#lingyuananthus

[vickysaurus-art]

A Microraptor investigates some strange colourful plants - the first flowers she's ever seen.

[vickysaurus-art]

My art in 2023

January

Microraptor and the Flowers. I started this year out making paleoart watercolours and never really stopped. This one is about a Microraptor investigating the first flowers she's ever seen. The flowers are Lingyuananthus, a lovely little fossil flower described in an even lovelier paper that was not behind a paywall for once.

February

Orthocones Descend. Having moved into a new apartment and made a timeline covering the walls, the paleozoic looked awfully empty, so I made a big effort to expand my horizons and do art showing creatures I'd never drawn before. Showing orthocones descending vertically on their prey made for a fun composition too.

March

Sinosauropteryx does not want to share its tree. I still can barely believe we know the colours of both Sinosauropteryx and Psittacosaurus. Dinosaur colours always felt like something we'd never figure out without literal actual time travel before we figured them out.

April

Hadrocodium's mossy home. I got the idea for one of the tiniest mammals of all time making its home in some moss on a tree while hiking in Switzerland and coming across some truly impressive moss beards.

May

Procompsognathus's cliff climb. Although the foreground cliff itself and the contrast between foreground and background didn't come out quite as well as I'd hoped, I still really like this art featuring the three main branches of archosaur (dinosaur, pterosaur, and pseudosuchian).

June

Anomalocaris, Dragon of the Cambrian. The realisation that most Cambrian creatures were tiny gave me the idea of a whole bunch of them hiding from a 40 cm long Anomalocaris while in positions reminiscent of a D&D party facing off against a dragon.

July

Caihong and the Kalligrammatids. Kalligrammatids were neuropterans that superficially resembled large butterflies, but unlike them their wings were transparent! I combined them with the gorgeous iridescence of Caihong and backlighting for a fun experiment.

August

Spring on the mammoth steppe. When the time came to do some art set in the Quaternary, I decided to depict a real life location and how it would have changed in the past few hundred thousand years. This spot is just west of Baden-Baden (which is in the glacier valley to the upper left), on the edge of the Schwartzwald. I also enjoyed depicting an ice age spring. It wasn't always snow and ice.

September

Darwinius and Geiseltaliellus's stare-off. The Paleogene was the last remaining Phanerozoic period I hadn't done any art of, so I drew this little scene in the Messel Pit formation.

October

Inostrancevia family at sunrise. I hadn't drawn Permian synapsids in a while at this point so they were overdue for a paleoart. I also felt like going absolute ham with my reds. The sunrise and Permian volcanism made for a convenient excuse but really, this is just for me.

November

Wind, Courage, and Wings. This one's a birthday gift for my friend, depicting a lovely fable in Genshin Impact about how the wind god Barbatos taught the first birds to fly.

December

The Zanclean Flood. 6 million years ago, the movement of the continents cut the Mediterranean off from the oceans. Since more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than it receives from rivers, this resulted in the sea drying up and becoming an incredibly deep, dry, salty lowland. Until 5.3 million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar formed and the entire sea was refilled in a massive flood. This depicts the early days of said flood seen from the tip of the Rock of Gibraltar.

If you've enjoyed my art this year, consider leaving me a tip! Or have a look at last year's art too.

[vickysaurus]

This piece started out as a cute little idea to have Microraptor, which lived in the early Cretaceous being curious about the recently evolved flowers. Then when researching it I discovered angiosperm evolution is a way deeper and more contentious rabbit hole than I had any idea of. Essentially, what I found was that molecular evidence says flowering plants split off from the gymnosperms way, way back in the Devonian, but all their potential fossils from before the Cretaceous are very unclear and contentious. So these flowers are probably not so much newly evolved, but still rare enough to be a novelty to this Microraptor.

The specific flower I based these on are Lingyuananthus, a beautiful fossil flower from early Cretaceous China. It predates Microraptor by about two million years, but also the paper describing them has full-text and figures available for free so I'm willing to fudge the dates a little.

Also a fun opportunity to paint some cool Cretaceous bugs!

A Microraptor investigates some strange colourful plants - the first flowers she's ever seen.