#morphology of the land

[ombuarchitecture]

CASA NAMORA

By David Bilo & Filipe Pina

GONÇALO, PORTUGAL

Situated in a natural shelter of a valley at the foot of the Serra da Estrela, close to the parish of Gonçalo, in a place also known locally by the name of Mora, this agricultural property has approximately 18ha of area, and is surrounded by a dense pine tree forest. (...)

The name NaMora has a double meaning in Portuguese. It refers to the location of the project, where “Na Mora” would translate into “In Mora” (Mora being the place where the property lies), but “namora” in Portuguese means literally “flirt” or “date”. (...)

Inside, we sought the neutrality given by the simplicity and purity of the materials and by the illusion of the absence of detail. The idea of interiority translates into openings towards landscapes, frames, and courtyards strategically located.

Read more Archdaily

[onenicebugperday]

Unknown slug species photographed by Matthieu Berroneau in Tanzania

Had to share this one because it has me wildly confused. Thought it was a sea slug at first, but it’s pretty clearly on land and has all the morphology of a terrestrial slug. I’ve never seen a terrestrial slug with coloring like this and couldn’t find any matches for similar species online. The photographer is usually great at IDing and did not recognize the species. If anyone can find anything, please share!

Photo shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

[dedalvs]

Someone on Reddit asked about a name like "Star Eater" in Valyrian for a dragon and I wanted to share my response here, as well.

*****

If you want my 2¢ on this, names like Star Eater, Moon Racer, Sun Chaser, etc. are good examples of Common Tongue dragon names, but not good examples of Valyrian dragon names. In the Common Tongue (a.k.a. English) it's easy to put together compounds and come up with names. This is much, much less likely to happen in Valyrian. You can do it, but, frankly, it sounds clunky and awkward.

To give you a real world example of this, here are some Song of Ice and Fire names translated into Spanish:

Storm's End: Bastion de Tormentas

King's Landing: Desembarco del Rey

Rattleshirt: Casaca de Matraca

The translators are trying their best, but these translations simply do not (a) convey the sense you get from the English, or (b) come off as natural-sounding Spanish names. This is exactly what you get when you translate things like "Moondancer" or "Dark Sister" into Valyrian.

A more natural way to create a Valyrian name that sounds Valyrian is to start with your target word and embellish it. If you start with qēlos you might get Qēlazmia or Qēlalbrion, both of which might be kind of clunkily translated into English as "Great Star". In truth, there's no way to capture the sense of it with a single word in English because our morphology works differently. You'd have a better shot in Spanish (maybe Estrellona).

If you wanted to translate "Star Eater" literally, it'd be something like Qēlosipradaros. It is quite literally "star-eater", but it doesn't look like a Valyrian name. Think about all the Valyrian names you see in the book—for dragons and people: Daenerys, Aegon, Viserys, Meraxes, Aemon, Aenys, Rhaegar, Jaehaerys, Helaena, Rhaenyra, Daemon… They don't look that big. They don't look like compounds. They can essentially be broken down into three parts: (1) the main semantic content piece, (2) the augment (optional), and (3) the ending. Daemon, for example, looks about as basic as a Valyrian name gets. You have part (1) daem and part (3)��-on. We see the ending -on a lot, so we know it's an ending, as opposed to -mon, for example. Daeneryslooks a little bigger, so you have part (1) daen, part (2) -er, and part (3) -ys. That is as big and complex as a Valyrian name gets.

If you look at the list of known dragons, the only time you see the English-y names for dragons are afterAegon's Conquest. And this makes sense. Once they're living in Westeros, the Targaryens start adopting Westerosi customs more and more: their language, their religion, their day-to-day practices... The younger Targaryens are essentially Common speakers that Valyrian as a heritage language. It makes sense that they'd name their dragons in the Common Tongue. There are a still a few Valyrian names mixed in, but that's also to be expected, depending on whether they want to honor their family's heritage or do something new that speaks to them.

In short, it doesn't make sense to render the Common Tongue names in Valyrian as they were never Valyrian to begin with. I'd say if you like the meaning "Stareater", do it in English. If you want a Valyrian name, build it up in a Valyrian way.

