"Future Spidrid Microdocumentary May Feature Silly Walks"

 Well, there's a headline for you. This post contains a quick update on the evolution of the intended 'microdocumentaries' about spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters. 

Why microdocumentaries? Because even animations of a few minutes take a long time to make if every frame is raytraced. Why spidrids and the other mentioned clades? Because seeing these animals move definitely adds value, compared to a diagram or a still image. There won't be hexapod microdocumentaries because my animation skills do not include such soft-bodied animal shapes. Not yet, anyway. 

The key elements of programming tetrapter movement are already there and I expanded the Matlab programmes that control cloakfish movement. I have almost completed work on programming spidrids, allowing visualisation of walking over uneven ground, separate movement of the abdomen and cephalothorax, slanted spidrid legs, and spidrid social signalling. I am considering having multiple spidrids walk about in a scene; that would be nice but is not essential.   

There was a very major snag along the way. I had intended to use Zbrush for 3D modelling, and had thought that I could use ZBrush, Sculptris, Photoshop or even Window's 3DPaint to paint body parts and produce texture maps. Unfortunately, Sculptris and 3DPaint no longer work well, maybe because Windows changed too much. Adobe abolished 3D painting in Photoshop because they now have a separate program for that. A glance at internet sources convinced me that ZBrush made texture exporting extremely complex, in true ZBrush style (for some reason the people at ZBrush keep clinging on to a horribly unfriendly user interface). What now? Well, with trepidation I turned to Blender, which had scared me off years ago because it was equally unfriendly. But the Blender user interface was said to have become friendlier now, so I downloaded Blender and selected the subjects of sculpting and texture painting for study. About 9 days later, I had modelled and painted all body parts of a new species of spidrid and had exported them successfully along with roughness and colour maps. I think that is telling, as I started with zero Blender knowledge. Mind you, Blender is still complex, because it does complex things; but there is a solid logic behind it.

 

So here is a try-out of a new spidrid species, produced with Matlab, Blender and Vue. There is a version with better resolution on my YouTube channel.  You may expect this species to feature in scenes of higher quality with sound, plants and more scenery.

 

 

And here is my rough starter species walking with a 'pronking' gait to impress potential mates. In this spidrid gait, two sets of four legs move together. It is an eight-legged version of the 'double tripod' gait used by insects, so I am calling it a 'double table' gait. In the pronking version, the body is held high and the legs are lifted much higher than needed. I think this walk is objectively silly, but you should ask the intended audience what they think of it, and that would be other spidrids, not me.       

By the way, I am trying my hand at Instagram too; you should be able to find me using 'J.Gert van Dijk' 

Do the ballooning lifeforms ('ballonts') of Avatar 3 make sense?

By Gert van Dijk and Abbydon 

If you like speculative biology, you cannot escape the Avatar films: they are spectacular. Regular readers will know that this blog likes its science 'well done' rather than 'medium' or 'rare'. But with television and film 'medium' is usually the best you can hope for. If the story is good enough, we are willing to suspend disbelief. The Avatar films are spectacular but have their share of biomechanical problems: the illogical anatomy and gaits of Avatar's six-legged animals were something best ignored in the first film, and the skimwing's size and mode of swimming in the second film did not withstand close inspection either. This post is aimed at the third film ('Fire and Ash'); as that is not even out yet, isn't it too early to start dissecting its biology? 

Based on the trailer, we thought we could have a first close look. 'We' here means Abbydon, who is a physicist, and me (Gert van Dijk/ Sigmund Nastrazzurro). Abbydon has his own blog and has written guest posts here before, on the subject of aerographene and foam as a way to make viable 'ballonts'. 'Ballonts', by the way, is a term one of us (Gert) came up with to describe life forms that move through the air using a lighter-than-air principle. At one point, I imagined a large array of floating lifeforms on Furaha, ranging from tiny aeroplankton to immense 'zeppeloons'. That bubble burst when I did the mathematics that proved that small ballonts simply could not work on an Earth-like planet, so all those lifeforms underwent a sad but sudden mass extinction. If you wish to follow the mathematics (just Archimedes' Principle, really), there is a list of posts at the end of this post. 

