Art History, Part 3: Another Speculative Radiodont

 

Another speculative radiodont lost to the fossil record (check out my first entry here). This is the False Ammonite, Pseudammonites ptilobrachiones, a filter-feeder that sweeps plankton and small fish from the water with its massive, broom-like Great Appendages. Much like a hermit crab, the creature’s soft body is protected inside the discarded shell of another animal, in this case an ammonite. The False Ammonite’s home floats at the surface of the ocean thanks to a symbiotic siphonophore, Megaera deformibaccata,  that inhabits the inner chambers. Siphonophores are relatives of jellyfish that form vast connected chains of individual animals known as zooids. Many zooids are highly modified to serve specific tasks within the colony such as reproduction, prey-capture, and bouyancy. The striped, pink tentacles dangling from the aperture of the shell in this illustrations are Megaera’s fishing tentacles and the orange pear-shaped blobs are gas-filled "float" zooids.

To the right of the False Ammonite is another hypothetical filter-feeding radiodont, the Sun Drifter, Medusocola silvadorsum. Drifters inhabit the stomachs of jellyfish, where they gain protection and free transportation. Most Sun Drifters harbor a small colony of Gardner Crabs, Demeter hortulanus. These crustaceans feed on algae that they cultivate on the back of their Drifter. Like a human gardener, they constantly tend and prune their harvest, brushing it clean with their furry antennae and keeping it free of other herbivores.

Those strange, vertically-oriented creatures are Thief Fish, Scutoculus longinares. They hang out under the False Ammonite, using their large, fan-like tail fins to keep themselves upright so they can steal bits of food from the great appendages of the radiodont and from the tentacles of its siphonophore partner. Thief fish have transparent bubbles of hard skin covering their eyes to protect them from the fine, stinging hairs that cover the False Ammonite’s arms and from the jelly’s tentacles.

Visually this piece was inspired by a painting in the book The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon, a Scottish paleontologist and educator. The New Dinosaurs postulates what dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and other Mesozoic animals might have revolved into had they not gone extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.  Dixon had written an earlier book, After Man, about how animals might evolve millions of years in the future after humans have gone extinct. After Man and The New Dinosaurs (along with Dixon’s less popular Man After Man, about the possible future evolution of humans) are considered by many to be the foundations of the modern genre of speculative evolution.

The entry that influenced my creature was the Kraken, Giganticeras fluitarus, a massive speculative ammonite that feeds with nets of stinging tentacles much like a jellyfish or siphonophore. 

The Thief Fish were inspired by the real life Barreleye Fish, Macropinna microstoma, an unusual deep-sea fish that has elongated eyes which can rotate straight up to scan the water above it. It is thought that the barreleye feeds by stealing food from the tentacles of siphonophores, deep-dwelling relatives of jellyfish. Live footage of Macropinna revealed that the fish has a transparent shield over its eyes which may protect them from siphonophore stings.

Barreleye. Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

The Sun Diver was inspired by Phronima, a genus of crustaceans that ride around in the hollowed-out gelatinous bodies of barrel-shaped creatures called salps. While Phronima eats the insides of its host, leaving just an empty, protective jelly-shell, the Sun Drifter leaves its host alive, to serve as a living transport.

Art History, Pat 2: Microbes

 Here’s another illustration inspired by the former Ruthven Museum, now the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. This piece was inspired by the Pond Life diorama on the Ecology and Wildlife floor.

Life in a drop of water.

Rotifers

Algae and ciliates

A colony of Volvox and more microscopic algae.

I’d seen pictures of microbes before, but this diorama really got me to think about them as actual living organisms with unique niches in a functioning ecosystem. I imagined them as animals in a real world rather than just weird phots and drawings.

There is incredible diversity in microscopic life. The most prominent and photogenic critters, of course, are the adorable water-bears, and wheel-mouthed rotifers. But there are tons of strange, interesting living things that all tend to get mushed together under the blanket “Protists” or “Protozoa” label. Microbe classifications are constantly changing, but at present there are around seven major groups that include Euglenids, amoeba, ciliates, flagellates, and so on.

It's tempting to think of microbes as alien creatures. I have, in fact, used protozoans as inspirations for extraterrestrials in other art projects. But the truth is microscopic life is far more abundant on Earth than animals, plants, and other large organisms. They've been around a lot longer too. Life on Earth was primarily microscopic for about three-fourths of its history. It's only within the last billion years or so that macroscopic life evolved on our planet. So, really, WE are the alien newcomers (geologically-speaking) on their world.

By the way, you can get a print of this piece on my store.

