TetZoo Time!

Even though we discontinued this comic, there are a few concepts from the series that I'm still fond of. Here's a realization of one of my favorite jokes that we came up with, modified from an episode that will probably never be released. —A

In honor of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, here is some never-before-seen TetZoo Time artwork!

Riding off the coat-tails of TetZoo Con 2015 and the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes this affectionate parody that would have been fleshed out into a special episode. Here, natural history artist Katrina van Grouw and David Lindo the 'Urban Birder' were to face off against a young Tyrannosaurus named Kylotyrannus, leading an army of juvenile-morph dinosaurs against our heroes. Darren, John, Alice, and Dawn were to pose for the original trilogy's cast.

Greetings to our loyal fans,

You have been waiting a long time, looking forward to new TetZoo Time comics, particularly in light of the newest iteration of the Tetrapod Zoology blog. So have we. Unfortunately, it is with heavy hearts that we (Joan and Albert) hereby announce that new TetZoo Time comics will not be forthcoming.

This was not by any means an easy decision for us to make. However, the long hiatus has given us a good amount of time to reflect on this little world that we have created, and in the end this outcome came down to two main factors.

Firstly, TetZoo Time began its life as a tribute to scientists, artists, and naturalists who we looked up to. As such, one of its most distinctive features has been its casting of real life researchers as major characters. Many of the individuals we featured have responded positively to their portrayals. However, we have also received indications that others are less appreciative, and we completely understand how being cast as a fictional character might be an awkward prospect to some. Combine this with the fact that we had grandiose plans for character development and fictional backstories for several members of our cast, and such awkwardness would have no doubt grown as the series progressed. Causing discomfort to the people we admire runs entirely counter to the spirit of TetZoo Time.

Secondly, another major component forming the identity of our comic rested on its status as a parody of Adventure Time. Though TetZoo Time was never meant to be an exact play-by-play parallel of Adventure Time, our art style, characters, setting, and narrative were nonetheless strongly based on the TV series. We are fans of Adventure Time, but we feel that our approach constrained the directions in which we could take our own storytelling, as well as what we could do with the comic itself. (Long-time readers might remember the very short-lived TetZoo Time online shop that we quickly closed down for fear of running afoul of copyright.*) On top of that, the fact that many of our characters were likenesses of real people placed further constraints, as alluded to previously.

*We are aware that parodies are not considered copyright violations in several legal systems, but we figured that it was better to be safe than sorry.

In the midst of this sad news, we do have a more positive announcement to make: we will be starting a new comic, Chile & Yi: Paleontologists! This comic will no longer feature real, living people as characters (at least, not directly), nor will it use the Adventure Time art style, but it will nonetheless contain many other aspects that we personally loved about TetZoo Time, including a cast of obscure tetrapods, references to the paleontological community, and Knuckles the Chalicothere. That’s right: we will be adapting many of the original characters and storylines that we’d planned for TetZoo Time into our new comic.

And who knows? Maybe we’ll still churn out the occasional TetZoo Time doodle in our spare time, and we always welcome fan art. After all, we invested a lot of time and effort into this project and, despite our aforementioned misgivings, we do consider it to have been very much a positive force in our lives. Should we produce anything related to TetZoo Time or come across any new fan work, we will be sure to post it here. We will also be leaving the askbox open to questions and comments.

Special thanks go to Gareth Monger and Rebecca Groom, who volunteered their precious time to help us complete the last few pages of the comic and greatly increased its artistic quality, to Darren Naish and John Conway for humoring our little endeavor and consistently being some of our biggest supporters (including advertising us at TetZoo Con, wow!), and to all of you readers for reading and commenting over the years. We would also like to apologize to those who we had announced as characters but never got the chance to release the episodes in which they properly feature, including (but not limited to) Memo Kosemen, Thomas Holtz (who was even gracious enough to indulge us once by reading his lines from one of our scripts), David Marjanović, and Alice Roberts.

Make no mistake, we have not lost interest in Tetrapod Zoology (the blog) or tetrapod zoology (the subject) in the slightest. We look forward to continuing to serve as Envoy and Ambassador of the Tet Zoo Empire in other ways. As long as there is more to learn about tetrapods, the fun will indeed never end.

Best regards, Joan and Albert

TetZoo Time! - Episode 3 (Comic 4+5/5)

And that’s it! This is the end of TetZoo Time! We had this ending planned, of course, but we hadn’t fully drawn it up for release. So please enjoy this “illustrated script”! Don’t feel too sad, we thank you for joining us on this journey!

See here for our explanation as to the comic’s ending and our future.

#DarrenTheSavage

At least one of us has joined the Cuphead hype! So here’s some little fan art.

I’d like to think the names of Darren & John are Jarhead and Canman, respectively. Darren’s a specimen-jar, and John’s a paint can.

Thanks for the kind words! We’re glad you enjoy TetZoo Time. We certainly enjoy making it, but real life has a pesky habit of getting in the way a lot.

An exciting new paper written by two Tetzooniverse scientists came out today. Darren Naish and Mark Witton describe a neck vertebra from the giant azhdarchid pterosaur Hatzegopteryx. Princess Tetrapod may be big, but she would be dwarfed by Hatzegopteryx. However, the new vertebra suggests that the neck of Hatzegopteryx would have barely been longer than that of the princess! What Hatzegopteryx lacked in neck length though, it more than made up for in strength. The stout neck vertebrae of Hatzegopteryx may have allowed it to assume the role of an apex predator and take down quite sizable prey on the islands where it lived.