Click to enlarge; source: Avatar 3 trailer

The trailer for Avatar 3 is out, and it's got ballonts in it. Seeing that nature seems to conspire against ballonts, we looked at it critically. Let's start with a description. 

Click to enlarge; from Avatar trailer

There seem to be two ballont species: a large one, a 'barge', towed by a smaller one, the 'tug'. Apparently, these are known as 'medusa' and 'manta kite', respectively. A Na'avi-made ship is suspended from the barge animal so the Na'avi can use it for aerial transport. The medusa/barge animal largely consists of a large sac, elongated from front to back. It has two lateral vertical surfaces that we will call sails. Tendrils hang down and move about a bit; these are probably there to feed with and to anchor the animal. The tug is much smaller and has undulating fins, rather like Earth's rays, cuttlefish and Furahan cloakfish. Those fins propel it. 

What does this tell us? 

Ballonts need to be very large on an Earth-like planet to work (read the posts on ballonts to understand why). Gravity on the moon Pandora, where all of this takes place, is said to be low, which sounds good for balloons. But, and this may surprise you, low gravity doesn't make a balloon more practical! 'Practical', as far as a balloon goes, means a small bladder and a large liftable mass. On Earth, physical circumstances makes balloons impractical by dictating that they must have a very, very large bladder to lift even a small mass. Gravity does NOT influence the balance between the size of the bladder and the mass to be lifted, and so does not help to make a balloon more practical. Two things that do help are a high density of the atmosphere, which can be achieved by adding heavy gases to it, and a high pressure. Pandora's atmosphere is said to have a density that is 20% more than that of Earth, while the surface pressure is a bit lower at 0.9 atmosphere. Those changes are not impressive from a ballooning point of view. 

The Pandoran barge looks very large, which it has to be; so far so good. But why does it have those two large sails at its sides? To catch the wind for propulsion? We hope not, as that cannot work! Balloons are, by their nature, as light as the air around them, so they will, after a short while, move at exactly the same speed as the air around them. That leaves no wind to power anything! You can only harness the power of the wind if the air moves relative to you, for instance because you are held back by the ground or by water. 

Or do the 'sails' serve some other purpose? Are they themselves a source of propulsion? They could perhaps function like oars, folded up when moving forwards and spread out when going backwards. Or do they undulate? As they are vertical, undulation would allow vertical but not horizontal mobility. But the sails look completely immobile in the trailer. The barges do not seem to have any kind of propulsion mechanism, and if they did, they probably wouldn't have to be towed. Do the sails serve another purpose, such as heating? This is unlikely, as they are transparent; the sac should offer enough surface area anyway. Do they then help to orientate the animal with help of the wind, for instance when the animal is tethered (if it can do that)? For orientation you would want them at one end of the animal, not the middle. In short, we cannot make any sense of the barge's sails. 

Is the tug, the manta kite, large enough to float? Without a better estimate of its size, there is no way to check. The undulating fins can provide some propulsion force in air, but probably not much. If this were an animal swimming in water, fins of this relative size would work because they would displace a substantial volume of water, which is heavy. But swimming through air differs from swimming through water in various ways: there is about a thousandfold difference in density that affects thrust and drag, as well as a fiftyfold difference in viscosity. No air animal use undulation to achieve true flight on Earth, making it difficult to predict how well undulating flight would work out. Based on the low density of air, we suspect that you would need either very large or very fast-moving fins to effectively swim through air. So, whether an animal like the manta kite would swim well in air is as yet uncertain, but its proportions suggest that the animal might feel more at home under water than in the air. 

The tug does not only have to move itself but also has to drag the barge along. And 'drag' is a key word here, as in movement studies 'drag' also indicates resistance to movement. We can be certain about one thing: those immense barge sails will function as pretty efficient air brakes, making the tug's job that much harder... 

Mind you, there are some interesting loose ends about balloons and their steering that may deserve another post. Meanwhile, we hope that the film will solve the riddles. Our biggest surprise was that the trailer seems to show sails to catch the wind on a free-floating balloon; but surely the designers wouldn't have done that? 

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Posts on ballonts that help understand the physics

Ballonts III: basic physics
Ballonts IV: effects of density and pressure
Ballonts V: ballonts in gas giants
Ballonts VI: effects of the envelope 
Ballonts VIII: foam 
Ballonts IX: aerographene  

 

 

Photorealistic spidrid animation (maybe...)