[serpentface]

The liwe and uraña, the megafauna of the Yutreiya archipelago (a large volcanic island chain near the center of the White Sea, homeland to the qilik-elowey Ulelilwa peoples). These are the two largest native land animals found in these islands, standing about waist high on a human.

The liwe is a flightless bird and the top land-based predator to be found here. Their ancestors were predatory birds who came to occupy niches as land based predators (with some members of the family specializing into insectivorous or partially herbivorous roles). Their wing are entirely vestigial, though retain some use in steering while at chase and in courtship displays- pairs will stand chest to chest and shake their wings at each other, and males will rapidly flap their tiny wings in continued display while mating, which is notably silly looking.

They act primarily as ambush hunters, as they have neither the speed nor stamina to capture a healthy adult uraña in an outright chase. Pairs mate for life and hunt cooperatively, with one typically driving prey to where the other waits in ambush. When hunting large prey, they typically attempt to injure the prey by slashing with their sharp beaks and kill with a crushing/piercing bite to the throat. Smaller prey is kicked and trampled until it can be dispatched with a bite.

The uraña has a superficially deerlike appearance, but is actually a highly derived lagomorph that has specialized in cursorial grazing and browsing niches. Their ancestors were likely hares (or harelike animals) who distributed through parts of the White Sea via rafting events and over land bridges during periods of lower sea levels. They have entirely lost the hopping gait of their ancestors and run like deer, but retain some recognizably hare-like traits. Males competing for access to mates (and females competing for herd dominance) will stand on their hind legs and box each other with their hoof-like claws. They give birth to precocial young (usually two at a time) who can stand and run shortly after birth.

They live in fission-fusion herds of up to 200 (though generally less) individuals for protection against predators. A herd at large is mixed sex, though most interactions outside of the breeding season are homosocial. Females and their young form bands within the interior of the herd, and will drive out adolescent males, while adult and adolescent males form bands that patrol the outside of the herd and watch for predators.

Females maintain strong dominance hierarchies within their circles, maintained with ritualistic displays and brief bouts of boxing. Male bands do not have strong dominance hierarchies, though they compete heavily during the breeding season. Male uraña have two distinct morphs in terms of size and reproductive behavior- larger, higher testosterone males attract and defend harems during the breeding season, and will spend these months tirelessly chasing off competitors, stealing from rivals, and attempting to prevent females from straying, all while barely eating. Smaller, lower testosterone males spend more of their energy courting singular females and/or wooing them out of their harems via shows of strength in boxing matches, attempting to mate with as many as possible during the breeding season without monopolizing access or picking fights with their larger counterparts. Harem males monopolize most of the breeding, but the yearly strain of defending large groups of females often results them having shorter lifespans (or being picked off by predators in a weakened state post-breeding season). Boxing males expend far less energy in the breeding season, and as such often live long enough to sire many offspring throughout their lives. As such, both strategies are reproductively successful and result in/reinforce this distinct morphology.

Liwe were part of a larger family of flightless birds once found on these islands, but the unintentional introduction of rats by the first Ulelilwa settlers contributed to the demise of most of this group (as well as a great variety of flying birds). Liwe eggs are too large and thick shelled for most rats to consume, and they have survived and thrived while the rest of their relatives are extinct on all but the most isolated of islands.

There also used to be a much larger species of uraña (about the size of a key deer). These were the largest animals on the islands and had no natural predators (save for liwe occasionally taking their young). Their population was already under pressure or locally extinct in many islands due to decreasing landmass in rising sea levels, and was fully driven extinct by its grazing lands converted to the raising of crops and ant-farming by Ulelilwa settlers. The smaller uraña occupy more generalist niches and adapted well to these pressures, with most of their populations not only surviving but exploding in size with the gradual extinction of their larger relatives.

