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cry me a river…

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discourse.jpg

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some random redemption arcs that aren’t just ‘zuko, but a little to the left’

I’m evil but all my evil friends betrayed me and I’ve decided that the best revenge is to ruin their evil plans. Yes, this means I’m a “good guy” or whatever. No, I don’t like it any more than you do.

I was evil but all my evil friends betrayed me and now I’m going to latch onto the first person who shows me kindness. If that happens to be the protagonist, I am totally fine with realigning my morality to match theirs.

I never wanted to do what I did, and now the biggest obstacle to me switching sides is convincing me that I’m not a living weapon.

Well as long as you’re imprisoning me in this magic amulet I might as well give you pointers on your technique. I mean come on if you all die I might be stuck here for millennia! It’s not because I like you and don’t want you to die. Nuh uh.

Look, I legit thought that being evil was going to be my best option to get this important thing done, but, uh, that didn’t pan out. Help?

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Junco Couple Chat!

Another iconic bird--this one of bird feeders and front yards, the dark-eyed junco! This little junco couple is having a cute conversation over some winter berries.

This is part of a weekly bird challenge with @elleskinner-justart and @elizabethpatricianart so check out theirs, too!

In my shop!

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"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

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Made the wall art from my gift art for Natasha into a phone wallpaper 👉🏼👈🏼🥺 filled in some areas with more doodles and added in our dear beans in the center ✨

Y’all are more than free to save it and use it as a phone wallpaper if you like 🥰✨ I hope to jump back into some nice doodle art of the beans before other things come up going into December 💜🧡

I just really love the doodles with Sabezra, Kalluzeb, and Kanera family with Jacen and Chopper 🥹✨ and I just love the pod of purrgil above 🐋💜✨

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Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.

The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.

“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.

The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”

Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.

“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”

Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”

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This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

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Possible Prehistoric Musical Instruments

Music is a great passion of mine so I have wondered for a long time if our earliest prehistoric ancesters in Europe were capable of creating music and how? I’ve done some research on this subject, have also visited several prehistoric instruments stored at an archeological depot and I own several replicas based on archeological finds. Here is a list of possible prehistoric instruments.

Unfortunately we will never know what melodies or rhythms our ancestors played on their musical instruments. We can only try to reproduce these instruments and experience/listen to the sounds that they could have produced. We do know that creating music wasn’t solely an activity practiced by us, Homo Sapiens. In the Divje babe cave, a flute was found made from the left thighbone of a young cave bear and it has been dated to around 60,000 years old. This was before modern humans settled themselves in Europe so this flute must have been created and played by the Neanderthals.

Wind instruments: -Transverse flutes -Vertical flutes -Oblique flutes -Trumpet-like instruments made from shells or gourds -Didgeridoo -Panflute -Whistles -Ocarinas

Instruments made with skins -Handdrum -Pottery drum -Frame drum -Cylinder drum -Friction drum

Instruments you can shake/rub or struck -Rattles -Rasps -Bells -Bullroarer -Click sticks -Xylophone -Ung-Klung

Instruments with strings -Mouth harp -Resonator bow -Lute/lyre -Earth bow

I see a lot of people, especially those interested in old Nordic music such as Danheim/Wardruna etc.. loving the Tagelharpa. The act of using a bow to drag it over strings in order to produce a sound, such as the tagelharpa, is actually quite a recent invention. The bow was invented around the 16th century. Tagelharpas described in the eddas were actually not played with a bow but as a lyre.

I hope this post has given some of you more of an insight in the types of instruments our paleolithic ancestors could have played. Perhaps this serves as inspiration to recreate these instruments and try them out, it’s a lot of fun.

