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I've not been able to upload a lot of stuff recently--I've got a little thing in the works but I gotta finish it all before I can do any sharing so I've got nothing to show, but...

I got all worked up about skvader again yesterday and remembered bilbies and wanted to make an australian version. After digging through some australian birds I finally settled on malleefowl for the bird half of the cross, for a skvader with some serious digging motivations, haha. The funniest thing to me about this cross is that bilbies and malleefowl take near opposite approaches to parenting.

As marsupials, bilbies have very short gestation periods (less than two weeks), give birth to barely-formed joeys a quarter of an inch long, and then keep the young inside of a pouch for a few months while they develop. The young are 100% dependent on the mother during that time. After that they still take care of the joeys for a few more weeks inside of their burrow before they finally disperse on their own.

Malleefowl, on the other hand, are megapodes, which are an interesting group of birds. The male scrapes out a large depression in the earth (and when I say large, I mean nearly ten feet across, quite a size for a chicken-sized bird!) and then fill it up with organic materials until they have a mound rising a few feet above the surrounding earth (a photo here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mal… ). These mounds are carefully regulated and tended to so that they provide a perfect incubation temperature for the eggs due to decaying material. Then the female lays large eggs one at a time under the mound, a week or so apart, and then the pair leaves the mound. When the chicks hatch a few months later, one at a time, they dig their way out of the mound and start their life completely independent. They're large and precocial, can run within hours, and within a day they are already capable of strong flight. So a completely different story from the dependent bilby joeys.

I'm still spitballing trying to decide what kind of parental care an amalgamation of the two would have. The image of them burying undeveloped joeys under a mountain of decaying organic matter and saying "bye kids, call when you get to college!" is a hilarious one but not wholly practical.

ANYWAY.... I gotta get back to work.

On tumblr here: etosaurus.tumblr.com/post/1291…

Description
I've not been able to upload a lot of stuff recently--I've got a little thing in the works but I gotta finish it all before I can do any sharing so I've got nothing to show, but...

I got all worked up about skvader again yesterday and remembered bilbies and wanted to make an australian version. After digging through some australian birds I finally settled on malleefowl for the bird half of the cross, for a skvader with some serious digging motivations, haha. The funniest thing to me about this cross is that bilbies and malleefowl take near opposite approaches to parenting.

As marsupials, bilbies have very short gestation periods (less than two weeks), give birth to barely-formed joeys a quarter of an inch long, and then keep the young inside of a pouch for a few months while they develop. The young are 100% dependent on the mother during that time. After that they still take care of the joeys for a few more weeks inside of their burrow before they finally disperse on their own.

Malleefowl, on the other hand, are megapodes, which are an interesting group of birds. The male scrapes out a large depression in the earth (and when I say large, I mean nearly ten feet across, quite a size for a chicken-sized bird!) and then fill it up with organic materials until they have a mound rising a few feet above the surrounding earth (a photo here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mal… ). These mounds are carefully regulated and tended to so that they provide a perfect incubation temperature for the eggs due to decaying material. Then the female lays large eggs one at a time under the mound, a week or so apart, and then the pair leaves the mound. When the chicks hatch a few months later, one at a time, they dig their way out of the mound and start their life completely independent. They're large and precocial, can run within hours, and within a day they are already capable of strong flight. So a completely different story from the dependent bilby joeys.

I'm still spitballing trying to decide what kind of parental care an amalgamation of the two would have. The image of them burying undeveloped joeys under a mountain of decaying organic matter and saying "bye kids, call when you get to college!" is a hilarious one but not wholly practical.

ANYWAY.... I gotta get back to work.

On tumblr here: etosaurus.tumblr.com/post/1291…