(slightly outdated) size ref

[ranticore]

finally forced myself to draw the Odd Sirenians i did a poll about aaages ago since askers had them on my mind today lol

of these only the shortstrider is considered to be an actual hybrid, the rest are just natural variations of body shape/type within the same species. except the sea zeta, now so distinct as to no longer be able to hybridise with regular zeta.

i wrote about shortstriders before but their morphology & what traits from either parent will express themselves is completely random. you could have one who almost entirely resembles one parent, or one that looks like a perfect blend of the two, or one with uneven traits like having disproportionally long legs or big wings. most cannot fly, lacking the muscle for it, and also can't hop well either.

inland swamp phocids are the smallest phocids, only a couple of metres long. they live in the shallow water swamps and marshes of the interior western continent. their very impressive plant manes protect their skin from becoming too dry, as they rarely have access to water deep enough to fully immerse themselves. as with other phocids the plants need to be woven in and carefully maintained, but it's far more accessible to these guys because they barely have to do anything to get a nice growth going

river selkies are a similar sort of direction, an inland subtype but for the very dry eastern continent. they live around the few rivers that cross the dry bowl and they are teensy tiny. polar selkies are the largest of their kind.

the longwing is only odd on a technicality; the form is very alike other longwings (tail-less, quadrupedal, four wings etc) but unlike the vast majority these guys can plunge-dive. there is a large population of them in the western coast of the western continent where the sparse land rises into tall cliffs and spires. they do not have to be ultra-light to fly long distances and so can make use of heavy waterproofing oils (applied by hand).

the aquatic zeta is still a marsupial (the fur is short enough to show off the pouch) and still needs to be on land otherwise baby will drown. they do have longer gestation periods than their terrestrial cousins, to minimise the time spent with a baby in the pouch, but when the kid is born they have to haul out and stay out until that baby can swim. they usually pick caves or sheltered lagoons with underwater entrances, in some of the remotest parts of the world. their population is likely only in the few thousands by now.

[cadere-art]

The Ki lesser owlcat is the smallest species of owlcat. It favours forested areas and is more aboreal than other owlcat species. It takes its name from its range, with mostly coincides with the lands inhabited by the Ki peoples: Uanlikri's equatorial archipelago, Petitwi mountains, and the Huwei, Shuwei, and Ojame archipelagoes.

There are several subspecies of Ki lesser owlcats whose morphology and habits are tailored to their specific archipelago. Mainland Ki lesser owlcats primarily hunt small prey and tend to establish themselves in the territories of larger predators such as jiwi, where there is less competition from other owlcats. The Ojame owlcat is unique in that it preferentially hunts the Ojame Hêtâ, which is larger than itself.

[o-craven-canto]

Related to the convergence vs. contingency ask I got a while ago, here's a list of adaptations I'd expect to find on any planet with Earth-like surface conditions and complex (equivalent to Earth's post-Cambrian) life:

Cellular organization, eukaryote-like cells with separated compartments for genome and energy production; large organisms multicellular or at least multi-nucleate

Most energy in the biosphere ultimately from sunlight; most energy is produced in the shorter term by transferring electrons to a strong oxidiser, most likely oxygen

Sex-like recombination of genomes common; most large organisms have a unicellular stage in their lifecycle (e.g. a zygote) and reproduce sexually at least part of the time (and when they do, each individual has two genetic parents); some kind of sexual dimorphism is very common at any given time, at least at gamete level

Most biomass at any given time consists in photoautotrophs, i.e. organisms using sunlight to synthesize organic molecules from scratch; biomass on land is greater than biomass in water, unless land is rare or the colonization of land has not occurred a long time ago

Fractal structure and/or radial symmetry common among organisms that move little actively or not at all; phototrophs have leaf-like light collectors that overlap to form a dense canopy

Bilateral symmetry dominant among organisms that move actively (so, clear distinction between front and back, and between up and down, but not between left and right, especially in outer morphology); sense organs, mouth, and central nervous system concentrated at the front end

Multiple "tree-like" and "worm-like" clades; filter-feeding a very common strategy in water; everything that has to move fast in water is spindle-shaped

Nearly all mobile organisms have long-range chemical, mechanical, and electromagnetic senses (i.e. smell, hearing, and sight), with the respective organs arising independently many times; perception of electrical fields may be common in water but not in air; communication is overwhelmingly vocal and/or visual

Every large organism has some sort of skeletal support; a skeleton based on hydraulic pressure is common in small organisms that move slowly, and a jointed exoskeleton is probably common in small faster movers (hard shells built from carbonates or silica will be popular in water), but the vast majority of largest organisms (say, >1 kg) probably has an internal skeleton

[idioticbat]

13 - horizon

also nerdy language rambling after the break

the text on the corner reads: "ndzəts'ats'aarm̱ ṟ́saþkhətkwarliwm̱ - khaþtłɂaɂvikts'əur, cevcoos thalbbuat"

two fishers about to set traps at seashore - windy fishing village, landing island

also a good old morphology breakdown because that's what i've been spending my time on instead of drawing, so at least i get to show off:

