u/EricCartoonBox

(1, 2) are general exercises in speculative biology, featuring a marine, semiaquatic therapsid mammal (1), and a tiny, jacana-like bird that, due to their finned feet, lined with thousands of microscopic setae, floats upon the water's surface. I was quite a novice at writing already, but not that much at drawing. I did like to sketch and create comics beforehand, and I do believe that was how I managed to learn several basic facets of physical anatomy, (eg: I knew most birds had digitigrade "stilt-legs," and that skin folds existed.) but beyond this, most of this was nearly outside the scope of my cognizance.

(3, - 6,) are from a long-abandoned art project from which I called "Schmarbworld." Each mobile, animal-like creature from the "Schmarbworld," was descended from the Schmarbo, a grey, bipedal creature with a single, swirl-like whisker atop its head - with a handful of exceptions, that being small, copepod-like animals and fungus-like "decayers," which, for an unknown reason, though I hypothesized this might've been for the simplicity of the project, were omitted and given nearly no illustrations.

(3) was an airborne, blimp-like form which lived among mountainous biomes. Despite what appeared to be asexual "budding" visualized in the attached slide, it was a sexual reproducer, and the "buds" arise from the fusion of gametes embedded deep within the skin of the blimp, which had been homogenized into a single, simplified multipurpose structure; whether it was filled with pockets of air, "gamete wombs," as I aptly called the pockets from which the larvae would arise from, or digestive pockets. (4) was a creature whose lore I have forgotten from time, but it was a stork- or seriema-like predator whose upper bill tapers at a hook-like structure from which it, along with its heron-like eversible neck, uses them to crook prey with a rapid strike, and potentially stun them. (5) was part of a story arc - though, perplexingly enough, the project was previously established as to be nearly storyless - from which Schmarbworld's oceans and lush rainforests would dry up, leaving behind shallow seas, and vast steppe. Forests, at the very extent, were mostly relegated to coastal, dry-summer scrubland biomes and sparse temperate prairie. One of the new forms that would arise during this era of tooth-and-claw was this creature, inspired clearly by and was named for the Jabberwock, among my favorite poems reading as a child. The "jabberwock" was an apex predator of continential-mediterranean steppe biomes, and was a hunter of herding "unicowns," horned, shaggy bipeds. As for its quadrupedalism, as the antecedent Schmarbo was an armless biped, its front limbs are not at all limbs, but are padded, germ layer-cloaked structures derived from hinge-like scales present in their lizard-like ancestors. (6) may have also been part of this story arc, I believe, as the file for the image dated to a similar date to the former. It was an aquatic, cyclopic, larvae-bearing descendant of the "unicowns" mentioned beforehand, descending from one population which managed to... eat too much poisonous berries, and their half-formed, barely-conscious progeny, controlled mentally by fungi, managed to survive on as oceanic creatures. The single eye, and many facets of its nervous system, are a secondarily-evolved trait, and are structurally more similar to fungal hyphae than true tissue.

From (7) onwards, sans (18), an attempt at replicating a Peepy in the style of one of my favorite artists growing up as a child - Gary Baseman, and (20), an attempt at satirizing humanity's ever-reliance on mobile devices and social media platforms, all of the images seen are part of an ongoing project known as Gribbetonia. Due to this project no longer being abandoned, I might not spoil the details for any potential readers of the project, and as such, details will be led for interpretation, or hinted at. Gribbetonia was originally conceptualized, along with the brainstorming of my friend, as a followup to Schmarbworld, and would've been a collaboration between two artistic minds, though now, Gribbetonia has been left near-entirely to my whereabouts, with my friend being relegated to a mere character designer. They designed (16) and (19), just so you know.

I do believe that the preference for putting backgrounds/more detailed shading on everything that I've drawn was not only a result of my skill set naturally evolving with time, but as a consequence of my main drawing program, Microsoft Paint, adding the ability to "layer" drawings, a transparency slider, and a "free-form" selection option; all of these seemed to have enhanced my art as a whole, and may have influenced my art skill, either indirectly or directly. Even if Microsoft is, unfortunately, trashing its products to the point of unusability and adding tons of bloatware to its operating system, I may still stick with MS Paint as my main drawing program, with others as mere supplements, due to its nigh-simplicity and easiness to grasp for slow, mentally impaired, or inexperienced learners like me. I did, however, recently figure out how to use Cheat Engine for another drawing program I use - IbisPaint, another drawing program whose simple-to-grasp UI and, unlike MS Paint's paucal amount, has a repertoire of multitudes of brushes - which contains an unfortunate one-hour time limit for its free trial, a shame for stingy brokers like me, who prefer to use freeware over products which contain a free trial.