 Now that The Book is out of my hands, I can pick up some old Furaha projects that I had to pause earlier on. I used Matlab, a programming and analysis tool, to produce animations to see how various animals moved. The resulting 3D representations helped a great deal to get a better feel for the gist of the movement and were very useful to get the paintings right. However, I also wanted to produce more lifelike, even photorealistic, animations. Those with good memory may remember that I used to do entire Furahan scenes using a 3D rendering programme called Vue (or Vue Infinite) from the firm E-on. There are some on my rather inactive YouTube channel.  

Producing even short animations proved to be extremely time-consuming. Vue is a raytracing programme that produces very good atmospheric results, but each frame took ages. I used to leave my PC running for one or more nights. The problem with animations is then that you only get to judge the the quality afterwards, and you may then have to do it all over again. 

The main reason I stopped making visually rich animations was that they did not contribute to The Book; by consuming time, they in fact postponed its completion. Another important reason was that programming animations was often frustrating. I could achieve my goals in Matlab, where the problems boiled down to defining rotations and translation of every body part of a radially symmetric eight-legged spidrid walking on uneven ground, with the body attitude compensating for the slope. That was complex in that it was difficult to keep track of everything, but the key parts required fairly basic trigonometry. The seriously frustrating part was to reinterpret the resulting data with Python code to direct Vue. The coordinate systems never really matched up, even if I started with both the y-axes up in both systems and similar handedness orientations of axes (that means whether the positive x,- y- and z-axes pointed in the same direction in both programmes. Even though I made sure of that, I still had to swap y- and z-axes, which in turns messed up all rotations.  

Here is an old example I posted back in 2013. There was a problem with the legs: sometimes the leg segment closest to the body (that wasn't shown) flipped around, so the pale underside is suddenly placed the wrong way. This happened when that segment rotated beyond the vertical position; let's say the rotation angles moved from 85 to 95 degrees. This was almost certainly because a function such as arc tangent interpreted 95 degrees as 5 degrees. At the time, I gave up and shelved the programme. 

I have now tried again, helped by the fact that I now have the latest and much more stable version of Vue. Sadly, Vue's parent firm (Bentley) decided that it would no longer develop Vue at all, so the 2023 version is the last one ever. The good news is that Vue is now available completely free. This version is a pleasure to work with. You do not need to be able to code at all to use it.

Here is a Matlab example of expanded spidrid animation functionality. You can see that the spidrid follows the terrain perfectly, meaning that the body posture echoes the terrain under the body precisely. You can also see something new, present in my spidrid paintings, but not yet in earlier spidrid animations. In earlier animations, the body consisted of one part whereas theyere should be two: a bottom part (the abdomen) that bears the spidrid's eight legs and a top part (the cupola or cephalothorax). The cupola can move on the abdomen. In this animation the copula is stuck firmly to the abdomen. 

In this second example, the abdomen is partly stabilised and no longer follows the terrain completely, so it stays more horizontal than in the previous animation. The cupola now moves independently and has its own tilt-dampening stabilising reflexes, so it stays even more horizontal than the abdomen. That should help the animal get a more stable platform for its senses.

After rewriting the python code the next step was raytracing with Vue. After suffering much misery and new dents in my wall where I banged my head, I got it working. The next phases include adding an abdomen and a cephalothorax, perhaps even feelers, and then it is time to add plants swaying gently in a breeze. 

Wish me patience...

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For those who wish to use Vue, or its associated plant editing software 'PlantFactory', you can download them here. 

As I said, this last version is quite stable. With Vue it is not that difficult to produce an image of a forest with prehistoric trees or something like that. If you wish to have more control over Vue's myriad options, be advised that this is a complex piece of kit that needs attention and time. 

For tutorials, there are several; GeekAtPlay provides good ones. 

Back from Dinocon 2025 (Exeter, UK)

Dinocon is a dinosaur-themed convention and a direct successor to the TetZooCon series of conventions that I wrote about on this blog before, in 2022 and 2018. Dinocon was a two-day conference in Exeter. It was excellent, but I will not discuss all events and talks at length; this is a blog about speculative biology, after all, not aimed directly at dinosaurs. 