Here are images of: Neanderthal bone flute 60,000 years old, A bullroarer, Possible cone shell instrument found in the Marsoulas cave, France, A paleolithic woman playing the sea shell instrument art by Gilles Tosello, Neanderthals preparing for the hunt, one plays the flute, artist currently unknown for now,

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Archovember 2024 Day 3 - Gorgosaurus libratus

The apex predator of Western North America during the Late Cretaceous was Gorgosaurus libratus. Found so far in Alberta, Canada and Montana, USA, it lived several million years before Tyrannosaurus rex would appear. While it was a tyrannosaurid, it was more closely related to Albertosaurus, so much so that some scientists consider it to be another species of Albertosaurus. Gorgosaurus is the most numerous tyrannosaurid in the fossil record, known from dozens of specimens. This abundance of fossils has allowed paleontologists to investigate Gorgosaurus’ ontogeny, life history and many other aspects of its biology. For example, in 2023, a 5-7 year old juvenile Gorgosaurus was discovered with stomach contents consisting of two intact Citipes juveniles about a year old. This showed that younger Gorgosaurus’ were mostly eating prey much smaller than them, and were probably not hunting in packs, as the meal would not have been large enough to share. That being said, only the remains of the hindlimbs and caudal vertebrae of the juvenile Citipes were present, suggesting that this Gorgosaurus may have had a preference for the muscular hindlimbs. Many Gorgosaurus specimens also preserve evidence of facial scars, a result of intraspecies facebiting.

Gorgosaurus would have lived on the coastal plain along the western edge of the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea which divided North America in half during the Late Cretaceous. The area was subtropical with periods of drought. Conifers would have dominated the forests, while the underbrush consisted of ferns, tree ferns and angiosperms. Gorgosaurus is best known from the Dinosaur Park Formation. Here, it would have lived alongside another apex predator: Daspletosaurus wilsoni. While these tyrannosaurids were roughly the same size, they may have preferred different types of prey, allowing them to coexist without too much competition. And there was a wide diversity of prey here, from many of the most famous ornithopods like Parasaurolophus walkeri, Corythosaurus casuarius, Gryposaurus notabilis, and Lambeosaurus lambei, to beloved ceratopsians like Styracosaurus albertensis, Centrosaurus apertus, Chasmosaurus belli, Spinops sternbergorum, and Vagaceratops irvinensis. There were also ankylosaurs like Anodontosaurus inceptus, Dyoplosaurus acutosquameus, Edmontonia rugosidens, Euoplocephalus tutus, Panoplosaurus mirus, Platypelta coombsi, and Scolosaurus. Pachycephalosaurids included Foraminacephale and Stegoceras validum. Gorgosaurus also shared space with other, smaller theropods, like the ornithomimids Ornithomimus and Rativates, caenagnathids like Caenagnathus, Chirostenotes, and Citipes, dromaeosaurids like Dromaeosaurus and Saurornitholestes, and troodontids like Latenivenatrix and Stenonychosaurus. Dinosaurs were not the only animals here, and Gorgosaurus would have also had to share space with the giant azhdarchid pterosaur Cryodrakon, as well as alligatoroids like Albertochampsa and Leidyosuchus, and choristoderes like Champsosaurus. Gorgosaurus is also known from the Two Medicine Formation and Judith River Formation.

This art may be used for educational purposes, with credit, but please contact me first for permission before using my art. I would like to know where and how it is being used. If you don’t have something to add that was not already addressed in this caption, please do not repost this art. Thank you!

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Homotherium latidens

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Homotherium cub!!!!

On November 14th, a paper was released describing a mummified 3 week-old homotherium cub discovered in Yakutia, Russia.

WE CAN FINALLY SEE A SABRE-TOOTH CAT IN THE FLESH!!! It's an incredibly remarkable find!

I wanted to try drawing it. Based it off what 3 week-old lion and tiger cubs look. Chubby and round. Homotherium has a sloping back. The mummy showed it has a thick, furry neck, shorter face, and a little tuft of long hair at the chin.

The paper is available here:

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Lil kitty that I drew based off the Homotherium mummy described earlier this week :3

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A Homotherium mother and cub, with input from the newly described mummy from the Arctic permafrost.

Was the adult coat color similar to that of small cubs or did it change with age?

Many questions remain, but the new find holds many answers.

by Mauricio Anton

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sweet beast

welcome to the holocene little one, we’ve waited so long for you

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Homotherium cub based on the incredible newly discovered mummy!