Book Review: Fundamentals of Creature Design

This is not the first book review in this blog (there were at least nine previous ones) and it is also not the first post about creature design. You could say that speculative evolution, the focus of this blog inasmuch it has one, is mostly about creature design, so is there in fact much difference between the two? 

Click to enlarge; copyright 'individual artists'

The book ‘Fundamentals of creature design’ starts with a section 'How to use this book', stating that the book is aimed at those who wish 'to create believable fictional beasts'. Again, that should include those interested in speculative evolution. Still, reading this book made me think that there are differences between the worlds of speculative evolution and creature design. 

But first, the book itself. It has a soft cover and has no less than 286 pages. It is published by 3dtotalpublishing, a company I think consistently combines high production standards with high quality illustrations. The cover mentions four artists whose work is included, but the work of many more is included, whose work is also good to excellent. The book is divided into 7 chapters: research and imagination, functionality and adaptations, anatomy, general design principles, creature design in the industry, design processes and a gallery. 

Click to enlarge; copyright Alex Ries

The chapter on research and imagination is written by Alex Ries, whose work on the Birrin should be well-known. If not, have a look here. The Birrin-project is a long-standing one; I wrote about his work in this blog back in 2009. In the present book, Alex Ries makes the excellent point that nature on Earth provides an endless array of examples that help inspire new creations. He is not the only author in this volume making that point, but I would say that he does something else with it than the others do. He extrapolates, as do the others, but he departs much farther from Earth life than the other authors. In doing so he succeeds in designing alien lifeforms. He alters the Bauplan of his creatures so they are not at all close to that of Earth reptiles, mammals or other vertebrates. The four-jawed and four-eyed heads shown above are a good example of that. (In fact, Furahan hexapods and the Birrin were given a similar head arrangement by coincidence -although the four hexapod jaws evolved from an original six jaws.) Most of the others artists stayed closer to Earth schemes, so their creatures are largely alternate mammals or reptiles rather than alien species. 

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

The next chapter, on form and adaptability, is by Brynn Metheney, whose work has also appeared previously on this blog, in 2011 this time. She makes the point that form should follow function, asking where animals live, what they eat and whether they are male or female. I like her flowing lines and sense of shape as much as I did in 2011. There is an occasional animal with six limbs in here (see above), but most are regular tetrapods, whose legs in particular could easily belong to some real Earth animals: successive segments bend forwards and backwards in the ‘zigzag’ pattern of mammalian legs. Also front and hind legs are easily recognisable as such. 

I do not think think there is an animal with a truly alien leg design in this book; see the last post on zigzag legs here. Admittedly, I am still struggling with the finalisation of just that aspect of Furahan hexapods, and have been doing so for quite some time. And if you do manage to draw unearthly legs, the animal will tend to look ‘wrong’ (but alien). 

This pattern of sticking close to the design of Earth animals is a common theme in the rest of the book. The chapter on anatomy, by Dominique Vassie, makes that point expressly, containing muscle sketches of groups such as primates, dogs, cats, horses, whales, but also myriapods and insects. There was something here that surprised me, and that was advice on how to blend anatomies of different animal groups. I had noticed that tendency in creature design before (see here and here). I was surprised then and now about that, because biological evolution simply cannot mix birds with mammals, for instance, to produce new species. Of course, there is convergent evolution, and that results in similar solutions to similar problems; but evolution does not stitch the front end of a badger to the hind end of a boar, as was done here. Or does that simply mean that creature design is not all that committed to biological evolution? 

The chapter on general design principles focuses on the artistic side of matters, and that is welcome, although one chapter cannot obviously do justice to all the various artistic styles. The chapter gives advice on matters such as a sense of scale and the use of detail at some parts of a painting but not others. The points made here are all valid. Overall, the design principles are not so much aimed at producing the most biologically plausible animal, but more at evoking associations in the humans watching the images. Soft and round shapes help evoke cuddliness, and sharp jagged edges give a more aggressive appearance. There may be a biological truth in that, in that animals with lots of teeth and claws are probably more dangerous than those without. But in biology such messages can be tricky: a cat, or tiger, for that matter, may look all soft and fuzzy at rest, but when it gets angry even a house cat suddenly has more teeth and claws than you thought possible. Such deceiving appearances are absent here: if an animal is to look dangerous, you can tell. Mind you, I have also altered the shape of some Furahan animals to convey a message to human observers. 