Art History, Part 1: Speculative Radiodonts

While designing my illustrations, I often like to imagine them as informative displays in a natural history museum. Museums have been a huge influence on my creative life, and elements from the institutes I've visited frequently find their way into my work.
In college, I worked as a docent at the Ruthven Exhibit Museum at the University of Michigan (now known as the University of Michigan Natural History Museum). My dad had brought me to the museum many times as a kid, so the place held a particular fascination for me from an early age. Working there as an adult only increased my fondness since I actually understood the information in the glass cases.

The Alexander G. Ruthven Building, home to the Ruthven Exhibit Museum when I worked there in the early 2000s (the museum has now moved across the street to the Biological Sciences Building)

The exhibit I most loved from child- to adulthood, was the Life Through the Ages room, which consisted of seven detailed dioramas depicting life from the Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous.

I can still vividly remember what it felt like to venture into that room. There were no overhead lights so all illumination came solely from the dioramas. It was looking at tanks in an aquarium, or drifting through an ancient sea in a submersible, observing the seafloor through thick riveted portholes. As a kid, I always wished my bedroom looked like that, and even as an adult I have this persistent dream of someday making my living room into my own private diorama hall. Considering how big of an impression those displays made on me, it's no surprise that they've made their way into my art. Today I’ll talk about one of those piece. 

But first a little paleontological background. Radiodonts were a group of odd Paleozoic predators that include the famous Anomalocaris along with  stranger forms like Hurdia, Schinderhannes, and Amplectobelua.  Based on current research, radiodonts are believed to be most closely related to tardigrades and onychophorans, also known as, respectively, water bears and velvet worms. They are also thought to be related to a lineage that was ancestral to arthropods.

Radiodonts are characterized by:

1.1.)    Two spined Great Appendages on the front of their body. Several radiodont species are known only from these structures.

2.2.)    A ring-shaped mouth usually covered in plates, with small, pointed teeth around the opening, said to resemble a "pineapple ring". The name Radiodont, in fact, means “wheel teeth”.

3.3.)    Three armored plates on the head, which become large, scoop-like hoods in Hurdia and its relatives.

4.4.)    Rows of fin-like flaps along their sides that undulate up and down in sequence like the fins of a cuttlefish.

A representative group of radiodonts, which you can totally get as a t-shirt design right here.

Radiodonts were soft invertebrates lacking skeletons or hard shells that would readily fossilize. In order to be preserved, they had to be buried under rare special conditions, often in a sudden sediment slide that would leave the body in anoxic conditions where they wouldn’t decay. These burials also contain numerous other soft-bodied creatures, giving paleontologists a rare glimpse into an aspect of the prehistoric world that is absent from other sites. Fossil beds with this exceptional preservation are known as konservat-lagerstätten, German for “conserving storage-places”. They include the famous Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada; The Maotianshan Shales in Yunnan, China; the Ediacara Hills of South Australia; and the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois in the US (from which came Illinois’ state fossil, the enigmatic Tullimonstrum, a creature I’ve played around with in a couple of my art pieces).

For decades radiodont fossils were known only from the Cambrian period. But in 2009 a single specimen of a radiodont, Schinderhannes bartelsi, was discovered in the Devonian-era Hunsrück Slate of Germany. This extended the temporal range of this group by millions of years. It also provided a tantalizing hint at a hidden diversity of Great Appendage creatures that have either not been preserved in the fossil record, or not been unearthed yet.

Schinderhannes fired the furnace of my imagination. I’ve always had a strong interest in speculative biology and paleontology, and my mind was filled with ideas about what these “lost” radiodonts might have been like.

Hermit Anomalocaris

Here's where I get back to my experiences at the Ruthven Museum. The first speculative radiodont I designed was the Hermit Anomalocarid above. The design, layout, and even color palette of this piece was inspired by a diorama of a Cretaceous seafloor full of ammonites, belemnites and other cephalopods,. The look of the Hermit, especially, is based on the giant Placenticeras model that dominates this scene.

The Cretaceous diorama

Placenticeras peaking out of the algae.

The museum's Ordovician diorama also had a significant influence on this piece, particularly the look of the crinoid forest surrounding my creature. The main focus of this diorama is a pair of Endoceras, ancient straight-shelled relatives of the chambered nautilus. One of them has flipped over a trilobite and is in the process of devouring it- inspiring my Hermit Anomalocarids' attack on a horseshoe crab relative.. When I was real young, I recall that this model would actually move its tentacles up and down when you stepped on a pad in front of the diorama. The mechanism broke at some point before I got to college and was never fixed. Most of the people I've mentioned this feature to do not remember it, but I swear it was true!

The Ordovician diorama

The nautilus-relative Endoceras devouring a trilobite.

The Ruthven Museum had a ton of exhibits that influenced my artwork. I'll talk more about other pieces in future posts.