#even if they're basic bitch carnivores

[gascreates]

them :) dino refs finally complete, so now i can make all the joke comics i want

design thoughts under the cut

aang- second hardest design to ge through. at first i couldn't decide on a species, and then i couldn't get the colors to work. believe it or not, bright yellow right next to bright blue is painful to look at. so instead i opted for an all orange color pallette. does he look like a candy corn? yes. and we love him for it. puny lil candy corn avatar

katara- sweet baby so easy, love her, perfect design, no tears shed except for joy. also GIGANTIC. non negotiable part of her design tbh. and aquatic dino!! spinosaurus was the only choice. the sail is meant to look like her necklace! isnt that cool. im so cool and talented.

sokka- nanuqsaurus is! maybe a cold weather dino. possibly. so we did that. he's smaller than his sister and he's mad about it :) also, him face is warriors paint!! and i know that atla water tribes didn't really have anything to do with orcas, but I love orcas and i wanted to give sokka some recognizably hunter-y pattern. so, orca white markings.

toPH- i am ENDLESSLY SUGFERING. do you know how many times i flip flopped on toph's species. do you understand how many hours i spent debating over the benefits of triceratops vs protoceratops?? ankylosaurus vs. pachysephalosaurus???? my agony is unending. im still unsure. sacrificing the concept that toph could take down a t rex (trike) for the small n unassuming character theme (proto). also the badgermole looking markings are cool i guess

zuko- this is where you pretend that im bot playing favorites when it comes to dino species. why is he a deinonychus? cuz i like big raptors, that's why. go away. dont look at me. he's cute. he looks like a bird and i love that for him. also something something aang and zuko similar species that specialize differently based on how their environments changed them, zuko an echo of the potential of flight and aang an echo of the potential to hunt. flock bird vs pack hunter. same but different.

height chart:

i really cant say if it's accurate at all to the real dinos, but i was lazy and didnt want to do math, so it's just eyeballed heights. the important part is that we understand how tiny aang is and how massive katara is

[artsycloudysleepy]

oooh awesome!!! same here, it's so good :D

just watched inside out 2 and really recommend!! not as good as 1 but it's still great :D

[harpywritesfic]

Cool dice 🟣

why thank you! i know many facts which plague my mind! and as you have opened the can of worms that is my hyperfixation, i will share! (my special interest is animals haha). this is off the top of my head, with a healthy amount of fact checking. PLEASE feel free to not read this.

5/7 of the big cats are in the genus panthera! the other big cats are the cheetah (genus Acinonyx) and the cougar (genus Puma). one subspecies of cougar is literally Puma concolor concolor. Clouded leopards (genus Neofelis) are more closely related to Panthera than the other two big cats. Neofelis and Panthera both belong to subfamily pantherinae, while every other felid belongs to felinae (the felines!)

The difference is that pantherinae can roar, while felinae cannot. The difference is in the mobility of the hyoid bone!

carnivores can be separated by how closely they relate to canines or felines. These groups are caniforms and feliforms! here are some species that fall into each:

Caniforms: bears, mustelids (weasels, otters, badgers), raccoons, pinnipeds (pinnipeds are seals, sea lions, and walruses! pinniped means fin foot.)

Feliforms: hyenas, mongooses (which includes meerkats!), vivverids (civets, binturongs/bearcats) (wondering what a civet is? they're like long cats.)

the saber-toothed cat's genus is Smilodon, for their chompers.

see i like carnivorans more than most mammals- in large part because they are NOT marsupials or worse, monotremes. i HATE monotremes they are so screwed up they need to get out of my sight. ( i have never seen one. this is because they know i would punt them like a football. not because they're all australian.)

