The ‘spietskip’ is mentioned in the Furaha book; the book contains a short section about the prehistory of the Furaha project, showing old paintings. The word ‘spietskip’ is a made-up Dutch word (the Dutch language allows everyone to make new words by stringing together existing ones). ’Spiets’ means to skewer or impale, and ‘kip’ means ‘chicken’: a ‘spietskip’ is therefore literally a ‘skewer chicken’, although ‘impaler poultry’ sounds more dramatic.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
The painting shown above is really old. Over time the animal, with it bird-like plumage and overly reptilian head, fitted less and less within the evolving hexapod scheme. One solution in such cases was extermination, and the other was a redesign. The idea behind the spietskip appealed to me: a small carnivore, hunting from a hiding place among reeds, and catching prey with front legs that are fishing spears. I also thought at the time that The Book needed more scalates. There is ample room for adaptive radiation within every scalate group. Carnivores definitely needed more radiation, to show their range from mouse-sized squigglers to slow massive carrion eaters specialising on dead rusps.
So I had wondered whether redesigning the spietskip might work. An animal clinging to reeds need to have legs with a large movement range, and feet that can grab a reed from about any angle. That should not pose to much of a problem for the general scalate design.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
Here is a simple Zbrush sculpt showing a spietskip following the scalate redesign, including the distal and proximal neck with the neurocranium in between. I now think it is too bulky. It is often difficult to get a good idea of the mass of small mammals and birds, because their fur and feathers make them look much bulkier than they really are. If you see a wet cat, you can see how little mass it really has. Let’s just pretend that the Zbrush sculpt already includes its covering. As you can see, the limbs are very simple; that is because such sculpts were only made to help with perspective and composition, and details can simply be drawn later.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
After importing the body into Vue, I played with limb positions, here simple cylinders, and the overall viewing angle, which was similar to that of the original painting.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
I could easily have take this image as a rough background and could have started drawing over it, before finally sitting down to paint.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
However, sometimes drawing without any such 3D aids resulted in livelier images, perhaps at the cost of some perspective mistakes. That’s why I also did a very quick sketch right over the adapted old oil painting. This sketch could also have been the starting place for a new drawing and painting.
But around that time I realised that I could keep on designing new radiations forever, and that there already enough material for a book already. And that is why the evolution of the spietskip stopped.
Perhaps I will pick it up again, some day. But first, I am preparing for DinoCon, where I will be selling The Book, images and some other stuff. There are also posts to write on the ever-intriguing theme of how many legs animals should have in speculative biology projects, and on colour changing.
And for people in the USA, don’t forget that The Book will finally be sold directly in the USA through Simon and Schuster, starting on 28 July, 2026.
Have fun at DinoCon and keep safe.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that, with most scalates having low levels of flexibility when it comes to bending their bodies sideways, any turning would require the Skewering Poult(ry) to have ankles like that of snow leopards: able to rotate to a vast degree. {I'd started to write "have wrists and ankles"...but stabbers don't need lots of rotational ability in the wrist, do they?}
Regardless of the answer to those, I see only great work in what you've posted. Kudos!
If this is not enough check out my playlist “stick it to the man” for more artists.
ReplyDeletei have been trying to make a post for months but it keeps getting an error, so i will see if this post works for me lol.
i have actually often wondered if making a simple model is a good idea and i think i will try it next time i have something to make.
i would like to say the colour changing blogs are fascinating to read, and i will hope you will continue with them when you have the opportunity.
i had an intresting idea for plants not long ago that i would sugest for a blog if the idea takes your fancy (tho please only write what you want,) i thought that radially semetrical mobial animals are almost a specbio trope by now, why not bilatral plants?
keep up the good work, tofer
Anonymous 1: I also felt that legs need to have many degrees of freedom if the feet are to grab a blade of grass or a twig running in a random direction. I thought that the two joints with the most degrees of freedom should be the joint linking the leg to the body, and the wrist joint. Some larger insects grab twigs and blades of grass all around them, so their legs face much the same problems as those of the spietskip. Unfortunately, I have found not much about how insect feet keep attached to the substrate when the corresponding hip joint moves over large distances and angles.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 2: I think we lost part of your message; where is the playlist you refer to? Anyway, I think that the general idea to explain that animals mostly have symmetry and plants do not is that animal organs are generally produced all together in a very complicated scheme and that symmetry makes movement easier. As Furaha is full of radially symmetrical animals, I do not think that bilateral symmetry is vastly superior to radial symmetry (lacking solid arguments either way). I think that animal symmetry (radial or bilateral) offers a locomotor advantage, based ob the idea that animals may be asymmetrical on the inside but not on the outside. Earth plants don't move in that way, and can add organs (flowers, leaves, roots, nuts, etc.) when and where these organs are needed; symmetry may offer little or no advantage. What would happen if plants were bilaterally symmetrical? Instead of one flower you always get two; growth would be symmetrical too, even if one side of a plant received more light than the other one. Would that be a handicap or would it matter hardly or not at all? Intriguing question...
I had the same sending problem with a youtube comment, i first tryed to post the comment from my pc then my phone, same with this post, i used the same google doc to copy and paste from my apologies for the cliped part of the comment mentioning playlists lol.
DeleteThanks for the responce have a good day
Anon1 here; sorry, i could've sworn I'd switched my computer back over to Google ID or at least to Name|URL
ReplyDeleteI may be misreading (always a possibility), but I do not suspect that Anon2 was saying one symmetry is superior to another...only that radial symmetry is a trope in Spec Bio. (me: and? so? therefore?) :D