#idk maybe the wizards of it all made them go extinct faster but they’d probably be around for the period of time necessary to get harpy-Ed | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

totally-not-an-awkward-okapi · 8 months ago

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Unfortunately my tablet died so it’s just horrible sketches but I freakin’ LOVE auks so. Please enjoy(?) me trying to figure out Great Auk vs Harpy proportions.

Are there… penguin harpies in the world of Kosa? Because you mentioned that crawlies exist in the ocean, so i kind of envisioned like. An emperor penguin king.

i've actually thought about it a lot and the answer is i'm not too sure... see the harpies could only be made from birds that the people in Unspecified Ancient Times In What Is Essentially Eurasia had easy access to (bearing in mind that harpies today do not map perfectly onto their original constituent species from a thousand years ago). i could imagine maybe an African penguin, but an emperor penguin might have been juuuust a bit out of reach. But it's also likely that some of auks later migrated to remote polar regions and then eventually specialised/evolved/whatever into something very emperor penguin like. but hardline spec bio/evo is not what this story is about so hey who knows

#fun fact the great auk was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus #which due to their visual similarly inspired the name penguins #idk maybe the wizards of it all made them go extinct faster but they’d probably be around for the period of time necessary to get harpy-Ed #I feel bad because I should have drawn them properly swimming where they look cool and not like Huge Dorks #and for most of these when I wasn’t heavily referencing kosa harpies I was referencing historical art of great auks #who just never seem to have been drawn swimming underwater! sad.#to be clear I didn’t send this ask #I just fucking love auks #sketchin’#Mayhaps there shall be cleaner art later. Mayhaps.

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