G means "grade", which is a kind of nominalizer and classifier on this language that works through reduplication and consonant gradation, otherwise it's all leipzig notation like this

I've spent the past two days overhauling their whole language since it had become a big mess. I've changed it to be mostly suffixing so the root usually show up first, which can be used for alliteration in writing. More complex consonant clusters are also allowed now, which is useful to make morphemes that are just one consonant. Assimilation rules are simpler, now, too. Overall the language feels way less cluttered, it's easier to find the roots and creating complex words feels waayy easier, so i'm really happy with the time i spent on this!

[livingforstars]

Leo Triplet Spiral Galaxy M65 - August 12th, 1996.

"Spiral galaxy M65 is a normal spiral galaxy not unlike our own Milky Way. In fact, M65 is a typical spiral galaxy of a type that could be found anywhere in the local Universe. Given a morphological type of "Sa," M65 shows tightly wrapped spiral arms and a large nuclear central bulge. The central bulge stars are older and redder than disk stars, which appear more blue. Stars in the bulge of the our own Milky Way galaxy are also typically older and redder than stars in the disk where our Sun resides. M65 is a member of the Leo Triplet of galaxies, along with its neighbors M66 and NGC 3628. Although it appears that M65's gravity has distorted M66's symmetry, M65's symmetry seems unaffected by M66. M65 is located roughly 35 million light years away, so that light recorded today left after the fall of the dinosaurs but when many land mammals were just evolving on Earth."

[ntls-24722]

What do Debu skeleton look like?

Also zebramen/elves.

I am so curious.

Do they have bone????

I wanna gnaw on bone

gimme a Debu bone so I can just go like:

yummy bœn

OH BOY IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!!!!!!!!

I ACTUALLY VERY RECENTLY FLESHED OUT THE MAIN BITS

OKAY so first let me go over something small first - evolutionary ancestors of hexapods and octopods

Unlike Earth fish, Bolur fish are flat, horizontal boys, they undulate up and down to swim like cetaceans do. These two are the "lobe finned fish" that became the two clades of hexapods and octopods when they got on land. They're very closely related with the only difference between the "hexapodal" and "octopodal" fish being that the octopods made use of fins that were becoming vestigial - both fish originally had 8 fins with one pair being used to sweep food into their mouths, but most of the members of the family began to lose this pair of fins in favor of this big wide mouth. The octopods instead developed these raptorial limbs out of those fins that would snatch up food, and a lot of early octopodal animals are really damn creepy because while everything else on their body looks archaic, they have this one frontal pair of freakishly developed hands. YUCKY SCARY.

These fish have interlocked plates of bony armor beneath their skin and this still remains, which is why Bolur skeletons look like turtle skeletons - their backbones and ribcages are these sweeping flat plates of bone, with the ribplates being slightly less wide than the backplates to fit beneath it, and their shoulders/limbs usually sitting where the gap is, like this.

And now that that's out of the way, here's the Debu skeletons first since you asked for them first!

Okay so, I said usually the limbs sit in the ribplate-backplate gap, but that's not the case for Debu because in order to climb, they need more flexibility in the shoulder area. They can't mountain-goat-method cliff-climbing, they're way too big for that - mountain goats are nice and vertical to do it, but debu have gone the different direction and gotten really wide to do it, the backplates where their arms sit under are actually a little less wider than usual so their shoulders have more freedom of movement. Their arms also have a little knob where it touches the backplates both for muscle attachment and to kind of lock the arm (and the debu) into place while climbing.

Their radius's placement is swapped in Bolur but this has no real effect (i wouldn't think so...?), the wrist twists just like ours, so the Debu can climb up walls the same way that DJMM does.

Here's a sideview and how the skin looks over it.

NOW, for the zebraelves, who i thought of skeletons for first

The backplates dont have those.... (rapid typing) spinous processes.... the little things coming out of the back. That's mainly because the Debu had them since their heads were humongous and super damn heavy and needed that place for their neck muscles to attach. Zebraelves and zebramen, not so much. Their heads aren't huge.

