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PeteriDish — alien sketch dump
Published: 2013-01-21 13:00:32 +0000 UTC; Views: 1792; Favourites: 41; Downloads: 25
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top-down left to right:A beaked flying species (the primary mandibles form thevisible beak, but I am still not sure whether I should keep the maxillae and secondary mandibles (see here the "upper jaws" of the blenderjaw: [link] ) hidden inside the mouth to function as tweezers, but I don't know if that is really necessary. flying animals must come up with ways how to save weight, so having unnecessary jaws might be disadvantageous in this respect...
A small mouse-sized animal, where I was trying to experiment with making the small vertebrates a bit insect-like...
A large marine predator roughly the size of an orca
a random head concept, probably for some mid-sized omnivore
A crocodile/phytosaur-like (the placement of the nostrills) semiaquatic ambush predator
And a "clawjaw" which is an ancient lineage that survived all mass extinction events on my planet. This came as a result of thinking about how this new head anatomy came about and how it changed over time. The image on the left shows the jaws loosely hanging down, but the animal can flip them forward full 180 degrees from the resting position, grab prey and then hold it in reach of the secondary jaws to tear the prey to swallowable pieces.
There are many possible spinoffs or the clawjaw's anatomy, for example, the mouth with the can be placed closer to the front of the skull near the base of the primary jaws, but for this sketch, I kind of liked that the clawjaw can retract the jaws during feeding, but that's not the only way it can be done and I'll try to exploit all the possible variants to the full.
I have many other ideas, this basic cranial anatomy is very friendly to being reshaped and rearranged which gives me variety, while being formed from the same elements which gives me consistency, which I tried to demonstrate with the clawjaw, the defining elements are icentifiable, but the arrangement is very different. The examples on the top two thirds of this picture are a bit different than the blenderjaw, their main jaws are still attached to the sides of the skull, but they open sideways, not downwards. I guess I could call them "scissorjaws," once I started naming them after things with blades. XD
There is one more variety I can think of, basically a derivate of the scissorjaws with broad heads and short jaws which close all the way in and only the tips of the jaws touch each other on the midline, not the entire length of the jaw like in the normal scissorjaws.
There is still a lot to be looking forward to, a lot to be experimented with and a lot to be fleshed out!
I finally feel satisfied that I have found what I've been looking for.
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Comments: 64
hahaha I know what you mean, but the drawing is a bit misleading, it really is more like a hybrid of shark and crab... XD but I can see why you see sepia in it, it's actually amusing how other people can find totally unexpected resemblances in one's drawings!
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That lowest-left specimen. I've seen a very similar creature in my dream tonigh.
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wow really?
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I think I'll draw it.
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So many bizarre and otherworldly ideas... nice work!
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Yeah, but I am rather oblivious to it. Oh well. We are actually finally getting into anatomy in school
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We are studying the heart now. Then we will be dissecting one for realz
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wow really? Why couldn't I attend a school like this? We would never be allowed to do any dissections. the biggest thing I have dissected so far was a cockroach... what a bummer...
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sorry lol
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preemptive apology king 
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Interesting. So do they all share a common ancestor or is it just convergent evolution?
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I guess you could say this was supposed to be a simplified "diversity chart" of the vertebrate analogues of my project. my previous response was clumsy and more complicated than necessary
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yes this is a very simplified example of radiation, with something along the lines of the Clawjaw being the original jaw configuration. another example of a possible derived anatomy is here: [link] and I have more examples planned
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For the flying organism, it would largely depend on the planet's gravity and air density, determining how light it would have to be to achieve whatever type of flight it performs. For instance, birds needing to be so light lost their teeth, and this required the development of complex digestive processes. This like so many biologica issues, is an exercize in compromise.
I like the semi-insectoid concept. Does the abdomen-analogue serve a biological purpose or is it purely aesthetic?
I love the variability of this head/mouth design!
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OH! And he abdomen... I will have to think about that yet, and I will have to consider how much difference there is going to be between the big and the small animals, it could be that this is what a "vertebrate larva" would look like, and it would be something like with tadpoles and frogs, that the young gradually changes shape as it matures. I guess if the larva had any organs in the "abdomen" they would gradually move in the body as it would grow bigger. But just like axolotles, some species could be neotenic and remain like this for the whole of their lifetime, there are so many possibilities to be considered here...
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Ahhhh...
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I agree! finding the compromise might be very hard sometimes though...