Even so, I guess that most people interested in speculative biology will also be interested in dinosaurs because of the large overlap: first, dinosaurs are strange and intriguing animals, and second, much about them is speculation. Of course much can be told from their remains, which thse days sometimes even includes colours. But the gap between facts and what dinosaurs really looked like and how they behaved is huge. Every dinosaur restoration is filled with educated speculation, which is still speculation. I find palaeoart and the history of palaeoart very interesting, not only because of the artistic component, but also because the choices made in depicting an animal tell a great deal about underlying concepts. 

Dinocon, as the TetZooCon successor, fortunately still cares very much about palaeoart. Speculative biology was not prominent in the official programme, which is obviously of some concern to me. Of course, focusing squarely on dinosaurs may be the perfect choice for a convention that is just starting. I do hope that speculative biology will get more attention in future Dinocons; we'll see. Next year's version, by the way, will probably take place in early August 2026 at an as yet unknown place in the English Midlands; Birmingham was mentioned. 

Speculative biology was certainly present unofficially at Dinocon 2025. Matt Wedel, known among other things from the 'Sauropod vertebra picture of the Week' (SVPOW) blog, gave a truly excellent lecture about why the general sauropod body scheme seemed to represent a package of features that, once arrived at, seems destined to remain unaltered. He used two examples from speculative biology to illustrate his reasoning, with Dougal Dixon's 'turtosaur' as a acceptable sauropod development. 

Here's a video showing Wedel drawing attention to Dougal's 'New Dinosaurs'. 

Moreover, both C.M. Kösemen (Snaiad) and Dougal had stands at which they sold artworks and books respectively. Dougal's new version of 'The new Dinosaurs' sold out quickly. Dougal told me that the images are the same as before but that the text has been thoroughly revised. You may read a review on this new version on SVPOW, with an image of a turtosaur, right here. Andy Frasier, of 'Dragons of Wales' (here and here), had a stand at which he sold his palaeoart. Another stand sold copies of a glossy magazine, called 'Almost Real', about speculative biology that was unknown to me. I intend to write about it at a later date. 

Click to enlarge

 Here is a scene at the art show with, from left to right, Mehmet Kösemen, me, and Biblaridion.   

Something of definite interest for lovers of palaeoart and of possible interest for lovers of speculative biology is another convention about dinosaurs and palaeoart, this time in Strasbourg in France: it is called Dinoël, a combination of 'dino' and 'Noël' (Christmas). It was held for the first time in 2024, and there will be another one in 2025. Various people involved with Dinoël told me that there are no firm plans to include speculative biology yet, but they certainly did not exclude the possibility. (I did not find a website of Dinoël, but you can find it on Instagram.) 

And that brings me to the last subject of this report. There was a nice panel discussion about AI and palaeoart. As the products of AI are essentially reiterations of work produced by humans, AI 'art' is squarely based on human creativity. But if you start thinking about using art made by others, without their permission, without even referring to the source, without reimbursement, and in likely breach of copyright, the whole of AI art evokes very unpleasant associations. Darren Naish wondered out loud whether the use of AI art is in fact immoral. This is a good point, with which I agree. People who use it should think twice about the morality of using AI art.  

To end on a more upbeat note, here is a short (and jumpy; sorry) video showing a tiny bit of Exeter cathedral. I could not help noticing that some of the grotesques on the facade are very nice examples of creature design.  

And on an even more upbeat note, here is my wife, Roelien Bastiaanse, having mixed feelings about dinosaur reenactments.  

Snaiad part 2: the remaining art

 As I wrote yesterday, I couldn't upload all the new Snaiad images Mehmet Kösemen had sent me in one go. This post presents the remaining images. The legends, like those of yesterday, were all written by Mehmet.

Enjoy the images!

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Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: Picozoan A

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: Picozoan B

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: Picozoan C; "Three of the many species of picozoans - insect-sized relatives of the large, landliving 'vertebrates'."

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "A trilateralan - from the phylum of xeric-adapted animals - most of which exhibit radial symmetry."

