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Osmatar — Wingsquids
Published: 2011-12-31 14:38:03 +0000 UTC; Views: 22807; Favourites: 505; Downloads: 98
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I have to admit I was quite dishartened when I first saw Brian Choo's baleen squids in Spec. It's like he took out all that wonderful mind-bending alienness of the cephalopod and then buried it under layers of vertebrate look-alike convergence. This lead me to attempt to salvage the baleen squids, and the best I could come up with were the mantasquids. (Later Brian added more fins to the baleen squids, which helped the issue a bit.)These two were further elaborations of the original mantasquid idea, smaller filter-feeding genera, the lower of which has colorful wingfins, dubbed butterfly squid as a result. Unfortunately I only have these pencil drawings to show rather than actual color artwork.
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Comments: 36
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Guess what! The Speculative Dinosaur Project is coming back! People are reviving it in the speculative evolution wiki.
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And you this guy is behind it with the help of , and a few other artists are helping revive the project based on stuff from the Yahoo group which never made it into final project. Also Osmatar, I have so much nostalgic memories of Speculative Dinosaur Project that wanted to see that project come back. I just hope you and the other members of the projects are okay with this, I am not at all ignorant to the fact that I have made several mistakes, but I am planning set things right. One last ting, I love your art.
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I think all the information should be transferred to a new website
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hmm how do ya join?I might help revive it
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Ask the one I'm talking to here
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I want to do that as well, with the help of the original artists ans those artists as well.
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Also, the article on Spec's geological history will probably have to change due to the huge amount of retcons planned.
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Are you talking about actually events in prehistory?
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What I'm talking about is that the old website used to have a section that talked about the history of Spec's Cenozoic era up to the present. Some of the information in it should probably be retconned.
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Out of curiosity, are planning to rejoin a revised spec project?
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You could always recolor them. I would love to see them in color.
- Leelan
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I'm glad someone thought theme thing I did about the baleen squids
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These always struck me as more of something from TFIW's 200myh epoch than a No End-Cretaceous extinction scenario. Like, squids coexist with Mosasaurs and Sharks in Spec in the same fashion they coexist with Whales and Sharks in the real world, right? So why are they so wildly divergent? It really just seems like something that happens in a post-tetrapod world where they don't have the same kind of competition.
But regardless, it's no secret these guys are the most intriguing creatures on Spec. I've seen raptors before, but THIS is just bonkers cool.
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Mainly because certain cephalopod groups that died in our timeline survived in Spec and took over the filter-feeding niche with whales absent. Admittedly chondrichthyes have evolved into filter-feeders too, so you could argue there should be more filter-feeding rays and sharks rather than cephalopods. But our cephalopods are cooler, so there.
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Nothing wrong with rule of cool. :3
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one thing i've never liked about the baleen squid's, and one of the things that makes them a little too whale like to me, is how the number of arms has apparently dropped. sure, they have six arms inside the 'mouth' and the two beak looking things are heavily adapted arms.. but it just makes it look rather too whalelike. i'd have suggested using more than two arms adapting into the 'beak', perhaps even the full 8. this would have made it look more squid like and thus more 'alien'. or you could make the 'beak' into an extension of the mantle, with the 8 arms thus partially recessed, but still visable.
it makes me wish i had been around when they were being created in the project, i'd have voiced my opinion then. now it's a bit too late to change.
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That did bother me too, but I didn't feel comfortable with my limited knowledge of cephalopod anatomy to say much about it then. I kinda wish they could have at least had "sideways mouths", with the jaw arms positioned more like manta ray cephalic lobes. In that case I wouldn't have created mantasquids though.
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Honestly, I think the Baleen Squids were a marvelous idea. I remember being a tad disappointed too by the striking similarity to actual whales, but as I've gotten older, I have to say I've grown to love them. It has been shown time and time again that convergence may not be such a coincidence. Animals living in the same sorts of conditions will come out looking very similar. This is not to say that all creatures must look a like; good heavens no. But as I think about it, it makes more sense to have the animals become more cetacean like in shape. I guess my only problem with them is not actually with them themselves (besides a few small things that could be tweaked, I suppose, though I'd have to thing about that) but rather that Brian Choo's illustrations make the animals looks awfully rigid.
That said, if it not for the fact they they were for Spec, I'd say that the Baleen squids would make a marvelous prediction for what life may be to come in the future of our planet.
I think these Mantasquids are excellent works!
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I remember these guys from Spec! Fantastic, and I would imagine if encountered in the fleash, truely magnificent beasts.
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"Well excuse me for having enormous flaws that I don't work on!"--Homer Simpson
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I need to eventually get off my ass and make that jellyfish-eating baleen squid I started experimenting with.
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That facefull of baleen is a really interesting design choice. It would be neat if they were somehow able to use a siphon (modified fin?) to suck the krill in like a vaccuum.
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I have to agree with you on the baleen squid business. I always wondered if you guys picked the best shape for them. On the other hand, I thought the mantasquid was believable enough.
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I love those speculative filter-feeding squids since I saw them at Spec. Too bad they don't actually exist
I specially like how these are not too whale-faced.
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I consciously tried to make them not look too much like something with a vertebrate skull.
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