Living Fossils - Creatures That Remain Seemingly Unchanged By Time. Here's The Coelacanth, The Sturgeon,

Living Fossils - Creatures that remain seemingly unchanged by time. Here's the Coelacanth, the Sturgeon, the Gar, the Horseshoe Crab and the Nautilus! (Gouache on 50x40cm canvas, SOLD)

I had the pleasure to work on a bunch of little ammonite portraits some time ago for a new paper that was just published.

Before you ask: no we don't know if their soft tissue looked like this. We know every little about the soft bits of these animals. However if you take into account the myriad of different shell shapes and the diversity of modern cephalopods you will see that there is so much more possible than what you usually see.

These are all from the same region and a handful of localities, and yet you can see how diverse they could get, and we didn't even touch the really crazy ones here.

Here the paper: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/RIPS/article/view/19942

joined paleostream again to sketch some silly creatures :] been a long time

During 2022, argentinian researchers studying penguins in Antarctica found a melanistic gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua) with an unusual plumage coloration in Esperanza/Hope Bay, north of the Antarctic Peninsula. The unusual coloration of the penguin was identified as melanism, a genetic condition that causes an excess of melanin pigment in feathers, this phenomenon is also found in other vertebrates. This partially black gentoo pengui appeared to be in good health and exhibited normal behavior. According to scientists, melanism is unusual, and may occurs in one in 250,000 penguins.

Reference: Nigro, et al. 2023. A case of melanism in a Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua) at Esperanza/Hope Bay, Antarctica. Polar Biol.

Have this little Yawning Sea Serpent! Made him for a looping animation test, and I think I did quite nicely.

ITS ALL CLIFFORD!?!!