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "Three of the many different 'arthrognathan' fish-equivalents. These common groups dominate marine and freshwater ecosystems, but are almost entirely absent on land.
Conversely, the ancestors of terrestrial 'vertebrates' which dominate the land, are
represented in the seas by a few very rare species."

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "An Adyognathus - member of another kahydron-adjacent family."

 

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "Refurbished and colourised illustration of a motosuchid."

 

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "Colour illustration of a forest-floor-dwelling herbivore that uses its club-like arms for defence, and a muscular tail as a third leg."
I

Copyright Mehmet Kösemen: "Colour study of a muppajiform - member of a cold-blooded, herbivorous clade with many unique families."

Snaiad: an interview with the author and lots of exclusive art (part 1)

Now that the Furaha book is in the publisher's hands, I can use the time I used to spend on new Furaha paintings on something else. That something may well involve more blog-related activities, but I am not yet certain about that; time stays precious. 

But there are a few things I have wanted to do for some time, and one is an interview with C. M. Kösemen - Cevdet Mehmet Kösemen. I have known Mehmet a long time, mostly through the internet, but we've also met in person a few times. People interested in speculative biology will know Mehmet's project to depict and describe life forms on his fictional planet Snaiad. If you do not know the project, please have a look at the current Snaiad website and the Wikipedia page. 

The interview was conducted as a written dialogue. To simplify reading, my text is shown in italics with Mehmet's responses in normal type.   

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Mehmet, does the word 'Snaiad' mean anything?  
   I wish I could give a profound answer, but I only came up with this name because it sounded interesting. The name ’Snaiad’ derives from an earlier childhood sketch where I drew animals from a planet called Snai-3. When I decided to compile Snaiad into a project I adopted this name because I wanted something that would be unique in web searches.

I wish I would have thought of that; I came up with 'Furaha' after I had visited East Africa. At the time, the word 'Furaha' was very rare on the internet, but of course the word in its original Swahili meaning is much more present now. What draws you to speculative biology art rather then, say, wildlife art or palaeoart?
   Wildlife art or dinosaur art always creates a subtle sense of anxiety in me, because in those forms of art, the aim is to be accurate and realistic. Anyone who has tried to paint a living organism will quickly learn that it is very easy to make mistakes, and the 'uncanny valley' is very easy to fall into. In contrast, speculative evolution is a fun and carefree domain of art. If you make any mistakes, they can quickly be turned into features and you can actually create new concepts from such mistakes. I think the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor said it best when he said: 'How enjoyable, how very enjoyable and luxurious it is, suddenly to emerge from the stern labyrinth of fact onto these dawn-lit uplands of surmise!'

I see; I agree that painting animals on other planets allows you more freedom than, say, painting elephants. But you have done palaeoart; in 'All yesterdays', Darren Naish, John Conway and you elevated creative ideas about dinosaurs to a new and more fun view of palaeoart. But at the same time palaeoart seems to become more rigid in that there is a strong emphasis on correct anatomical proportions, so in that sense palaeoart is not 'carefree'.
   True - even when you are freestyling in palaeoart, there is a nagging sense in the back of your mind that you are making a mistake somewhere.

How do the shapes of Snaiadi lifeforms come into being? Do they start with doodles that look interesting, or are they based on biological characteristics and principles? Or, as I expect, a hybrid procedure?
   Usually I have brought outlines of body plans and clades in my head. I just think about one and start doodling randomly. I produce small doodles usually no bigger than a few centimetres in size. If I like any of these doodles, I enlarge them by scanning and printing them and create a second magnified sketch based on the first. This goes on that way for two more iterations until I have the base layout for a complete organism ready. And then I sit down and draw, draw, draw. This said, there have been times when I have just sat down with a blank piece of paper and created a completely new creature out of nothing -no sketches, no studies-, just the finished creature flowing out of my pen onto the paper. This is a rare phenomenon, but when it happens, it is always wonderful. Actually, some of the most memorable Snaiad creatures have been created this way.

Can you give us an example of one such creature?
   Actually, the first few iconic Snaiad creatures came into being with this spontaneous process. Especially Kahydron and the Allotaur were spontaneous creations. Maybe a greater creative urge guided my hand there because they formed the basis of many creatures which followed.