Proofs-of-concept for future eras, which I have dubbed the "sixth" and "fifth eras" to remedy spoilers for otherwise turn-of-events time periods. Within the "fifth era," >!life hangs on to nothing more than brittle threads, and what was once a diverse, biome-rich continent, is now an anoxic wasteland, full of aggressive, highly-specialized lifeforms, and what was once the expansive oceans are now lush refugia holding the last vestiges of life. The collective efforts of several sapient species, two native to the planet, and the others contacted from every end of the galaxy, were brought to help bring back the planet from nearly impending doom, and restore it to its former glory. !<The "sixth era" >!is the result of these efforts: a lush, hothouse world, similar to the Zesture period before it. Competition reigns supreme in this era, as the providence of new resources and biomes has led to the mass diversification and proliferation of newer lineages of lifeform. !<I do believe I might be posting this much ahead of what I can write, and where the reader can start, so, if you have any questions about the project, or what it could be like, then you're free to ask!

1: A lineage of typically small, mammal-like creatures, defined with a hinging, jaw-like snout secured with a beak-like sheath.

- 1a: This sub-lineage of these creatures is defined by the presence of novel, digit-like structures, derived from ossified callosities used by their mountain-climbing ancestors as a means of holding a grip onto rocky surfaces, and covered with germ layers. Only the firstmost digit, the "thumb," is a true digit, and otherwise the only digit left in their ancestors.

- 1b: The facial profile of these creatures, displaying an appearance otherwise closely resembling their ancestors.

2: An amphibious, belly-hopping lineage of seal-like creatures known as 'flotsums.' A row of muscular protrusions, shaped like those of a caterpillar's "legs," descended from the frontmost chest muscles used to steer the creature underwater, are used to propel and inchworm them forward through spongy terrain.

3: A tripedal lineage of >!struthers !<- sapient, raptor-like creatures with a fused, single hindlimb acting as a tail. It is very likely descended from either a feral lineage of ">!civilized struthers!<," or one of the predatory lineages.

4: Small, rodent-like beaked creatures. They bear a similar "pseudo-digit" condition to the firstmost species, as they both descend from a monodactylous ancestor, only that their "false digits" are derived from mobile elements of the carpals.

5: A lineage of "multi-jowled" creature with an as-of-writing undetermined ancestry.

BONUS: Redesigns for the ">!civilized struthers!<." I wasn't really all that happy with how overly "humanoid" I decided to design them, as I did believe it was a pretty arbitrary decision, and I did believe designing them after humans made the direction of the story quite "anthropocentric," as I did believe the reader would sympathize even more for the species whose planet was in peril, over the more "inhuman-looking" sophonts, even if it did matter that their home planet was also dying and exhausted from resources. As you can see from the second slide, these were how I originally envisioned the creatures. I decided that their "hair," instead of what was originally conceptualized as locks of crests that happened to outwardly resemble hair, could be bristle-laden crests that, depending on the lineage, or how I am happy with them, could look like feathers (1), or actual hair anchored to these "crests."

See the Gribbetonia Megathread for more information.

Learned about it from a Tumblr post that came across my dashboard.

If you see the skull, (2nd image), you'll realize why it's named that, considering it has only two pairs of teeth. The rodent also has a shrew-like appearance - shrews, despite their murine appearances, are not rodents - to top it all.

reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpeculativeEvolution/comments/tnso7p/amongids_by_tril0bite/

"Another weird alt evo universe idea, this was arose from a conversation about how robustly adapted to herbivory that were paranthropus and then someone called them Ape bovids or something like that, I mixed it with the idea of hornbills taking the route of sapience and the end resulted in this image of a cowboy (or apeboy?) with some large young adult male forms of this cowfolk, they are more robust and fat that their african counterparts and they could gain more weight over time, in their head hold large "cheek frills" similar to an orangutan due to artificial breeding."

I believe I may have taken inspiration from this for a different alternative history/evolution scenario I had came up with, though it could've easily been coincidence, where a lineage of hyper-intelligent corvids - ones either related to the African pied crows or curve-billed ravens - domesticate early hominins - I believe these 'hominins' would be something related to Australopithecus or Homo, or within the bounds of either genus. The corvids used these hominins as beasts of burden, and later domesticated them as would dogs would in our current timeline. These 'pet hominins' do share some ounces of human-like cognition, though, sometimes to an uncanny degree; I'd imagine a fully-grown example of their species (or genus) would have the mentality of a naive, hyper-active child. I didn't really come up with any anatomical traits as of yet, though I may have imagined them looking somewhat human, though with a longer face, a wider gape, and larger lips or a bigger nose, as to emulate the 'beak' of their owners, and bigger, wider eyes with darker sclerae, likely looking something like this.