#ninjemys

here's today's #Paleostream sketches!!!

today we sketched Tullimonstrum (Tully Monster), Ornithosuchus, Xerces blue, and Ninjemys

tullimonstrum ornithosuchus xerces ninjemys was having a moment yesterday because of ninjemys so thats why this is late :,v

So honestly I'm relatively new to digital painting. I sketched a little here and there, made skeletals, but actual painting I've done very little. But I ended up putting this together for my work on the Wikipedia page for meiolaniid turtles. (Yes the Ninjemys colours are a reference to it being named after the TMNT)

I've rambled a bit about them before, but basically, meiolaniids are weird stem-turtles thought to be outside the two main modern groups we have. They were decently large animals, their shells alone range from 1 meter to 2 meters in length (3 to 6ft I believe?), they were land animals, had some crazy horns and tails that were encased in spiky armored rings and tipped with a tail club. Here some photos with paleontologist Victoria Arbour, a Ninjemys tail club photographed by Serjoscha Evers and a Meiolania tail club illustrated by W.H. Wesley.

They were found throughout almost the whole Cenozoic, with the oldest form dating to the Eocene of South America and the most recent ones living from the Pleistocene to Holocene in Australia and on various South Pacific Islands. They are honestly pretty cool animals and super underrated, which is why I decided to give their wikipedia pages upgrades in the first place. Which also meant doing a bunch of other illustrations (that I was more in tune with) and pulling a bunch of public domain photos and putting them on wikimedia. Here some skeletals and charts I made, open the last pic, it shows multiple different Meiolania species atop each other.

The results were pretty mixed tbh. Some of the most recent forms, Gaffneylania, Warkalania and even Ninjemys had relatively little to write about. But things were more exciting with Niolamia (if you remember my rant about its messed up history). Meiolaniidae itself was just a big summary of all the other stuff, but easily the most extensive was Meiolania itself, which took AGES to research and put togehter. Tho I'm pretty happy with the result. Here's a little side by side, old and new.

Nanantius, a cretaceous enantiornithean bird Neohelos, a cenozoic diprotodontid marsupial Nimbacinus, a cenozoic thylacinid marsupial Ninjemys, a cenozoic horned tortoise

Niolamia is a fascinating turtle. Living during the Eocene (probably), it is one of the earliest known meiolaniids. What makes meiolaniids special is not just that they were sizable land turtles, but two other things 1) The massive horn-like scales, primarily those marked A-C. Niolamia has some of the most impressive ones at that, with the A scale forming an almost ceratopsian-like frill at the back of the head and two large, flattened, side-ways directed horns before said frill. 2) The long tail was armored, covered in bony rings with spikes and in some species even a straight up tail club

The two images above are things I put together for the Wikipedia page of Niolamia. The first shows the growth of the species. The small skull is a juvenile Niolamia, originally described as Crossochelys but synonymized by later researchers. The bigger skull (to scale) is the neotype (or holotype?) of Niolamia. Check out an older post for some history on that. The other is a simple sideview of the skull and lower jaw, nothing too fancy.

The bottom two photos aren't mine but those of Victoria Arbour, but show the weirdness and size nicely. The first image shows Niolamia (right) next to Ninjemys (left). While the second picture shows Ninjemys with as I said Victoria Arbour. Which still gives a good idea of how big these animals heads were.

The reason is about as dumb as you would think. So while Megalania was originally described based on a few vertebrae, Owen was beginning to referr more and more material to the animal, a lot of the time without the bones showing any overlap. Now around 1880 the skull of the giant turtle Ninjemys was found in Australia and sent to Owen in London. G. F. Bennett, who found the skull, correctly identified it as a turtle and mentioned as much in a letter to Owen.

Except Owen seemingly ignored that or disagreed, because he swiftly proposed that the skull was actually that of a lizard and not just that, specifically that of Megalania. As if that wasn't already an unholy chimera enough for you, the limb bones that Owen assigned to Megalania at the time were those of a GODDAMN MARSUPIAL. Not even a reptile.

Even when studying more turtle skulls from Lord Howe Island, Owen insisted that what he had were actually lizards, which he considered to be relatives of Megalania (naming them Meiolania). Eventually both Huxlay and Woodward got involved, recognizing the two skulls as turtles and removing all the non-lizard stuff from Owen's Megalania. But for just a brief period of time Megalania was some uncanny hybrid between monitor lizard, giant wombat (art by Gabriel Ugueto) and tail-clubed turtle (art by Joschua Knüppe)

Ninjemys in the Sunset