not much else to say. If I make a long bit of writing or add some art to a reblog, it may end up with this tag as well.

my art = again, not much else to say. Use this tag to quickly filter out reblogs and my non-art related posts from my blog :)

Cretaceous Alberta = art pieces, info and announcements regarding my Colours of the Lost World: Reconstructing Cretaceous Alberta project.

here's a bit about me + my page

Name: firestorm_shiba, Fig, or G, whatever you like

I am a Canadian artist, currently in high school but planning to pursue a degree in paleontology!

some of my interests are: Paleontology, fantasy, dragons & fictional creatures, bugs & insects, nature and all her random crunchy stuff, art, science, books, legend of zelda, and so on.

some of my hobbies: drawing of course, video games, dancing, insect pinning, writing & reading

have a question, art request or anything of the sort? Let me know in my comments, my asks, or shoot me a message! I love to hear from you guys :)

I also have a ko-fi shop (I'm currently unable to receive payments through there so if you would like to buy a sticker or product, please let me know and I can work out PayPal instead. You can still buy stuff off my ko-fi and I will still send it to you, but I won't be able to receive the payments from there for a bit (stripe and TD.... please just work with me I want the money I worked hard for ;-;)

Links and more under cut!

firestorm_shiba's art | Link Card

firestorm_shiba's art | Link Card

A short card containing links to access the social accounts, contacts and information regarding firestorm_shiba (G.R.C.) and their art.

More fun stuff coming soon, hopefully!

Courtship in the sky

What makes a fantasy book good to you?

Yep. I'm trying to get myself into writing a book again. Hopefully I'll actually pull through and write something fuller this time, even if I don't make it to the end.

But I've been thinking. I like to write, and I've always considered myself a good writer-- until lately, when I've actually started to notice some of my flaws. (I'll probably get into that another time, if I continue to make writing posts). And I want to improve-- so I'm asking for advice, to anyone who is a fan of fantasy books, a writer of books, or even a reader of any genre.

What makes a fantasy book enjoyable? What is something you want to see in the genre? What ruins a book? And what makes you want to pick the book up in the first place?

Sorry, that's a few extra questions than what I started with-- feel free to answer one, two, all, skip over and do none, or just comment some general advice :) I'll be happy with any kind of help or support

The way people demonize seagulls is actually unreal. Almost all of their natural habitat has been destroyed (almost all coastal areas have been developed, destroying natural sand dune ecosystems) and they're doing their best to adapt. They're literally just trying to survive. You're in their home. The vitriol some people have for these gorgeous sea birds just because they're not shy about snatching food if you're not cautious is insane

Something that has both fascinated me and frustrated me to no end as of late are the lacrimal crests of allosauroids and other such theropods. No living theropods, to my knowledge, possess such structures. The closest analog I could find were Geese. I'm being driven up a wall trying to figure out what they would have been covered with in life. How would they have been incorporated into the face of the theropod? What display structures could they support? Air sacs, keratin, or caruncles? How pneumatized were they? Were they even for display? Most paleoartists just reconstruct them as odd stones sitting on top of the animals head, or say they were just for shading the eyes, but that can't be it, right? It feels like something is missing.

As a Paleoartist, is there anything you can say on this? Because I don't know nearly enough.

Oh boi, this is a tricky one.

Cranial ornaments come in all kinds of shapes, sizes and surface textures. For Allosaurus it seems likely that they simply had keratin sheets on top of the lacrinal crests, at least that's what the rough surface and striations suggest. However it also seems like air sacs were reaching up from the antorbital fenestra

This is how I would reconstruct that part of Allosaurus in the moment.

There could have been more though, you can see in this photo of the skull of Big Al II that this animal had large opening behind the lacrinal crests, so there could have been other structures involved.

Maybe even better to look at is this 3d scan of Arkhane, from Brussels.

Sketchfab

Allosaurus sp. nov. - "Arkhane" - 3D model by Benoît Rogez (@shadows44)

This is the skull of “Arkhane”, an adult allosaurus specimen (70% complete, 8.7m). Wyoming, USD, 157 to 152 million years old. &

This could have been related to theroregulation, more display structures or simply further weight reduction.

There is quite a bit of wiggle room when it comes to the interpretation of dinosaur facial features and there is way too much already published and at the same time too little to put it all into a single blog post.

Also not all dinosaurus follow this patters, the cranial crests of oviraptorosaurs show no good indication for keratin crests for example. So it's better to say good bye to cassowary interpretations of these animals and instead cover them in skin and/or inflatable sacs, because these hollow chambers appear to be extensions of the sinuses. (my version of Corythoraptor on the right, Citipati from Wikipedia on the left.)

And then again in other theropods like Abelisaurs we see very rugose skull tops but without the striations you see on the lacrinals of Allosaurus, potentially indicating large scales. Here my, slightly over the top, interpretation of Skorpiovenator. And even then: within abelisaurus you have stuff like Carnotaurus which shows clear signs of keratin sheets on its horns.

This all has been complicated in recent years with new methods in bone histology, because as it turns out the internal structure of a bone can tell us stuff about it's outside, that's how we for example found out that Amargosaurus neck spines were no horns and probably conected with soft tissue, or that the osteoderms of notosuchians were covered by skin like in leatherback turtles.

Going back to Allosaurus and other allosauroids. Keratin sheets, scales, air sacs, all these were probably present in these animals, but their exact distribution is still a question of debate.

Here a paper from a few years back that maps para-nasal sinuses in extent and extinct archosaurus which gives you a little idea how complex their internal anatomy could get

https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ar.20794