Fossils - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

If I was a Necromancer

I think if I was a necromancer, I would go to museums and fossil yards and things like that, and bring extinct life back to the world of the living. I am fascinated by skeletons and bones from creatures who breathed and lived aeons in the past. It’s so majestic and formiddable in a way I can’t really explain. Could you imagine seeing these things, gorgeous and vibrant and primordial, alive and whole like you are right now?

As a necromancer, I’d wear obsidian and fossilized plating, cloaked in rich black, white, gold, and red fabric. Necklaces of elegantly carved amber with preserved ammonites, raptorial claws from Dakotaraptor or Velociraptor on my greaves and gauntleted fingers, mammoth fur heavy-duty pack on my back. An ornately carved and patterned primeval skull helm, with rich and striking colors, thorny pieces.

The Tyrant, Regal-Eternal

Come and marvel at my obsidian bones.

See my mighty jaws swallow the mountains long after I can bite, my shattering roars crumble the sky even without vocal cords.

Midnight feathers ripple on ebony scales, riveting even in death, phantoms summoned by awe to once again quiver atop my cathedral skeleton.

Look upon me and tremble, and fear, and desire. Witness.

Many prone before me in this grand tomb of stone and metal. I hear their prayers, their wishes. Even so long after I have perished, my Reign continues in the imagination, in the soul..

I am a Primeval King, I am an unending God, I am a force of the Earth herself.

Forever.

EON, USA

This place feels old. Older than it has any right to be.

Hidden between cliffs and the plains, under an untamed sky. Civilization feels like a footnote, a temporary blip in pages eons deep. Even with roads and the first tentative electric lights to challenge the stars, even with the iron horses thumping this way and that across so much empty— the town *feels* old. Maybe it’s the land. Maybe it’s the bones of the earth that it lies upon.

Everyone can feel it, the strangeness. It lingers at the edge of their words and in the fringes of their long, quiet looks beyond the boundaries like an omen.

When the wagon trains first came in their droves, there were stories of eerie stalking shapes across distant hills, and scouts puzzled over three-toed tracks big as a man. In the night there were no howls from wolves, just the sound and scent of an ocean long vanished into time; just the feeling of mighty shapes weightlessly swimming overhead.

The farmers have long since turned a blind eye to their mutilated cattle, butchered and battered into scant piles. Whatever it is that eats them can crack iron like frail bones, and eat a longhorn whole. Braggadocious hunters from both coasts have all retreated into quiet extinction, their eager crusades left with no legacy but disquieting nothingness. The cattle continue to disappear down unseen gullets.

The town is old. Weary, creaking. Even in the age of satellites and highways, it remains. Hidden between cliffs and plains, under an untamed sky, smelling of an ocean vanished to time.

Dandy's World had gotten its claws into me, unfortunately... -3-

sometime u gotta bust out the fossil collection you acquired from a creek in 2015

Paleoart Sketching at the Royal Tyrell Museum

I promise I’ll get better photos eventually, but here’s a quick dump from my trip to drumheller! Visited the museum for some amount of hours over two days so I could sketch the mounts, all of these are done on watercolour paper so hopefully when I next post about them, they’ll be painted up and pretty :)

What museum do you guys recommend to go to next? (At least, in North America)

Hopefully going back for visit number 6 next year! (I’m so greedy, I need to go back again and again)

Young Gorgosaurus libratus, death pose.

more under cut

Dromaeosaurus albertensis I believe, I gave it some strange butt plumage there but oh well

Black beauty (Tyrannosaurus rex) had a nice little chat with a photographer while drawing this one, we were both struggling to perform our arts with the massive crowd ;-; luckily day two was a lot less busy, I went first thing in the morning rather then midday.

Ornithomimus brevitertius, as to which the species Google refused to elaborate whether it’s synonymous with a different dinosaur species or genus so to this day I am unsure if it is a valid radon :,D regardless, this was probably my favourite sketch, working on painting it rn

I don’t remember the tag on this one, gonna guess it was a type of corythosaurus?

I’ll do some extra photo dumping from the museum later :)

Fossil Shark Teeth ID Project - Part 1

I am currently working on a shark teeth ID project. It is a personal project I am working on because I got gifted a multitude of fossil shark teeth of various species.

I am fairly sure that the teeth (seen in the two pictures below) belong to the family Lamnidae and are from the species Cosmopolitodus hastalis.

If these teeth are in fact the teeth of Cosmopolitodus hastalis they ought to date back to the Miocene and Pliocene (which are the two epochs of the Neogene). Although the species was still alive during the Pleistocene, fossils found of Cosmopolitodus hastalis in Cadzand (in the Netherlands) date back to the Miocene and Pliocene.

One of the shark teeth (the left picture below) gifted to me is so severely eroded that I cannot visually identify it, however it is still a gorgeous fossil.

Between the various shark teeth I also found what I suspect to be a part of a fossilised chela (claw/pincer of a crab) (seen in the right picture below). Considering the location of the find I think it might be from Carcinus maenas and could date back to the Pliocene.