This is where my review becomes a bit critical, but please realise that the observations that follow only hold from my peculiar point of view. I am a scientist who happens to be able to draw a bit, and what I like to see are biologically plausible organisms, with a form that makes biomechanical, evolutionary and ecological sense. If the speculation takes place on another planet, the results can indeed resemble Earth life because of convergent evolution, but it is unlikely that the resulting animals could ever be mistaken for Earth mammals or birds. The discussions on the speculative evolution forum, and the often very knowledgeable and insightful comments on this blog, show that people engaged with speculative evolution usually take their biology and plausibility very seriously.

 

Click to enlarge; copyright Dominique Vassie

Click to enlarge; copyright Edin Durmisevic

That may be the heart of the matter: if speculative evolution is like ‘hard’ Science Fiction, then most creature design is like Fantasy, where the laws of nature take a back seat. There is no hard border between the two realms. The inclusion of the Birrin in fact shows that the two worlds fit well together. Mind you, the Fantasy element is much the stronger one in this book. That Fantasy focus explains why the book contains creatures such as a a giant insect-like beast that can carry humans, although its legs are biomechanically unlikely to allow it to stand, or a human-bear hybrid in the form of a were-bear. Both are biologically implausible, but in a fantasy setting, that's fine.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brian Valeza (I could not scan a part of the image at the left; sorry for that)

Click to enlarge; copyright Kristina Lexova

The book is filled with brilliant images such as the ones above, and I enjoyed it immensely. The above examples are random examples. It does exactly what it set out to do. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone interested in designing animals for a Fantasy setting. I also recommend it to those who wish to draw better life forms in a Speculative Evolution context, but just remember that it is not primarily a guide on how to design life forms with a systematically different Bauplan and evolution. That would require a different book, one that may not exist yet. I wonder if there would be a market for such a book...

Evolving another aggie

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

What you see here is a sketch of the 'aggie', the favourite prey of the marblebill. The pages detailing the marblebill in The Book have this to say regarding the aggie:

"The marblebill’s favourite prey is the ‘Aggie’ (Agitator augur), a tree-dwelling fructivore. Once caught, the victim’s feeble attempts at defence have little chance of success against the marblebill’s armoured chest and abdomen. There is little time for resistance anyway, as marblebills usually disarm their victims quickly by snapping its cervical medullae."  

 "A troop of Aggies, admittedly not the brightest of beasts, may suddenly see a branch swaying and a baignac falling. Only when they hear the marblebill’s triumphant howl does it dawn upon them that one of their comrades had just now been sitting on that branch and been munching that baignac."

That's all that is known in the entire universe regarding the aggie. I have started sketching them several times, but was never too happy with the result. The sketch you see here is not the definitive aggie either. This particular one is a brachiator, just like the marblebill. The degree of adaptation of the marblebill to its arboreal brachiating life style suggests that its environment has been around for quite a while. If so, other species could be equally well adapted to an arboreal way of life. That does not necessarily imply brachiation (see here and here); the animal could be a jumper, a climber, or even a glider. But this one is a hexapod brachiator.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

In previous versions I toyed with the idea of using the second pair of legs as the main. In fact, here is an old very quick and dirty sketch showing that approach (Brynn Metheny also did one once, the 'pygmy esorifleu', which I discussed previously). In the 'Mark I' the body is suspended from the middle limbs, and the front and aft ends hang down. It must have evolved from basic hexapod stock, and it is hard to imagine an ancestral species with six more or less equally-sized legs preferring to grasp branches with its second rather than its first pair of limbs. You can see the 'Mark II' next to it. That sketch was ancestral to the marblebill's design, and they still swing from their front limbs.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Still, there may be a way to evolve a brachiator with 'middle limb suspension'; take a typical Furahan neocarnivore, one of those animals exhibiting centaurism. As you may remember their first pair of legs are not used for locomotion but to catch prey. If such an animal started climbing trees, it might keep its weapons intact, and adapt its second and third pair of legs for locomotion among the branches. Its offspring could become either become jumpers of climbers, using four more or less equal limbs, but they could also turn into brachiators. If so, they would swing from their middle limbs and use their front legs as weapons. In my mind, I  see the hexapod evolutionary tree sprouting a new branch even while I am writing this...
Then again, a neocarnivore taking to the trees might use its spears or clubs to hook a branch. Being at the front of the body they are well placed to do so. If these limbs then become brachiating arms they would resume a locomotor function again; I see another evolutionary branch exploding into view with an almost audible 'whoomph'. By the way, that latter branch is also the first official example of 'decentaurism', or the reversal of nonlocomotor limb use to a secondary locomotor purpose.

Anyway, back to the aggie. Have a look at some of its features.

