#but that’s speculation

[quibbs126]

Okay but it’s kind of funny how out of all the Ancients, from day one Dark Cacao was just designed to be Dark Choco’s dad

Like his original beta designs have the Oreo pads, but with a different design, he has the same star shape, they have the same eye colors, and like the Wiki says, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason his design changed is because he looked too similar to Dark Choco, which would cause potential confusion

Like even with Hollyberry, who is the other Ancient to have had a pre-existing character be related to them, she doesn’t look identical to Princess and it’s not immediately obvious they’re related. Heck if anything, her beta design looks even less like they’re related, at least a little and at least to me

So like, why was this specifically a thing with Dark Cacao? Did one of the designers just really like Dark Choco or something? What’s going on?

[iris-of-the-lambs]

what if instead of horses we domesticated porcines... i think that could be cool

[tawnysoup]

Finally now that the comic is fully public on comicfury, I get to share it with all of you here, too <3

If you enjoyed, please consider supporting by buying a PDF of the comic on itch.io: https://tawnysoup.itch.io/home-in-the-woods

[yupmabel]

i think creepers are herbivores who get their chloroplasts by eating plants and then photosynthesize by themselves. like sea slugs

[t00thpasteface]

here's something stupid: the catcatfish

some quick facts:

they're nocturnal and tend to roam around while awake.

they have keen senses of smell and hearing, but terrible eyesight. despite this, they also have a tapetum lucidum, making their pupils "glow" in the dark.

their fur is short, dense, and oily to waterproof them.

they prefer a diet of mostly meat and are attracted to strong-smelling food like fish, cheese, and anything fermented.

the elongated dewclaw on each front paw is sharp, flexible, and nonretractable. it injects a venom that causes respiratory failure and cardiac arrest in prey and, in extreme doses, humans. veterenarians typically remove the dewclaw venom glands during the neuter/spay procedure.

they grow to an average of 1m and 23kg (3ft and 50lb) but can reach up to double that length and triple the weight!

[frankierotwinkdeath]

Y’all want Taylor Swift to be gay so bad but you won’t even write femslash about her

[lylahammar]

My take on unicorns! I'd really love to make a mythical creature field guide someday, since the Spiderwick Field Guide is what inspired me to start drawing in the first place 🥰

[armadillorollup]

biology of a stapler

[theantiazdarcho]

The Lancetfish is a species that looks like it comes straight out of a realistic fantasy world building project.

[rosie-dear-rosie]

I love you speculative biology. I love you worldbuilding projects. I love you creature design. I love you fantasy biology. I love you speculative evolution. I love you science fiction.

[vcreatures]

PRINTS AVAILABLE

if you’ve been following me long enough you know I love a mimic. From my false faced mermaids that I’ve been painting for years to butterfly dragons, I’m a big fan of illusion in the bestiary world.

I bring you the Ginkgo Draco, another member of the Botanical Drakes. 

[valdevia]

The Ghost Buckeye (Junonia prosopon), descended from a species driven to extinction by urbanization and habitat loss, has evolved specifically to ward off humans. When intimidated, they display the uncanny face-like patterns on their wings. The image it creates has inspired many legends about unearthly distorted creatures, and has consecrated entire areas of forest as haunted.

[iris-of-the-lambs]

Behold, an angel

some anatomy musings on winged ppl and also clothing furgonomics

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

All the dragons from the HTTYD stream. Detailed images below.

The designs from the original movie are basically perfect, which is why I didn't really dare to touch them... until a certain trailer dropped recently.

I'm a spiteful creature.

Anyway. Some ground rules. I tried to make these creatures overall a little bit more realistic and grounded without robbing them of the inherent whimsy that the originals had. All of them are tetrapods, so only 4 limbs max.

Nightfury

These guys have no more functional limbs to move on the ground. They are living stealth bombers. Silent fast fliers.

On the ground they flop around similar to seals, forming small colonies on top of tall cliffs.

Red Death

At a certain size it becomes unfeasible to fly for even a dragon. The Red Death stays on the ground using it's heavy armor and enormous size when raiding other dragon nesting colonies. it'as wings are more like spurs, to injure rivals in combat.

Gronkle

The original had a hummingbird style in flying , something that doesn't work for an animal of this size. My compromise is to make the wings rather stout and being able to be folded a lot.

Nadder

Easiest design, take a unfeathered theropod and combine it with a bearded dragon.

Shellfire

This was the last one I made on stream, it is one of the (in my eyes) worst designs from the shows, so a nice challenge to make it work a little better.

This guy is now a filter feeder, using its large horns to funnel water into its mouth.

Zippleback

Multi-headed dragons are really tricky. In my design I made one of the heads a parasitic male, similar to angler fish, that hitches a ride on the back of the larger female.

Monstrous Nightmare

One of the most classic dragons from the original movie. Lots of crocodilian influence here. The osteoderms on its back have pores from which it produces flammable secretions.

Razorwhip

A fast an agile dragon, but the original doesn't really show that in the head shape and all these spines don't help. I put some tapejarid influence into it.

Rumblehorn

The massive neck of this dragon doesn't work well in terms of aerodynamics, unless it's an inflatable display structure ;)

Whispering Death

The giant maw of this dragon is an even greater challenge, but when you give it the gular pouch of a pelican eel and turn these eyes into eye-spots, it works quite well.

And of course the Terrible Terror!

As you can see it's in my case a close relative of the nadder.

[nolinno-art]

I've developed mathematics for a non-human mind, for my comic "The book written by tiny paws"

Sapient distant descendants of rats, known as packers, living on Earth millions of years after the extinction of humans, began to develop mathematics using cognitive mechanisms never intended for such tasks. Due to an evolutionary quirk, multiplication came more naturally to them than addition, and their mathematics reflects this.

Packers write numbers as shapes, with each number having a corresponding number of corners.

And they write large numbers as nested shapes. The number inside is multiplied by the number outside.

Examples of some numbers:

Packers haven't invented 0 yet. They haven't even invented 1! In fact, they don’t need the concept of "one" much in their system. There's no need to say "I ate one fish" when they can simply say "I ate fish".

Packers can't yet write large prime numbers, like 101 or 10,501, because they would have to draw a huge shape to represent them! Even writing 17 or 19 would be quite difficult if they only used convex shapes.

So packers use non-convex shapes too!

Many years later, some packer noticed that large prime numbers look suspiciously symmetric.

So this packer improved the notation system and made it clearer.

Later, another packer simplified this system even more, deciding that there was no point in writing the same shapes twice.

This packer was the first in their culture to declare that "a dot isolated from a number" should also be considered a number. The packer called this dot "the wonderful number that's less than two".

Many years later, another packer made an important innovation: the "dot isolation" could be repeated multiple times as long as the result remained odd. When the result became even, it could undergo a "two isolation" (division by two). The final result will be a series of dots and twos.

This invention led to the creation of a binary system based on one and two, which had a significant impact on the technological advancement of packers.

The comic "the book written by tiny paws" talks about all of this in more detail. There will be mistakes, debates, the invention of rational, irrational, multivariate numbers, and some other stuff. Some stuff will be very much like human math, and some will be different. After all, math is still math, only the point of view has changed.