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NocturnalSea — A Field Guide to Amaterasu: Paxillilbarums page 4
Published: 2012-09-25 22:46:29 +0000 UTC; Views: 3420; Favourites: 59; Downloads: 37
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Page four of the paxillilabrum entry.Go here for the other pages:
Page 1: [link]
Page 2: [link]
Page 3: [link]
Page 5: [link]
Go here for the other entries in the Field Guide:
The Last Birds: [link]
Aquarium Plant: [link]
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Comments: 18
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nice "chordates" (you said two groups - what's the other one?)
interesting and novel, how fighting infections can transform an animal into a plant.
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I find the bones on the seal's fins pretty strange, otherwise, the skeleton looks pretty awesome. Have I got this right, the "seals" have not evolved from land-living organisms, but are basically just really specialized "fish"?
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Yep, they are indeed specialized "fish". That's why their fins are just solid plates instead of multi-jointed hands like an Earth seal's. Some species can move around on land with their fins, but they aren't nearly as agile as, say, an Earth sea lion.
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Personally, I rather think the skull is a bit too familiar-looking.
At a glance, the eye socket-like structures seem unjustified.
Did you have any specific thoughts about those?
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The "eye sockets" are really just fenestrae to make the skull lighter, rather like the hole sin a dinosaur's skull. The eyes of a ghost seal are actually a colony of completely separate organisms called oculophyton that embed themselves in the surface tissue layers.
Notice that the "ribs" are actually a sequence of interlocking plates with grill-like openings in them.
I did deliberately make the skeleton rather Earth-like; I'm fond of convergent evolution and I like the idea of an alien that looks similar to an Earth creature, but which has a radically different internal anatomy and evolutionary history. My "Last Birds" are another example.
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That's cool, maybe not the way I would have done it, but I understand you reasons.
And either way, your work is spectacular.
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I understand, but I still thkink it would help if you flipped the jaws, and the large fenestrae were in the lower jaw
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I could actually have both orientations present in the order. Since the eyes aren't actually fixed in the skull, and since the brain of a ghost seal is in the main body instead of the head, there's really no reason that the larger part of the skull has to be on top.
In fact, I'm considering making the skeletons of host-seals a lot more plastic than chordate skeletons, so you'd end up with much more variety than you'd find in Earth pinnipeds.
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okay! that's great! I was just thinking that this way you could avoid excessive convergence while keeping the essential idea for the fenestrae.
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Also, I didn't mention it in the Guide, but the seal's "teeth" are actually serrated extensions of the jaws rather than separate articulating pieces. The lower jaw is also attached to a a pair of long hinge-bones, allowing the seal to open it's mouth much wider than a chordate's, creating a vacuum-funnel like a basking shark.
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I'm still a little sceptical. I mean, the bones in the fins of our fish aren't solid plates either; well, I guess that makes it a truly alien design
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if I had to guess, I'd hunch that the bony fins here are from an ancestor which was more spherical or (like seahorses) otherwise dependant on those fins for either motion or stabilization. the Ghost Seal is just part of a descendant lineage which seems to be utilizing those fins.
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Structurally, a ghost-seals fins are more analogous to the parapodia of annelids, or the spine-fins of an acanthodian, or the simple fins of an antiarch placoderm such as Bothriolepis.
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