• It sits upright, which may make sense for a brachiator: its body is held vertical while brachiating, and it might easily keep doing so at rest.
• Its limbs are attached to the body with joints that allow three axes of rotation. The brachiating arms are attached to the body through a short bone that ends at the 'shoulder'. Unlike Earth primates, the shoulder girdle is attached through bones to the axial body skeleton rather than through muscles only, but the animal still needs thick muscles to control the position of the body with regard to the arm. The unfortunate result is that the attachment looks much like a primate shoulder girdle; parallel evolution or a limit of my imagination?
• You might just make out the ancestral hexapod toe branching pattern (more about that here). 
• This particular aggie version has a pot belly. While sketching it I had forgotten about it being a fructivore with a preference for baignacs (remind me to show you a baignac one of these days). Fruits usually offer high quality food, so animals does not need many of them. While sketching I had low-grade food in mind, say fibrous leaves, and such food requires a lot of processing and a sizable gut. Specialising on low-grade food has the advantage that there will not be much competition, but the end point might be a slow animal that is not at all energetic: something like an Earth sloth. While sloths are preyed upon by harpy eagles, the dense parts of the forests are probably closed to eagles. But introduce the marblebill, and anything as slow as a sloth has a problem. So, the aggie cannot be too slow. It should probably lose its potbelly and resume a high-energy fruit diet. Of course, it should perhaps be better able to defend itself, or use its social skills, or perhaps...

...never mind; thinking about the aggie has once more led to interesting predators rather than their prey. One of these days I will design the definitive aggie; this is not yet it.

Between the Morae River and the Red Valley

I discussed Brynn Metheny's 'Morae River' project once before in this blog. The project dealt with life forms in a certain geographical area called 'Solturna'. The animals there at first glance looked like Earth's mammals, reptiles, or fish, so you might think that the Morae valley might be somewhere on Earth. But a closer look revealed small but telling differences in anatomy, so you might think that the creatures perhaps stemmed from a not too alternate time-line and were mammaloid, reptiloid and ichthyoid. But a few animals departed so much from regular Earth stock to make you think that they required an extremely early divergence or an unearthly origin. Brynn gave no clue as how to place her creations, and preferred a fluid interpretation. Earlier this year she unfortunately decided to stop working on the Morae River. But that should those who never visited the site from doing so, as it is a great project even if it is no longer updated.

Luckily she did not stop producing odd animals. Far from it! I gather that she is making 'creature design' her career, which hopefully means that there is much more to come. There are several places where you can admire her work: she has a site on Deviant Art where she goes under the name of LenoreKitty. She has a site under her own name, brynnart.com, as well as one going by the name of Fishhook studio. I selected a few paintings for you to see here, and expect that they will make you hungry for more.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

The pygmy esorifleu
As you can see, this is an arboreal creature with a strong bill, like a parrot's, and six limbs. The middle pair are placed at the top of the animal and are directed upwards, whereas the front and aft pairs are directed downward. There is also a tail, which looks like it is prehensile. This animal can only be a brachiating carnivore. It looks somewhat like my marblebill, to be found on the Furaha site but also in this blog (here and here). A fairly large design difference is that the esorifleu using its middle pair of limbs to swing from, whereas I chose the front pair. Brynn wrote me that the pygmy was designed for a creature design contest. I think the marblebill and the esorifleu are nice examples of convergent speculation.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

Elegant hunters
And indeed they are. Mind you, the prey look rather dashing as well. The beaks of the hunters remind me of the mouth of a deinichthys. At first glance their body design seems to say 'bony fish from Earth', with its vertical tail, fin rays, gills and dorsal fin. But then you notice that instead of one pair of pectoral fins there are two, giving a jolt to the idea of what exactly they are. What I do not know is whether you have to know that two pairs of pectoral fins are impossible for that jolt to occur. Anyway, four gill slits is an unusual number as well.
I would like to see more of their prey, whose 'Bauplan' seems much more unearthly. I like the bumps on the front of the flippers. Not many swimming animals have those, but humpback whales have very knobbly leading edges on their enormous flippers, and in their case the turbulence they cause actually seems to help. Is that the end of a siphon I see on their sides? Are those expiratory outlets?

