a-book-of-creatures

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Well, tbh (that means “to be honest” for short, btw (that means “by the way” for short, iirc (that means “if I recall correctly” for short, fyi (that means “for your information” for short, if you even gaf (that means “give a fuck” for short, lol (that means “laughing out loud” for short)))))) we should be concise. QED. (That means “quod erat demonstrandum” for short).

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(Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller)

fonts will be named shit like viscera antique, 16 bit dreams, doctor's orders, bingo condensed, googly, wish you were here

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I’m not dead, surprise! Working a lot on projects for @paleoartae , and preparing for Dinoel 2025 ! (Also my wifi has been cut off) Still an Alsatian dino, two apatosaurus kissing in a typical Alsatian house ! « Schmoutz » is the Alsatian word for a kiss !

This will be available as a print and stickers during the Dinoel

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Oh boy I’m so glad I can go looking for a recipe for traditional food back home and discover that one of the first hits is pure AI rubbish

Natef deserved better than that ;_;

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Love this Richard Clifton-Dey cover for a 1973 edition of The Wizard of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Amazing creature design.

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🆗 -_-

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So many shades of “Why?”

I mean, art is art but

I have so many questions. 

WHy legs? Where going? Why bundt cake? Puff expression How did puff pick up cake.

How.

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Snakes in various ancient Roman frescoes and mosaics.

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Vespula germanica worker consuming some iced tea on my hand.

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Source details and larger version.

Archival advertisements reveal the trends of their time: here’s my collection of vintage ads.

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This is what umbrellas looked like before they were domesticated :/

Malayan Colugo aka Sunda Flying Lemur (Galeopterus variegatus), family Cynocephalidae, order Dermoptera, Singapore

Despite the common name of this group, "flying lemur", these creatures are not lemurs, and are not closely related to lemurs.

They are closely related to primates.

Colugos are gliders, like gliding squirrels and sugar gliders, and do not actually fly.

Nocturnal and arboreal.

feed on a wide variety of leaves, flowers, and fruits.

photograph by Jamie Allott

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A basking shark actually doing the thing it's supposed to do :O

St. Nicholas: Volume 11, part 1. May, November, 1883 - April, 1884. Conducted by Mary Mapes Dodge.

James Carter Beard (1837 - 1913). "Birds Alighting Upon a "Basker-Shark"." From Blown out to Sea, by C. F. Holder.

Internet Archive

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Wait… is The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor a book of lies? I really loved that book in high school and I feel bad now for having praised and spread an academically dishonest work.

I don't know if I'd use terms as strong as those but yes, I do think it's academically poor.

The main issue with The First Fossil Hunters as a whole is that it proposes superficially plausible, lovely ideas that either 1) fall apart if you know just a bit more about folklore or paleontology or 2) cannot be proven or disproven and fail the parsimony test anyway.

Let's get one thing out of the way, yes, fossils have influenced folklore - but not in the way most people think. There are mythical creatures that 100% were inspired by fossils, but their folklore makes it clear that they were. There are stories of giant subterranean mice that died in the open air, lake monsters whose horns stick out of the ground, thunder beasts who died en masse and left their bones behind... those are unequivocal fossil myths based on, in this case, mammoth fossils/tusks (the first two) and brontothere bonebeds (the last one, inspiring their name). It then gets a bit fuzzy - did the fossils inspire the creatures, or was existing knowledge (creatures exist) applied to new discoveries (where did these bones come from)?

What The First Fossil Hunters (and a lot of armchair mythologists) ends up doing is extending this to everything else based solely on vibes. What if fossils were behind other mythical creatures? All you have to do is think of a vaguely similar fossil found nearby and you're good! Evidence? Evidence is for wimps! Look at how much this fossil looks like a winged lion if you squint hard enough!

The most famous story from that book is of course the "Protoceratops inspired the griffin" story, which I have discussed on here before, and it's been dismissed by far more qualified people than myself. It flies in the face of, well, everything. It requires people to have seen perfect articulated Protoceratops skeletons (I'll give you one word: taphonomy) in the same place where griffins were supposed to be (they're not) and also to dismiss just about everything else about their legend (what's an Arimaspian? Why are they described with specific colors? Who knows?). Surely if they were based on fossils something would be made of their fossil nature. Griffins live underground and turn to stone in the light of the sun!

Ultimately, combining a lion (king of beasts) and an eagle (king of birds) is just... not that difficult to come up with. Griffin motifs date back to Mesopotamia and it is this artistic motif that likely ended up spreading from there (although at least one griffin description, on the face of it, appears to be describing a recognizable animal).

Other arguments are more baffling. I already talked about the Samotherium skull on here. And the Cyclops too. You've probably heard of the elephants inspiring it, but, again... One-Eye Guy is not that hard to imagine by a species notorious for imagining. And it again ignores some of the oldest Cyclops legends associating them with metallurgy. Elephant skulls might have inspired them. They might not. (The fact that their name means "wheel-eye", not "one-eye", to me sounds more telling).

The main problem with those fossil legend arguments is, like I said, they can't be proven or disproven. They're unfalsifiable. There isn't compelling evidence that fossils inspired griffins or cyclopes or whatever, but It Stands To Reason and can't be disproven. And it's immensely popular with the general public. I posted once on here about how mythical creatures are ultimately mostly etymological telephone games and got clobbered with "did you know sauropod bones inspired giant snakes in folklore?" As opposed to, you know. Giant snakes in real life inspiring giant snakes in folklore. We have the receipts. We know where dragons came from.

Random thing too is that I feel it, much like cryptozoology, kind of cheapens human imagination. Yes, we are capable of imagining weird things. And telling them to others and getting mistranslated and misunderstood in the process. We don't need to reach so far as to come up with fossils to explain them.

The First Fossil Hunters is a fun book and has some interesting anecdotes, but it should not be taken seriously. I will always praise Ogden's Drakon and Meurger's Histoire Naturelle des Dragons, for instance, as good starting points. For more on fossil legends from an actual paleontologist (something I'll never be, haha) check this out.

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in da jungle

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"next time, log in faster with fingerprint/face/iris recognition!" how about i keep typing my password like i have for the past 25 years and you fuck off

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Heat mat (doubles as wifi router)

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If you don’t end up taking your clothes off before midnight, you should probably leave the party

Wait, so the clothes Cinderella kept on turned back into rags but the glass slipper she lost stayed glass? Does that mean if she’d taken it all off it wouldn’t have turned back? What is the lesson supposed to be there