cornbread Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 So this started out as a anomalocaris, but soon changed to have to work on the cork. They normally have grabber "arms" and swim freely in the water. Mine is more of a aggressive roly poly with claws. The inspiration looks like this/ But with no source material in front of me when I did this, mine looked more like this . Either way, it was fun to do a monster 17 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adrift Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 I feel like it is looking up at me thinking, "You want me to crawl how much farther...?" 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeffWoodall Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 Nice looking. I don't think I have ever seen a miniature of one of those before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pingo Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 It looks wonderfully creepy, although a little more like a monster shrimp than an anomalocaris. This is why I keep visual references around when I am painting. I love the Burgess shale fauna. We have a blown glass opabinia on our mantel. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baphomet69 Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 Great work! I'm actually surprised Gary & Crew never adapted an anomalocaris for dungeon duty in the original D&D. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pingo Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 Great work! I'm actually surprised Gary & Crew never adapted an anomalocaris for dungeon duty in the original D&D. Paleontologist Steven Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life," the book that put the Burgess Shale fauna in the popular eye, wasn't published until 1989. Amazing reconstructions had only been done on the fossils in the 1970s. Before that, most people thought they were only boring old worms and stuff. The anomalocaris itself wasn't much noticed as a critter until Gould's book. Its name, "weird shrimp," refers to the first fragment of it that was named, the two raking claws at the front, which were so named because they looked sort of like the tail of a shrimp if you ignored the fact that they were completely unarticulated and never seemed to be accompanied by any corresponding legs or a head. Other fragments of what were thought to be other critters kept getting found with them. No one thought anything Precambrian could possibly have been as big as a meter long, but eventually someone asked hey, how come these shrimp fossils are always found in twos and they are frequently found with one of these jellyfish support rings and near a pile of these other weird fossils? And eventually scientists worked out that all these disparate fossils were part of a single gargantuan (for the time period) predator. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr.Bedlam Posted December 26, 2014 Share Posted December 26, 2014 If I remember correctly, all they HAD at first was those two raking claws at front, and there was some debate as to whether they were a pair of limbs on one critter, or if they were a pair of critters who happened to get fossilized together. Paleoentologically speaking, this stuff is VERY new. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pingo Posted December 26, 2014 Share Posted December 26, 2014 If I remember correctly, all they HAD at first was those two raking claws at front, and there was some debate as to whether they were a pair of limbs on one critter, or if they were a pair of critters who happened to get fossilized together. Paleoentologically speaking, this stuff is VERY new. The Burgess Shale was first discovered in 1909. Hundreds of fossils were collected, but they were mostly only glanced at and classified as worms and trilobites and ordinary modern type animals of little interest. They were then shoved in drawers in the storage area of the Smithsonian and ignored until someone took another look in the early 1970s and realized these fossils suggested something extraordinary and astonishing. The shrimplike claws happen to have been the first parts named, which is why the critter still bears that name. But the other parts also showed up very early on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smokingwreckage Posted December 26, 2014 Share Posted December 26, 2014 Didn't it turn out, on closer inspection, to be a vast and rapid explosion of novel types, like Mother Nature had dropped her inhibitions a little and said "What the heck, it MIGHT work"... ...which also suggests a time of plenty. No time for metabolic costing, sorting and sifting, get in on the action while it's hot. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay Posted January 2, 2015 Share Posted January 2, 2015 If I remember correctly, all they HAD at first was those two raking claws at front, and there was some debate as to whether they were a pair of limbs on one critter, or if they were a pair of critters who happened to get fossilized together. Paleoentologically speaking, this stuff is VERY new. The Burgess Shale was first discovered in 1909. Hundreds of fossils were collected, but they were mostly only glanced at and classified as worms and trilobites and ordinary modern type animals of little interest. They were then shoved in drawers in the storage area of the Smithsonian and ignored until someone took another look in the early 1970s and realized these fossils suggested something extraordinary and astonishing. The shrimplike claws happen to have been the first parts named, which is why the critter still bears that name. But the other parts also showed up very early on. Did you see the Marble Canyon fossils announcement? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pingo Posted January 2, 2015 Share Posted January 2, 2015 If I remember correctly, all they HAD at first was those two raking claws at front, and there was some debate as to whether they were a pair of limbs on one critter, or if they were a pair of critters who happened to get fossilized together. Paleoentologically speaking, this stuff is VERY new. The Burgess Shale was first discovered in 1909. Hundreds of fossils were collected, but they were mostly only glanced at and classified as worms and trilobites and ordinary modern type animals of little interest. They were then shoved in drawers in the storage area of the Smithsonian and ignored until someone took another look in the early 1970s and realized these fossils suggested something extraordinary and astonishing. The shrimplike claws happen to have been the first parts named, which is why the critter still bears that name. But the other parts also showed up very early on. Did you see the Marble Canyon fossils announcement? No. Wow! Thanks! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140211083804.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator TaleSpinner Posted January 5, 2015 Moderator Share Posted January 5, 2015 If I remember correctly, all they HAD at first was those two raking claws at front, and there was some debate as to whether they were a pair of limbs on one critter, or if they were a pair of critters who happened to get fossilized together. Paleoentologically speaking, this stuff is VERY new. The Burgess Shale was first discovered in 1909. Hundreds of fossils were collected, but they were mostly only glanced at and classified as worms and trilobites and ordinary modern type animals of little interest. They were then shoved in drawers in the storage area of the Smithsonian and ignored until someone took another look in the early 1970s and realized these fossils suggested something extraordinary and astonishing. The shrimplike claws happen to have been the first parts named, which is why the critter still bears that name. But the other parts also showed up very early on. Did you see the Marble Canyon fossils announcement? No. Wow! Thanks! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140211083804.htm Sweet! I can't wait to see what they find. I love the Cambrian period. Nice work, by-the-way. It seems almost a cross between anomolacaris and a trilobite. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kangaroorex Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Alright that is awesome! Both the mini and the new find. Wonderful life was the first book to interest me in that era of life. And that era is amazing. Though, for names, hallucigenia still wins :) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pingo Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Alright that is awesome! Both the mini and the new find. Wonderful life was the first book to interest me in that era of life. And that era is amazing. Though, for names, hallucigenia still wins :) A good scientific name for WHAT-the-heck-is-THAT? 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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