What's cool is their arms and "legs" (they are morphologically the same but have varying levels of dexterity) are set up the same way as Debu arms, where they sit at the edge of the backplate rather than between the little gap beneath it... hmm. What was the point of me showing that image at the very beginning, now that i've established that all 3 species deviate from that setup.... whatever

Also, peep the little bones at their butt! They're little bones for keeping their fleshy spinnerets straight just like how earth animals have baculums.

Here's a front view, which also shows the holes between their legs so that all sorts of Stuff can go out of them + Skin. That place is the least protected by bone in zebrapeople, so I guess if you want to kill one go for the ass

Then there is zebramen!

So, as you might notice, the backplates holding the "legs" have slowly pointed more and more backwards in order to facilitate hexapodality, with zebraelves' backplates being diagonal but zebramen's backplates being completely pointed to the back to facilitate permanent hexapodality. Also, the spinneret-culums have almost completely vanished. they're just these sad little pieces of bone that can rotate there like a carnotaurus's arms. I wonder if they spin em around really fast when they're excited.

Anyways. no front view for this one. Because I'm tired and honestly, if you saw the zebraelf one, you could guess how it looks, these 2 are so morphologically similar

well. hm. your behavior won't get you kicked out but your overenthusiasm sure is enough to freak out the guests at meemaw's morturary cookout

[bethanythebogwitch]

For this Wet Beast Wednesday I'll be going over one of my favorite animals: the horseshoe crab. The first thing you should know about horseshoe crabs is that they aren't crabs. They aren't even crustaceans. They're chelicerates, which makes them a close relative to spiders, scorpions, and sea spiders (not actually spiders). The name comes from the shape of the hard shell that covers most of the top of the body. There are 4 living species of horseshoe crab and many more are known from the fossil record, stretching back to the ordovician period around 480 million years ago. For comparison, that makes them about as old as the first jawed vertebrates if not older, and quite a bit older than the first land vertebrates. They are often called living fossils as they have changed relatively little in millions of years. Living fossil is a misleading term as the species alive today are not the same as those living alongside or before the dinosaurs and there are differences in morphology.

(image: a horseshoe crab from above)

While the most famous feature of the horseshoe crab it its large shell, there's a lot more going on on its underside. At the front of the body are the legs and mouth, which aren't all that distinct. Horseshoe crabs have 6 pairs of limbs. the front pair are known as chelicera, which are used to move food into the mouth. After that there are pedipalps, which most chelicerates use for food handling or for picking stuff up, but which horseshoe crabs use as another pair of legs. Males have modified pedipalps used for grabbing onto females when mating. Finally there are the true legs, the back pair of which is the one used mostly for pushing the animal forward. All legs except to back pair have claws that can be used for picking up food but are too weak to be used for defense. The mouth is located in the middle of the legs. The bases of the legs are rough and serve the same function as jaws, giving them the name gnathobases (gnatho means jaw). Imagine having your legs come out of your face and you have to walk around to chew and you know what it's like to be a horseshoe crab.

(image: a horseshoe crab with body parts labled)

After the legs comes the next body segment, which is home to the gills. Horseshoe crabs have book gills, which seem to be an evolutionary precursor to the book lungs seen in spiders and other arachnids. Horseshoe crabs have five pairs of these gills, each located on a flap that can move back and forward. Each flap is covered in over a hundred tiny membranes called lamellae that are used for gas exchange with the surrounding water. Horseshoe crabs keep their book gills moving rhythmically to keep water flowing over them. They can survive on land for several hours as long as their book gills stay wet. Because the gills can flap back and fourth, they are sometimes used to swim. This is only seen in young crabs as the adults are too heavy and they usually swim upside down.

(image: a horseshoe crab swimming upside down because I couldn't find a decent gif)

