Shiisa's random findings

pidraws:

Okay so in color theory, we had this assignment to paint thirteen panels each with a different color harmony. This sounded tedious (spoiler: yes it was); so in order to combat that, I decided that I would paint dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. 

Then I discovered we needed something for the backs of the panels. ‘Well,’ I said to my self, the wondering sparkle of ambition and naivete in my eye. ‘I’ll do skeletals for the backs and get bonus points!’

And then I had a presentation. And another presentation. And two twelve-page papers come due. And the rough draft for my thesis. Somehow, I forgot about the skeletals. 

And then the panels were due on Monday.

Moral of the story: doing fourteen skeletals in two days is not a fun game, don’t try to play it. What is sleep? I don’t think I remember.

Anyway, enjoy some of the ones that I don’t actually hate. They are mostly coelurosaurs wow gee no one is surprised. (Also, surprise gorgonopsid!)

(via scientificillustration)

arsanatomica:

I always felt that photos did poor justice to the breathtaking dimensionality of skulls, so lets try something different. (Making animated gifs is something I’m somewhat new at, so bear with me here.)

This is a Gaboon Viper skull.

Gaboons are large (highly-venomous) African vipers, that hold the unique distinction of having the longest fangs in the world, with the ability to inject more venom than any other snake. There’s usually two (or more) fangs on each side. 

In the photo below, you can see a groove at the base of the foremost fangs, through which the venom duct enters the hollow fang. 

vintar:

#reptile skulls are satan’s jigsaw puzzles

(via vintar)

myampgoesto11:

Anatomical ceramic sculptures by Maria Garcia-Ibáñez

(via cocokat)

fightingforwhales:

theecolologist:

Blue Whale Scale: Getting Into The Heart Of The Matter…

If you happened to catch the neat infographic on animal hearts posted by the National Wildlife Federation earlier, then you’ll now know that a Blue Whale heart is, incredibly, as big as a small car (If you didn’t see the infographic, then guess what?; a Blue Whale heart is as big as a small car). Amazeballs. And just as neat and amazebally is this model of said heart constructed by the New Zealand company Human Dynamo Workshop.Originally commissioned for The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the model impressed curators at the LWL Museum of Natural History in Munster, Germany, so much that they ordered one for themselves.

The model was designed to be crawled through and contains an integrated sound system which enables arterial-explorers to hear and feel the whale’s heartbeat. Groovy! The model is currently on display at the “Whales - Giants of the Ocean” exhibition at the LWL Museum until the 11th of March, 2013. So what are you waiting for, get booking your flights to Deutschland pronto! Or, if you’re a tad bit totally-completely-and-utterly-wayyy-too-broke for that (like me!), you can just read more about the model here.

I would love to crawl through a model of a blue whale’s heart. Weird, I know.

(via mad-as-a-marine-biologist)

paleoillustration:

Mauricio Antón talks about his process:

“Outside in”

“Ever since the times of Georges Cuvier, the reconstruction of fossil vertebrates is known as a process that proceeds “from the inside out”, as we first draw the skeleton and then add succesive layers of soft tissue until we finish with the skin and fur. But, as I prepared my reconstructions of sabertooths, I also did the opposite exercise: to draw extant animals “from the outisde in”. What is the point? Well, it is easy to get the wrong mental picture of how the bones of an animal fit inside its body. One may naively imagine that bones are broadly in the center of the mass of soft tissue, but the relationship between the skeleton and the outline of the living animal is more complex, with bone coming quite close to the surface in some particular places (which the classic anatomists knew as “bone points”), while it is hidden under deep layers of flesh in other parts. In order to get used to the correct arrangement of flesh over bone, I did dozens of drawings of modern cats with their skeletons inside. I simply traced the outlines of big cats from photographs (many of them taken at the Madrid zoo), and then using as reference the positions of the “bone points” as illustrated in anatomy manuals, I drew the bones inside the soft tissue “envelope”. After a while the exercise gets easier and more fun -it is relatively simple to pinpoint the ankle, knee or elbow of the animal and place there the corresponding parts of the skeleton (calcaneum, patella, olecranon…) and so on, and then putting the rest of the skeleton in place. And then some things kept surpising me, for instance how far the nasal opening of the skull is behind the external nose of the animal…

Some of these sketches were done almost 20 years ago! Ever since then, I have had the opportunity to make many dissections and CT Scans of big cats, which have allowed me to refine interpretations of bone-to-soft-tissue relationships, but to this day I find that “bone-point” sketching is an enormously useful exercise, and one that you can do with the simplest of tools!”

(via scientificillustration)