#carboniferous

I have to thank a team of friends and colleagues who help behind the scenes with research, creation of size charts and conversation partners when it comes to deciding on the compositions of these pieces. Their help has been invaluable!

11.7" Carboniferous Fossil Fern (Odontopteris) - France

From the vault: my Arthropleura (Carboniferous) model for Muse - Museo delle Scienze di Trento (2015). This is a smaller one, just 50cm long, but they grew to be over 2m long.

[img id] Digital cel-shaded artwork of a Tully Monster, which is a hagfish-adjacent pink wiggly worm fish from the Carboniferous. It has a long, ribbed body with soft pink flesh, encased by protective slime that imbues it with a purple hue. It has a tear-shaped fleshy tail, primitive ‘pore’-shaped openings lining its sides for gills, zero limbs, and a head that is probably going to take a hot minute to describe well so hang on a second because I might as well write my will and testament at the same time. Okay. Here we go. Its eyes are shaped like a preschooler’s craft project, with each orbit glued onto either end of a narrow stick, and the stick has been awkwardly glued onto the creature’s head, right on top, no care for aesthetics. It has a long, stiff trunk. There is a raised hole in the trunk’s base on the front of the head that could be a misinterpretation of other reconstructions  on my part, because I have no idea why there would be a hole there. The trunk itself looks very unbending cartilaginous to me on most reconstructions, with a stiff ‘elbow’ in the middle to bend it. For this composition I chose to make the trunk even bendier. The trunk has a fun surprise in the shape of a beaky mouth full of too many lamprey teeth. So what is this tully monster even doing here? It is suspended inside of a pond over an isometric chunk of pondscum-covered dirt and rocks. Tiny pinecones have fallen into this pond, as well as some twigs. The tully monster hoists a spare pine tree branch over its head, with no idea what to do with it, because during the Carboniferous trees were literally just stacking up with nothing to break them down and return them to whatever cosmic hole the Tully Monster slithered out of. [/id]

(Transitioning to my normal postings on my other platforms)

I saw this cross my feed and I was like "oh, hey, it's that girl from that one badly translated French webcomic I haven't caught up on in like twenty years – I wonder what its creator is up to these days?", and apparently the answer is "making video games about herding trilobites".

Shashajaia brimani

https://archive.org/details/winnersinlifesra00buckiala/