At the very back of the body is the telson or tail. Despite looking like a stingray tail and being related to a scorpion's stinger, the horseshoe crab's tail is harmless. They will raise it to try to scare off predators, but its main purpose seems to be flipping the crab over if it ends up on its back. The telson and legs can grow back slowly if removed. Like ofter chelicerates, horseshoe crabs have an exoskeleton and need to molt regularly, leaving behind their old shell. Females are larger than males, who will cling onto their shells during mating. Amusingly, some small horseshoe crabs will cling onto bigger ones just to get a free ride. They are predators whose diet consists mostly of small mollusks and worms. Horseshoe crabs prefer to live in shallow water with sandy sediment and are often found in bays and estuaries. Horseshoe crabs have 9 eyes. The most prominent are a pair of compound eyes that are easily visible on the shell. In addition, there are 3 pairs of simple eyes capable of seeing visible and ultraviolet light located behind the compound eyes, on the front of the shell, and on the underside by the legs. Another simple eye is the parietal eye located just behind the pair of simple eyes on the front of the shell. And if that isn't enough, they have a cluster of photosensitive cells on the tail. Horseshoe crab eyes have the largest rod and cone cells of any animal, over a hundred times the size of a human's. Despite this, they have very poor eyesight, mostly distinguishing between light and dark.

(gif: horseshoe crab righting itself)

There is one species of North American horseshoe crab and three Asian species. The one I am most familiar with and have had the chance to both see in the wild and handle is the North American Limulus polyphemus, which ranges from the Gulf of Mexico up along the Atlantic coast to Maine and southern Canada. Recent genetic studies have shown that there is very little mixing between a population around the Yucatan and the rest, possibly representing a subspecies or separate, related species. Some of the oldest DNA ever sequenced (about 2 million years old) was of L. polyphemus and was found off the coast of Greenland, suggesting their range was much larger in the past when the oceans were warmer. The northern population (north of southern Florida) Have a yearly mating season taking place in the spring during high tides and especially on the full and new moon. Females will crawl onto the beach to lay eggs in shallow burrows, which the males will then inseminate. Female can lay up to 80,000 eggs per year. It takes offspring about 9 years to become sexually mature and they can live an estimated 20-40 years. L. polyhemus has been extensively studied for topics including eyesight, circadian rhythms, and blood clotting.

(Image, mass horseshoe crab mating on a beach)

Horseshoe crabs have been studies for medical purposes regarding their blood. Their blood is bright blue and contains an important chemical called Limulus amebocyte lysate or Tachypleus ambeocyte lysate depending on whether it comes from the North American or Asian species. LAL/TAL reacts with a component in the cell membrane of gram-negative bacteria by clotting. This allows it to detect the presence of many species of bacteria, even dead ones. Tests using LAL allows scientists to detect contamination. The LAL test has been used in the US since 1977 and has been used for vaccine production, making horseshoe crabs responsible for saving millions of lives. To get the blood, companies will catch large amounts of horseshoe crabs and extract blood before returning them to the water where they will tell stories of being abducted by aliens to other, more skeptical crabs. The companies claim to have a mortality rate of 3-5%, but independent studies suggest the proper value should be 15-30%. A few artificial alternatives to LAL have been developed, but adoption of them has been slow and horseshoe crabs are still extensively caught and bled.

(image: horseshoe crab blood extraction)

The living species of horseshoe crab are all classified as vulnerable or endangered by the IUCN. Threats include habitat loss and fisheries. All species are fished for bait and the asian species and eggs are used for food. Catching for blood extraction also poses a threat. Horseshoe crabs are considered vital species in their environments and new protections should be enacted.

[draconesmundi]

What does the dragon family tree currently look like? What is the most "primitive" surviving dragon clade?

Hi, I don't have time to write out a full dragon family tree right now (there are 68 species) but the loose tree I posted in this post here shows the gist of the dragon groups.

Turtle dragons split from the other dragon families earlier in time, evolving as a sister group to the rest of the dragons. HOWEVER I would not say they represent 'basal' or 'primitive' dragons, as firedrakes and long dragons look the most like ancestral dragons in terms of body shape.

In my project Dracones Mundi the dragons start life as serpentine animals, and their legs develop as they age. This usually means they have an aquatic juvenile stage followed by a stage where their legs are strong enough to support their weight on land. The dragon family tree is split between those who have four fully developed limbs in adulthood (with the exception of feathered serpents) and those which do not fully develop the hindlimbs in adulthood. The evolutionary relationships are a bit more nuanced than this (I gesture once more to the placement of feathered serpents, far away from other serpentine dragons), but that's the rough gist.

I won't be having a 100% morphological dragon taxonomy (no "this number of legs and wings makes this a Thing"). Evolutionary relationships are decided by the total number of shared features - horns, toes, wing shape, weird manes of 'rough' scales that look like feathers, frills, behaviours (divebombing differentiates the jaculus group from the rest of the winged serpents).

