Well, my tablet decided it’s working again for some reason ( I did absolutely nothing with it since yesterday, and pressure sensitivity is working like a charm. It went weird after I updated Krita and does weird things all the time now :/)
After that hell that was hair on Entelodon, I could have go a bit overboard with fluff on Dvinia prima here. But I really wanted to draw something fluffy, so here it is. It’s 50% fluff at least. I have no idea how likely it is (not very, I guess) but I have this vision of startled, or irritated, Dvinia puffing up, crouching with its butt higher than its shoulders, hissing and madly waving its ridiculously puffy tail at the aggressor/rival/what have you. Have a very quick drawing:
Irritated fluffball wishes you to go away asap. For that drawing I did my first ever orthogonal projection - that is, figured out how the skull would look like in front view from side and top views of it I had available. At first I thought I bungled it (it looked really low), but after adding skin and muscles it looked pretty good, so I’m happy with that. And later I found the skull in occipital view, so I know I was pretty damn close.(It should have more molars than I gave it here)
Dvinia prima is a Late Permian cynodont form Sokolki in Russia, first described in 1922 by Amalitzky. It’s found alongside better known Inostrancevia, Vivaxosaurus and Scutosaurus. Of course, as is the case with loads of synapsids, we don’t have much skeletal material available. Only the skull was published, but some postcranial bones apparently exist, as there’s been some mentions of them, and I believe, there was a bad drawing of a pelvis somewhere. Nothing of this was published, however, so, besides the head, the body in my painting is speculative, and based on modified skeleton of Procynosuchus.
Somewhat typically for synapsids, trying to find any kind of information on Dvinia is an exercise in frustration. Anything I can say about it is this: it probably lived near water (there were floodplains in the Sokolki area during the Permian), it wasn’t very big - the skull is about 12cm long, and it was an omnivore adapted to crushing relatively large food objects. Event its exact position between cynodonts is uncertain.
Pitifully scant sources: src, src.