so, to understand why monotremes are awful, you must understand mammals are classed by reproductive habits. placentals are live-birth species like humans. marsupials birth what are basically fetuses and grow them in a pouch. monotremes, however? they lay eggs. and, as a mammal, they nurse their young. but they don't have nipples. they secrete milk from their skin. the platypus is a monotreme. how tf does an animal with a beak nurse? echidnas are the other four species of monotreme, and they have pouches like a marsupial. echidnas have a horribly unusual penis too. i'm talking four heads. and they use two. but they can alternate which two they use. they also have a very large penis to body size ratio. i don't know whether or not to recommend googling it, so make your own conclusion. the platypus is also one of very few venomous mammals (other venomus species include certain vampire bats, shrews, and the slow loris). platypus males have a venomous spur on their legs. the correct way to lift one is by the tail to avoid the spurs. the venom won't kill a human but it'll hurt like a bitch.

more horrible reproductive facts, you ask? how about one for the placental mammals? the baculum is a bone in the penis of many placentals. even most primates, but humans haven't got them. the walrus has the longest baculum of any species. i'm talking TWO FEET. (that's 61 centimeters, kitty.)

less horrible reproductive facts, you ask? actually, i need to go to sleep.

[unoisveimved-un-proffesional]

One of the qualities that makes humans the dominant species is the extra ability humans have to form relationships with other creatures. It's far more common to have interspecies friendships and beneficial relations between non-human creatures of different kinds and for animals to have pets than you'd at first think, but it's a skill humans especially excel at. Where there are humans and where there are animals, someone will inevitably try and befriend, interact with, or make a part of the family/community that animal. Even in very urban environments people sometimes try to adopt feral cats and dogs. It's a very human urge that society really hasn't made any safer or more convenient than it was a thousand years ago.

You could just get a pet, but maybe you don't want just a pet? Maybe you just want a friend of another species you sometimes see. Like moose. I knew 4 generations of moose where I used to live, and one of the mothers trusted me enough to pet one of her calves. They were far too comfortable coming close to me, but to be fair I was building in their home lol, maybe I was too comfortable coming close to them. I only saw one mature bull though, and it had the biggest rack I'd ever seen! It was longer than the width of my RV! And that guy had the build to support it too. I think the moose there appreciated when I cut down certain trees because they'd always come around and eat off the bark, just strip it clean, and they might've known I was responsible. Did you know that in some places in Russia they Milk Moose? I bet moose get milked anywhere there's moose but I only heard of Russians who did it.

Moose are kind scary to me tbh, what's even scarier is the wild cats though! I've been hunted by lynx my entire life, literally, starting just a week after I was born a lynx tried to break into my moms house. Lynx have always followed a little too close to me, as a kid when I walked along paths in the woods to get to places they're the animal I noticed around me the most, either a ways away yowling like they do or I felt them just too close for comfort watching me, saw their silhouettes in some tall trees illuminated by moonlight looking down on me. One time late at night I stared one in the eyes and it locked eyes with me, it hunched its shoulders, but after a while, (my sense of time has always been terrible, but in that moment it was nearly nonexistent) it sat down, still staring, so I just slowly backed away without breaking eye contact, and I got off unharmed, but when I was finally safe the panic hit me all at once and I fell over lol.

One of my old friends in a rural area had a cougar walk into her house one day and just make itself at home on her couch! She had friends who stayed over, she was a mother and her old folks stayed there too, she wasn't alone! And they all just had a six foot long wild animal that felt comfortable to come and go when it pleased! She thought it was a little funny actually, that it would scare off unwanted guests, crazy bitch (affectionate). It was completely passive, but at the time I thought it was basically a ticking time bomb. It eventually left never to return, at least as far as I know since I last checked in with her, which it has been kind of a while, they may have seen it around. That's kinda bizarre you know? But not uncommon where there's animals and where there's people.

I've grown to consider such interactions between wild animals and people healthy, so I don't look too far down on those kinds of people, but do happen to question some of their judgements. Stories like that of Timothy Treadwell, the bear man, in the back of my mind remind me that it is still dangerous in nature and dangerous with animals, a tiny slip is all it takes to become the victim of any animal attack, whether they are carnivorous or not.

The difference between the relationship Americans have with American alligators and Australians have with saltwater crocodiles is so funny. I know a lot of it is down to the individual behavior of the different species but we’re like. Probably not scared enough of the alligators. We just coexist.