[beautifulmars]

HiPOD: Prospecting from Orbit

The combination of morphological and topographic information from stereo images, as well as compositional data from near-infrared spectroscopy has been proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the geology of Mars.

Beginning with the OMEGA instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter in 2003, the surface of Mars has been examined at near-infrared wavelengths by imaging spectrometers that are capable of detecting specific minerals and mapping their spatial extent. The CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) instrument on our orbiter is a visible/near-infrared imaging spectrometer, and the HiRISE camera works together with it to document the appearance of mineral deposits detected by this orbital prospecting.

Mawrth Vallis is one of the regions on Mars that has attracted much attention because of the nature and diversity of the minerals identified by these spectrometers. It is a large, ancient outflow channel on the margin of the Southern highlands and Northern lowlands. Both the OMEGA and CRISM instruments have detected clay minerals here that must have been deposited in a water-rich environment, probably more than 4 billion years ago. For this reason, Mawrth Vallis is one of the two candidate landing sites for the future Mars Express Rover Mission planned by the European Space Agency.

This image was targeted on a location where the CRISM instrument detected a specific mineral called alunite, KAl3(SO4)2(OH)6. Alunite is a hydrated aluminum potassium sulfate, a mineral that is notable because it must have been deposited in a wet acidic environment, rich in sulfuric acid. Our image shows that the deposit is bright and colorful, and extensively fractured. The width of the cutout is 1.2 kilometers. (Enhanced color cutout is less than 1 km across.)

ID: ESP_051153_2025 date: 25 June 2017 altitude: 284 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

[evilcentral]

jselenfriend: How do you even begin to say goodbye to a show you've dreamed of working on since you were a little kid?

I've dreamt of playing with monsters since I was maybe 6 or 7 years old and for the last 5 years, 50 episodes, over 50 different creatures, ghosts, demons and creeps, through pandemics and through strikes, from the pilot to the series finale; -EViL- has made that a tangible amazing reality.

It's been everything I have ever wanted and hoped for in my career and shy of landing a job on some Star Wars project, its likely to top that list in perpetuity.

Working with Joel Harlow and his incredible team at Morphology has taught me more than I could have ever imagined. My experience on this show has opened up so many new opportunities designing my own shows with titles that I never would have concieved of handling prior to the knowledge I gained here.

There are far, far too many names to thank after all this time but: Joel, Milagros, Mindy, Rachel, Emily, Gil, Rob, Dan, Brian and Sam are at the immediate forefront on the work front. Holly, Amber, Zoey and Aaron have handled the bulk of the emotional support. Our amazing core cast of Katja, Mike, Aasif and Michael who have all had to endure one prosthetic or another, while Marti, Ashley and Fedor have endured just a wee bit more.

And of course and most importantly, endless thanks to Robert and Michelle King and Paramount for making this all happen!

Final season premiere on May 23rd but in the meanwhile here's a few favorite BTS moments from seasons 1-3

[ranticore]

So the dragons have two phases of flight, a low speed phase and a high speed phase. Low speed is as you imagine - a flapping flight for landing, take offs, manoeuvring in tight spaces and so on. Transitioning into the high speed phase is something new riders must rigorously train for before they're qualified. The wings are fixed, while the jet rune compresses and accelerates air past itself, forcing air to flow over the wings to generate lift. The location of the jet rune varies but for maximum manoeuvrability it should lie along the axis of the body, usually one on the underside or two on either side of the ribcage. The further out onto the wings the rune is located, the flight becomes more stable at the cost of manoeuvrability and additional issues like asymmetric thrust potentially becoming an issue. With the right rune and wing morphology, supersonic speeds are achievable. Dragons

[corin-tuckers-left-one]

Chaeropus ecaudatus the Southern Pig–footed Bandicoot

Pig–footed bandicoots (genus Chaeropus) were so called because of their hooflike forefeet. They had relatively slender legs compared to other bandicoots, allowing them to move quickly through the landscape.

Although initially designated as a single species, Chaeropus yirratji was split from C. ecaudatus in 2019 on the basis of morphological differences. Both species became extinct by the 1950s due to habitat loss from land clearing for agriculture and predation from cats and foxes.