Well, the atmosphere i am working with is about 1.8 times denser than earth's, so maybe the push for lightweightness will not be as serious there, what do you think? still, I don't think having the maxillae and secondary mandibles slender and lightweight would do the job too, but then again, I want to avoid copying this: [link] too much, it's enough that my filter feeders are unavoidably going to resemble this guy: [link] with their "comb jaws" I guess convergent speculation is unavoidable in certain cases. XD But I don't want to let the idea go just because there is a possibility that the result will resemble something. no matter what you are looking at, you can always come up with a way how to compare it with something else XD
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Ha. The unfortunate consequence of dealing with the similar neurochemistry and thought processes of other humans. I feel your pain.
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Holycrapthisissoawesomeimnotleavinganyspaces but yeah this is so EPIC im glad you seem satisfied with the head anatomy now XD
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No thanks you for the awesomness
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Seriously though bravo i cant even pic a favourite
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that's a good sigh, thanks!
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If you check out my new solar system pic ive named nearly every planet XD lot of potential for life in this solar system now i need to name it XD i was wondering more about mars i know theres a lot of ice on mars so what if there was a large ocean of water within the ice under the brown dust of mars? Like europa but a little bigger and closer to home
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that's entirely implausible. first of all, if it were so, we would know it. they only explored the isolated subsurface bodies of ice so late, because they are isolated. you can't have a global layer of ice under a layer of rock, you can't even have a layer of water under a layer of rock, and the surface of mars is rock and soil, not just dust. And the surface crust would press the subsurface ice/water and evaporate everything. do you even know how heavy a global layer of rock is? even if it were one metre thick only. On europa, everything you see is happenning ABOVE the rocky surface. Actually, this is some of the bullshit creationists say to jsutify noah's flood - that there was a global layer of water under the earth's crust and got pushed through a hole in the crust above the surface. This is bullshit because water simply cannot withstand the pressure from above and stay liquid underneath the crust, it couldn't even acummulate there, and even if it could, there is more than one hole in earth's cust which means that it would leak out gradually and wouldn't acummulate at all, even if it could stay liquid while being subjected to such pressures and temperatures, whch it cannot. Something like this is simply not possible no matter how you look at it, there can't be anything like you have described on any planet. permafrost and subsurface layer of liquid are a different thing, I hope you know that...
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Ohhh coarse i know that i was just saying a lake witha layer of ice covering it and then the dust but i see youre point........:]
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oh okay... that was quite a misunderstanding on my part, sorry XD
well I sefinitely can see the point but how much dust can acummulate on that ice? I guess if there were such things, we would already know, winds could blow the ice away and we could see them... but the ice that already is there should be enough for life to take the challenge and survive.
It would really suck if we would eventually find martian fossils from the time when it still had an ocean, seeing that it is just a planet-sized graveyars floating in the vastness of space... that's a depressing thought indeed... and venus could have had an ocean too! (that's where the thick atmosphere comes from) so it could also have life, at least the simple one, and it is a completely different planet-sized graveyard too... at least potentially...
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Yeah just think at one point in time there could have been macroscopic critters on mars and maybe venus my big hopes are titan and europa though
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mine too. (europa I think is almost certain, there os no drop of water on earth devoid of life, and europa has a global ocean of that stuff! Holly cow, there must be something out there, even if it were just bacteria, it would still be extraterrestrial life! And if you look at it, two water-based lineages of life, unrelated to each other, separated by many and many AUs of empty space, I think it would be more than justifiable proof that life must be very common in the universe, and that life is an imperative of liquid water, but I would be overjoyed if there were life on titan. That would really revolutionize what we think of life. so far, we only have a sample of one, and it's water-dependent and carbon-based. If there were life on titan, it would mean that different kinds of life are also possible, and not jsut the one we are familiar with. it would mean that just having something liquid on the surface is good enough for life to emerge, not just water.
This view of titan kinda opened some door in me that used to be closed before, and that is thinking that life could even emerge on gas giants, but I will only hold my hopes for this last kind of life only if there is life on titan, because the presence of liquid methane instead of water would require that life to be very different (at least metabolically) from what we are familiar with from earth. But imagine this: if not only water can lead to life, but other liquids too, why not try to imagine life that evolved in a gasseous environment? (this is just going one step further, from liquids to fluids (gasses and liquids are both fluids)
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Ive always had a open mind to life in the solar system and yeah on gas giants to after all "life finds away". I cant wait for the missions to europa theyre making a film based on a manned mission to europa! And yes tianian fauna would change the way we as a species perceive life
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Imagine us finding sentient life on a moon like europa
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