User:Coluberssymbol

Joined recently, so this is not going to be anything special. Interested in a range of biology topics, more specifically in vertebrates, from phylogeny, paleontology, predator/prey relationships, muscular anatomy, and especially evolutionary biology. Carnivores are a favorite. I'm an artist who does a lot of biological illustrations and often full reconstructions from fossils.

Images
I'm working of uploading more of my pictures, but this one was handy. This was reconstructed from the type specimen of Miacis cognitus, discovered in Reeve's bonebed in Texas, U.S. The fossil was missing upper canines and mandible, and these were reconstructed with reference photos from modern viverrids. This is the second reconstruction of this species I've done, the first was horrible and it took me a while to get a reasonable reconstruction. Each image in the sequence involves some sort of guesswork as with any reconstruction, and with the skin and final images, there is a degree of artistic imput. The slit pupils are a guess, the shape of the ears takes after cats, the nose is more dog-like when I've seen depictions with a much more civet-like nose, and of course, the fur color. The final took me hours to paint and days to plan out because I did a full out cladogram with the colors each carnivorous family has and traced back where certian colors first originated and what the ancestral colors should have been. Reds and browns were on the list of "must have" along with lighter underside and minimal distict markings, hence, the final coloration. The whiskers did not show up well, but they're present.

Pages started
Miacis cognitus

Muzzle clamp

Throat clamp

Bahe Formation

Yeni Eskihisar

Reeve's bonebed

Stubs Developed
Acinonyx pardinensis

Miomachairodus

Machairodontinae which has kind of become my brainchild