Saturday 14 March 2009

How much more Speculative Biology is there?

Call it fictional biology, speculative evolution, alternate evolution or call it anything else, by rearranging these words at will or finding others. I like it, and I also like art concerning alien lifeforms (wildlife art in general and palaeontological art are also nice but left out of this blog; it should have some focus, blurry as it may be).

I know of books, documentaries and websites, and some are listed in the links section on the Furaha site, but there may well be more material I never knew about. The excellent work on hypothetical future evolution on Earth I discussed lately (here and here) was completely unknown to me, and I had not seen it mentioned on other sites either. So perhaps there are more sites or books like that. If so, I would like to know about them!

Why not ask you, the reader? I am looking for quality material with preferentially a good visual side to it, i.e. good artwork. If you know of anything good, simply mention it in a comment. I do not care about the form: books, documentaries and films are all acceptable. All languages are good (admittedly, I will need pictures if the language is not Germanic or Romance...).

To see how many experts are out there, I will post a picture of an interesting beast I found on the internet. I will come back to it later, and will then give full credit to its origins and provide the address.

Meanwhile, you can see that the artist knows his or hers business (although the biomechanics contain some oddities). Do you know where it is from?


Click to enlarge

7 comments:

JoshT said...

That particular beastie would be a Shallow Beaked Gorgan, from Venus. They seem to have a foundness for cakes.

Anonymous said...

I have the same idea, by the way. And I collected some links of this kind... Just look.
First of all, Metazoica, the world 50 MY in the future, mostly mammalian evolution:
http://www.metazoica.com
Site made and perfectly illustrated by Cassandra Rivera (aka Timgal).
http://www.metazoica.blogspot.com
Blog of this site.
Language: English.
***
Great Spec:
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/%7Ea0000265/Spec/
And Yahoo group for discussing:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DinosaurMailingList-KilledThreads/
Language: English.
***
Snaiad by Nemo Ramjet - life in alien world:
http://www.snaiad.com/
Perfectly illustrated site and marvellous ideas of alien species.
Language: English.
***
Some forbidden now blogs of Tim Morris:
http://squamozoic.blogspot.com/
Squamozoic, the world where squamates won.
http://piatnitskysaurus.blogspot.com/
Collection of ideas for futuristic and speculative evolution projects.
http://spectim.blogspot.com/
Some ideas for Spec.
Language: English.
***
http://www.eobasileus.blogspot.com/
One more interesting blog about nature. Early posts from last years are dedicated to Spec ideas. Illustrations are also present there.
Language: English.
***
Worlds of Robert Ibatullin - life at Nu Phoenicis; the world of thousand-year-long day; visions of future history of mankind and Solar system.
http://robert-ibatullin.narod.ru/conworlds.html
Ideas are exact from the point of view of astronomy and climatology, but poorly illustrated.
Language: Russian.
***
And my project - poorly illustrated and only partly translated into English - Neocene, life on Earth 25 MY in the future, after man and without mankind.
http://www.sivatherium.h12.ru/englver.htm
Language: English. Sorry for grammar mistakes.
I'm not iron man to translate the project completely into English. Just compare to Russian version:
http://www.sivatherium.h12.ru/rab_budu.htm
Language: Russian.

Anonymous said...

http://www.alexries.com/
http://exozoo.blogspot.com/
http://abiogenisis.deviantart.com/

Very interesting work made by a biologist/artist.

Anonymous said...

it looks like something I saw at Conceptart.org, but I'm not sure which folder or artist at that site might've done it.

though it's interesting how the forelimbs seem to be bifircated - reminds me of S.J.Gould's drawing of a marella/trilobite leg-and-gill.

Anonymous said...

Quite a bit of stuff on DeviantArt, if you look around. This includes an exobiology project on Europa and various single works.

Anonymous said...

There's Drake E (4? the name seems to vary). Here's one of the videos by the guy behind it, Glorfon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCWfJN7MR0U

Anonymous said...

Evan Black recommended your website to me and so far, i know of the websites listed on your blog and two others,
http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/englver.htm
and
https://sites.google.com/a/stu.ccsdut.org/project-sereon/
the second one doesn't have as many animals and plants, ad some of them don't have a description, but the creator is still working on it.