#vendobiont

[carbohs-region]

Charniplex, the Fractal Pokémon!

Type: Dark/Ground

Instead of growing by branching off new segments or growing bilaterally, Charniplexes would actually expand fractally; starting from the base, it would grow a lobe off one side of its central axis, then the other side, then the other. This process is called glide reflection, and it creates Charniplex’s distinctive asymmetric pattern.

[vickysaurus-art]

For all the long eons of the Earth, the shores have remained empty. But now, something is stirring in the depths, and after each storm that rages across the seemingly barren world, strange creatures wash up on the beach. In death, they announce to the land the first animal life in the Ediacaran sea.

I've wanted to draw the strange Ediacaran life that pre-dated even the Cambrian explosion for a while now, but had been struggling to find an interesting way to depict them. With little behaviour to show, I find Ediacaran paleoart has a bit of a tendency to end up looking like a pretty aquarium with all the organisms nicely arranged together for the viewer's enjoyment. I landed on painting them washing up on the empty shore. It's also me experimenting with watercolours instead of my usual coloured pencils.

[vickysaurus]

Ediacaran biota! Having recently done a watercolour about them, I was very excited to see these weirdos' fossils.

[quark-nova]

@a-dinosaur-a-day's scuba certification didn't allow you to go past the Ediacaran, but now you can! With the new formula focusing on Earth's earlier times, when will you go?

[nonexistent-triangle]

me: the time machine: the vendobiont in the chair across from me: me: wow. i didnt know you guys were so chill the vendobiont, holdinga blunt: yeag its the one major thing that all the paleobiologists miss about us me: mm

[alunclewe]

Well heck.  After posting almost every day in January, I then posted exactly one day in February.  See, this is why at the beginning of the year I tried to make a commitment to post every day, because I knew that once I missed a day or two it would be easy to justify missing many more.  Well, okay, no, I can’t say that I really went through that though process on a conscious level, but maybe I had that motivation subconsciously.

Regardless, I am going to try to post every day in March, so to that end, enjoy these very rough concept sketches for the character designs for another project I’m working on.  (”Working on” in the sense that, um, I’m trying to create it, not “working on” in the sense that anyone is paying me to do it.  (Yet?))

[pseudomantis]

I like the vendobionts. Plastic bags of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago. The jellyfish evolved into them again

I never heard of them i need to read about it

[alexuchiha9521blog]

Reino: Animalia (Linnaeus, 1.758)

Super-filo: Vendobionta (Seilacher, 1.992)

Faixa Temporal: Ediacarano até Cambriano médio.

Idade: 570 - 513 Ma.

Vendobionta é um superfilo extinto que inclui os filos dos organismos da Biota Ediacarana. Vendobionta é um grande grupo de metazoários pré-cambrianos.

A fauna do Ediacarano devia previamente conter apenas animais (multicelulares) como ancestrais para diferentes grupos de invertebrados. Por causa dos tamanhos dos fósseis, segmentação, simetria bilateral e polaridade, todos os fósseis do Ediacarano foram originalmente atribuídos aos cnidários (como plumas-do-mar e águas-vivas), vermes anelídeos e artr��podes. Porém, uma nova interpretação surgiu a favor dos fósseis do Ediacarano, apontando incongruências funcionais que indicaram que os fósseis não estavam relacionados aos grupos citados anteriormente. Charniodiscus, um exemplo, lembra modernas plumas-do-mar em forma e coordenação, mas como ele é um fronde, e tem uma folha fechada, ele foi interpretado como um organismo filtrador. Similarmente, Dickinsonia poderia ser comparada a um verme segmentado. Porém sua forma de panqueca não permitia nem os modos sinuosos nem os peristálticos de locomoção característicos dos vermes. Nem a forma superficialmente parecida com trilobita de Spriggina indica uma relação, pois, ao contrário das trilobitas, Spriggina não tinha carapaça. Outros Vendobiontes lembram nada tanto quanto as folhas das plantas terrestres atuais.

Inclui os seguintes filos:

†Petalonamae?

†Proarticulata

†Trilobozoa?

†Medusoids?

#vendobionta #animalia #ciênciacidadã #divulgaçãocientífica

[quark-nova]

Why Lantian fossils are so cool

A lot of you might have heard of the wonderfully weird Ediacaran biota, with the likes of Dickinsionia, Spriggina or Tribradichium expressing unique body plans and symmetries nearly unknown in later fossils, and still a huge mystery for paleontologists.

But did you know we could go further back?

All those fossils date from the late Ediacaran, following the Gaskiers glaciation. Fortunately, we happen to have an even earlier fossil bed, preserving the creatures that lived before this fateful event: the Lantian formation, in China!

Lantian-era fossils are even different from later Ediacaran ones, so much that paleontologists still don't know if some of them should be interpreted as animals, as macroalgae or as something else entirely!

Here's Lantianella, appearing to be some sort of tentacle-bearing crown, reminding of sea anemones, crinoids or lophophorates:

There's also the related Piyuania (left), showing a similar central structure covered in a sheath of tentacles, and their elongated cousins Qianchuania (right, A-F) and Xiuningella (right, G-I)!

These creatures appear unrelated to lifeforms known today (except maybe cnidarians or early sessile ctenophorans?), but also to the more characteristic later Ediacaran fossils (vendobionts), making them an even more ancient mystery at the dawn of modern complex life!

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.12242

[alunclewe]

Wow... I have not been good about posting to Tumblr lately.  Or... ever, really, save for very brief periods; I don’t know that I’ve ever gone more than a month posting regularly.  I don’t actually know that I’ve even gone a month.

Speaking of months, in a last-ditch effort to avoid letting May pass without any posts at all, here’s the fifth main character to the project I’d been posting about.  Out of all the main characters, this is probably the one whose design I’m least happy with... she needs something.  I’ll work on it.

Hopefully I’ll be posting a lot more in June, but, uh, I don’t know that I can make any promises...

[alunclewe]

Well, when I said I was going to start drawing every day, I’d intended to draw something new every day, not just refine drawings I made on previous days; and of course I intended to post them earlier in the day, not just before midnight.  (Well, technically I only said I’d draw something new every day; I didn’t say I’d post it; but I mean...)

But right now, with the end of the semester nigh and as busy as I am catching up with grading and writing exams, I’ll give myself some slack and count this.

Yeah, this is the drawing I posted yesterday, but with shading added and with a slight alteration to the costume.

[alunclewe]

Okay, I said I was going to draw something every day, so in keeping with that goal... and on the topic from yesterday of character redesigns—here’s one of the main characters from the animated pilot pitch I’ve been (sporadically) working on.  I posted a drawing of her before, but I really wasn’t happy with it, and had been meaning to give her a redesign for some time, so... here it is.  Still not sure I’d call this definitely finalized, but I think it’s a vast improvement on the previous design.

(Previous design here, for comparison.)

Eh, meant to add shading, and I... didn’t.  And it’s late enough I probably shouldn’t take the time to do that now.  Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.