#<- no they're not they're not even pantherines

[mammoth-clangen]

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In which Pounce's panic attack is interrupted by my FAVOURITE LITTLE GUY!!

U will learn more about him in part 2 uvu

Fun fact, I was gonna have Pounce stalking a giant pleistocene Pika but literally cannot find any reference to how big they were.

And then i realised pika are just,,, insanely tiny,,, so i used a marmot instead. I like marmots now, they're so chunky!

I drew Pounce with proper sabers by accident, big cats have milk teeth until they're 1yr old, whoops! Let's say it's uh... an effect... from baring them... being stressed out... yup

[mammoth-clangen]

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Telling Lie-lacs?

Meet Bat!

He has an edgy af design which is immediately counteracted by him having 1 braincell he is now sharing with Dart

His mum seems... hmm... (u get a cookie if you can guess the gist of the conversation between her and Lilac- it's not nice)

Also Bat is a little bit based off a kid I taught who was missing a leg. She wore a prosthetic in the pool and one time stood up mid-lap holding it over her head and said "my leg fell off!" and i was like "oh... what do you normally do when this happens?"

Kids can adapt to anything and I think that's cool.

Oh yeah u can read Kindred of the Mammoth on Comicfury btw!

[mammoth-clangen]

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Im so torn on how I feel about these colours. They're very bright and I can't decide if it's pretty or garish cx

Poppy and Lilac get to have a chill moment though, I think that's nice c:

I wish I had foreshadowed this better but yeah Poppy was always planning on leaving once she was well and the cubs were big enough. Now she's not, which is good bc I like drawing her uvu

Begging people to teach me how they draw characters interacting with each other. I feel like mine always look like they're clipping through each other's mesh and bouncing off, rather than being organically close >:/

[mammoth-clangen]

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So... Snakespots seems nice :)) This is fine :))

Sorry for the death fakeout! I usually hate them but this was too much fun to pass up! Burnet gets to live, and I'm sure there will be no cost to this >:3

I gave this a lot of thought but decided Lilac gets to cry on screen bc-

*checks notes*

-full realism is boring, characters who don't emote are not fun to read in a visual format cx

Oh yeah i binged House MD while doing this page and finally finished all of it and now i need to find another silly medical drama to watch XD

[mammoth-clangen]

I love seeing the colour patterns on your clan gen homotherium and smilodon.

They remind me of cat colours. Colour mutations in animals (cats and prehistoric animals on general too) are my special interest

I remember that my favourite smilodon design was the one from Primeval. I still have the box sets and they were my favourite as a kid (and now lol).

Sad that Smilodon was most likely tawny like lions. It apparently lived in open areas so most likely wouldn't have spots or stripes. But that doesn't mean we can't draw them like it. Also I wonder what mutations they did have in real life (like white lions, white tigers, "strawberry" erythristic leopards, albino leopard, and melanistic leopards and jaguars do appear in the wild)

I actually discovered your comic when I followed the homotherium tag after seeing the frozen cub. I once saw lyuba the mammoth at the natural history museum, London, at a limited exhibition. I'm completely obsessed with the permafrost mummies. I hope I get to see more in person one day.

Here's my kitty, Zoe.

Oh my goosh what a cute cat ;A;

here's my creature, Fat Tilly! She's an 11yr old Selkirk rex who likes loafing and lying in the sun c:

And thank you! I adore colour mutations in extant animals and I agree that it's really fun to contemplate them in extinct ones c:

I'm gonna preempt this getting long and put a cut here jhrjhrf

I'm sure you will already have seen this, but for anyone interested in paleoart depictions of colour mutations, I'd really recommend this great article all about it

White Cat, Gold Plains was actually all about the premise of a Homotherium with piebaldism. Pied is one of my favourite pigment mutations because it's so much deeper than integument patterns; it's actually a neural tube defect that leads to distinct behavioural changes. WC,GP was about Kiina, the pied cat, and her struggles with always being view as 'childish' by her peers and struggling to fit in. There was also more human impact in this story, as Kiina gets picked up as a cub by a group of early humans. It was sort of my own experience/musings on neurodivergency played alongside some thoughts on early domestication attempts humans must have had (though we all know that, sadly, Homotherium did not end up domesticated). Pied animals are typically more trusting, which is why you see so many pied domestic animals! (Fat Tilly and Zoe both are, for example lolol)

Also the Primeval Smilodon has one of the most gorgeous and distinct designs of any media sabercat tbh, I really loved the episode as a whole even though it had a sort of sad-but-expected ending.

I don't remember where I read it, but there was someone discussing Smilodon patterns and the conclusion was basically "we can't be sure". While lions are solid as adults, they're spotted as cubs and likely had spotted ancestors seeing Pantherines seem to have strongly contrasting patterns as the default. Machairodontids aren't even the same lineage as Pantherines, so we really can't know what patterns they had except for Homotherium latidens having dark brown cubs! They could just as easily grow into a different adult coat, like hyena do. (side note, I was sorta hoping that absolutely amazing Homotherium mummy news might drag some people to my comic so I'm glad it did lolol)

Smilodon was also likely very ambush dependent, being too bulky for pursuits even as long as modern lions. Disruptive colouration could have helped with this even in fairly open habitats. This is actually why I gave the Ice Fangs very faint stripes; high contrast tiger striping didn't make much sense, but breaking up the outline a little couldn't be a bad thing even in a steppe environment. I also didn't want them completely solid because there are actual lions to differentiate cx