How much of the physical background of Snaiad have you worked out? Is it a generally Earth-like world in terms of gravity, composition and biochemistry?
   Unfortunately, I am not well enough versed in physics, chemistry and interplanetary mechanics to work out Snaiad’s exact details. So I am conservative and keep the planet as a roughly Earth-like, slightly larger world with a different arrangement of hydrocarbon protein analogues. Some of the more erudite fans of the project have pitched in with their ideas about Snaiad’s planetary dynamics and biochemistry, and in due time I might canonise their versions of how things work.

I agree; in fact, Furaha was consciously designed as an Earth-like planet for artistic reasons, as I wrote recently; no-one knows what a methane lake looks like from a viewpoint on its shores, but everyone immediately recognises all visual effects of water. 
   I think both of us primarily focused on the creatures so we don’t 'look under the hood' of the planet so much :)

Indeed; I do like to look 'under the hood' of Furahan organisms as far as their biomechanics are concerned, but I am much less bothered by their biochemistry, the atmosphere etc. 
    Most Speculative Biology worlds choose not to present many pages of insectoids or small plants, which is understandable. But a wider view might be interesting. Will you be showing examples of plants or the plant / animals in-betweens that live on Snaiad?
   Actually, yes, there will be many pages of boring animals, small insect-like things and other creatures that live in the undergrowth. This is one of the neater things about nature. For every charismatic species, there are many 'boring' drab animals and commonplace related species that are hard to tell apart. For examples, if you look at a field guide to mammals of any region, you will see page after page of rodents and bats. The most unassuming animals are usually the most diverse. On Snaiad, there will be many small creatures that fill the niches of insects and other invertebrates and I am having a great time drawing them all, no matter how boring and insignificant.

Great! I love that idea. On your website you describe main groups of vertebrate analogues, but there do not seem to be invertebrates on that page yet. Does that mean the eventual book will contain different clades of invertebrates, each with a completely different Bauplan? If so, can you tell us anything about these completely new animal clades? By the same token, how about plant- or fungus-like clades? Do you already have a store of drawings of such life forms?     
   Yes, there will be many pictures of different clades from these additional phyla - especially a lot from the fish-like Arthrognaths. In some cases there will be wildly different body plans within a single phylum. Here are some sneak previews - stay tuned for more. There will also be lots of drawings of plants - good thing they are easier to draw and invent.

Click to enlarge; copyright CM Kösemen: "I am also working on illustrations of human colonists and non-diagrammatic, environmental scenes - stay tuned!"

I am curious to see what you will come up with! Why did you decide to have people on Snaiad? Are they there to provide observers of the animals, or do they have their own stories?
   I think people need a frame of reference to understand natural history. I want the Snaiad project to 'stand up on its two feet' like an actual book of natural history written on another planet. Thus I needed to have a human society to research and make sense of the animals on that world. 
    Of course, with our current understanding of the universe, travel to another planet and colonising it is flat-out impossible. But I have written a creative caveat around that and I think you will all be surprised when you read it. The presence of a human society interacting with the creatures on Snaiad also allows me to write many interesting stories about animals which I think will be very interesting to readers.

Once again, I followed the exact same reasoning for Furaha. In fact, my very first blog post about Furaha discussed why I decided to have humans on the planet in the first place. 
   On the Snaiad site, you speak of 'vertebrates' between quotation marks. The animals are of course not Earth vertebrates, but they have vertebrae. 
   Yes, they have backbones that resemble vertebrae as a result of convergent evolution. Differently from earth, Snaiad’s vertebrates have bones made out of hydrocarbons rather than calcium. In that respect, they are more like wood than bones.

That is interesting! You may find statements that bone is 'generally' stronger than wood, but 'generally' may not be useful in this context. Some Earth woods resemble cortical bone while others resemble more porous bone. Suppose Snaiadi 'woodbone' is as strong as vertebrate bone for the same volume. If it is like oak wood, it would weigh roughly 65% of the same volume of bone. Are Snaiadi vertebrates significantly lighter than their Earth analogues? I ask because I cannot help myself thinking about the mechanical consequences: swimming animals may need heavy 'swim weights', not light swim bladders! Likewise, flight may evolve much more readily. The ramifications are fascinating. 
   I think the density of bones is as variable as the density of bones or wood on our own planet. Now that you mentioned this, I will need to work around some solutions for how to derive bones that sink from this hydrocarbon-based tissue. The key visual I had while designing this concept was the possibility of bones that could burn and would fossilise harder.

I hadn't though of burning or fossilisation... Mind you, the relative mass of a skeleton typically increases with body size, so the weight gain would be most pronounced for very large animals. That would allow you to make them larger than their Earth analogues. Big flying animals might be much more feasible than on Earth. Snaiadi 'avians' might look down on Azhdarchids, for instance.
    Most animals you show are drawn as side or front views. I would really love to see the animals in perspective view doing something in their natural surroundings. Will there be something like that in the book?
   There will be some drawings of natural scenes and more indirect perspectives, but I just like the diagrammatic representation so much. So most of the creatures will be rendered in that style.

You do that exceptionally well, so the book will be the better for it. But please do some landscapes... 
   Alright, there will be some landscapes. Perhaps I could commission another artist to do them, giving them the schematics of my side-view drawings.

Will the Snaiad book be published by a regular book publisher, or are you going to publish it yourself, through Amazon or something similar? Can you give us an approximate publication date?
   Publishing is a very tumultuous world at the moment, so there is no guarantee on how Snaiad will be published. In the worst case, I will publish it through Amazon self publishing, but of course I would be honoured if a respectable publisher picked it up. If anyone picks up an interest for Snaiad through this interview, please let me know. At the moment I cannot give you a precise publication date, but I can assure you that almost every day new creatures and classes are being produced for Snaiad. I want to create a magnum opus, a work that generations can enjoy so I am taking my time and looking in for the long run. Thanks to everybody for their patience.

Teşekkürler! (Thank you!) 

Esas ben teşekkür ederim, iyi günler! (The pleasure is mine – have a lovely day!)

 

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Mehmet sent me a very large number of images, which is wonderful. However, I ran intro trouble putting all of them in one post, so what you see is just a first batch; the remainder is to follow shortly!

Copyright CM Kösemen: "The new illustration for Moai mapagalithops - the famous terrestrial “blumbomen” of the Mapag Isles.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright CM Kösemen: "One of the refurbished, herbivorous Allotaurs."

 

 

Copyright CM Kösemen: "Illustration of a 'pitcher serpent' - one of the many new snake-like lineages."

 

Copyright CM Kösemen: "A novel relative of kahydrons and pescidons."

 

Copyright CM Kösemen: "A fast-swimming mullojiform with a flattened, fish-like body-plan. One of the many different clades of 'fish' on Snaiad."

Copyright CM Kösemen: "Another mullojiform - a terrestrial, tree-climbing species with no exact comparable analogue on Earth."

The Book is announced!

The Book is announced! 

Yes, I do mean my long-awaited book about Furahan wildlife; for me, this is not just a book, but 'The Book'. 

Before anyone becomes overexcited, let me start by saying that it is not available yet; you will probably have to wait until November to get your copy! 

The publishing process is advancing nicely and has now reached the stage where The Book is announced to booksellers. This means you can search for it on booksellers' websites, but it will not be mentioned in every country yet. Because Crowood Press, the publisher, is in the UK, UK sellers and sites are first to mention it. I recommend 'speculative biology furaha' as a search term to find it quickly. 

Mind you, the official price has not been settled yet, in spite of you may see! 

Here are the cover and accompanying text, with thanks to Dougal for the praise! 

 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

"On the planet Furaha, Gert van Dijk creates a biosphere on a new world along with its solar system. Evolution on Furaha found solutions to life’s problems that remained unused on Earth. There are in-depth accounts of habitats where marshland mixotrophs use bioluminescence to catch animals, where four-sided radial cloakfishes swim in tropical waters and where tetrapters flitter through the air, using radial flight. With over 180 stunning illustrations, this is a book that all fans of science fiction, biology and science will enjoy, and that will inspire artists to think beyond the limitations of our own planet. 

 'Major works on speculative biology are rare but Furaha is a welcome addition to the genre and gives a well-considered account of life on another planet, along with stunning illustrations. This is a must-read book, which I heartily recommend.’ ~ Dougal Dixon The father of speculative zoology"