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

'Mamma'
No classification problems here: that's a perissodactyl unguloid, or a hoofed animal with an odd number of toes. But are those concentric structures external ears? Perhaps the animal is not Terran after all...
What I like a great deal about this one is how the animals are not simply shown in side view, but are much more three-dimensional. The calf's head cannot be seen, and the mother's head is turned away a bit as well. This is where the trained artist shows herself, I think.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

A work in progress
Lacking a name, let's call it a 'wip'. If I see correctly there is just one pair of eyes, and the other markings on its head are nostrils and ears. Even so, this animal is more alien than the previous one, with the sail on its neck and particularly the spikes at the base of its tail. Now what are these doing there? They are not placed well for attack or defence, so perhaps they are for display purposes, and display to members of the same species always boils down to sex. Do the spikes serve to impress other wips, or do they provide tactile stimulation during procreation? I had better reign in my imagination here...
It's a beauty though.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

Another work in progress
If it is, we might as well label it a 'wiptoo'. It is interesting how this head and neck study immediately evokes the notion that we are looking at a very large animal. One reason must be the relatively thick neck. Large animals need proportionately thicker limbs, and that goes for necks too (see here and here for the reasons). Apparently we are so used to seeing the results of these laws of nature that we immediately draw conclusions from seeing their results. Alternatively, of course, this could be a moderately sized animal from a heavy-gravity world, but I do not think so: its eyes are also small in relation to its body. They seem to be camera eys such as vertebrates have on Earth. While bigger animals generally have bigger eyes, eye size does not increase directly with body size, so large animals have relatively small eyes. As with neck thickness, the observer takes these cues and judges the size of the animal, consciously or unconsciously.
Its skin glistens. You can tell from the linear nature of the reflections that its skin is smooth, and I wonder whether it is wet because it just emerged from a swamp or something similar or because the skin itself is wet or oily. A large animal with a permanently wet skin would need a permanently moist and saturated environment. Perhaps it lives as brontosaurs were once thought to do: in humid steaming swamps.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

There are no animals on this painting, but the image contains a promise. The website of the Red Valley project is already up, but there's not much to see yet. We are promised that animals will appear there in the Fall, so hopefully Brynn won't keep us waiting too long. She wrote me that she is not going to reveal all about the planet: "I might know details about the whole of the planet and such but as far as my viewers are concerned, I'd like it to just be about this valley." I agree with that sentiment: always leave the viewer or the audience hungry for a bit more, and a hint that there is in fact more does wonders to whet the appetite. She added: "I want the flora and fauna to feel alien enough but I want viewers to relate to them as well."
From what Brynn has done in the past, I think she will succeed. The text on the Red River site also states: "No regions, no classification, just this place as it is." Oh very well, I get the message: I should stop trying to classify these animals to see where they belong and what makes them work.

Hmmm; as if I could...

the river Morae

While many people draw or paint an odd animal every once in a while, there aren't that many who go so far as to design biotopes or ecologies to go with them. And let's face it, not everyone is fortunate enough to have the skills to turn their ideas into attractive and biologically convincing depictions of fictional animals. It is therefore not that surprising that the number of 'grand scale' speculative biology projects is rather small. Most regular readers of this blog will probably be able to rattle off a short list of such projects, and my call for new ones some time ago added some, but not many (I still need to update the links page on the Furaha site, by the way).

So imagine my surprise and delight when Josh, a regular commenter, alerted me to a new project: the Morae River by Brynn Metheney. Browsing through the Morae River website revealed that the site came into being about half a year ago, so it is fairly new. What is it about? Well, one of the first pages shows a map of a large geographical region around the river Morae. The area covered is 300,000 square miles. After conversion to a more sensible length measure this conforms to an area of about 770,000 square kilometers. The closest match for countries I could find was Turkey. That is a big playing ground. This shouldn't pose too many limitations to the designer's creativity, as there are mountains, plains, hills, swamps, an estuary and a sea. I did not immediately spot a desert though, but there might be one. The site discusses animals, plants and biotopes. Let me show a few examples. There are more on her site, so be certain to visit it.

Click to enlarge © Brynn Metheney

The first animal I will show here is a recent addition to the site: the 'Sabulo'. It is described as a fish. Take a good look: that does not look like a contemporary Earth fish, does it? Its body plan is neither that of a teleost fish nor that of a cartilaginous fish. And it also doesn't look like any of the various extinct classes of 'fish' on Earth. I see no gill slits and no clear gill covers, and there are three pairs of paired fins, looking suspiciously like redesigned legs. Are we not on Earth? By the way, I have no objections at all to using the word 'fish' in a loose sense. On Furaha there are six classes of 'Fish', all of which have proper names such as 'Clavifluitati', which probably explains why they are usually labelled 'Fishes I' to 'Fishes VI' instead. The English language is biologically extraordinarily careless with the word 'fish' anyway: apart from animals such as salmon, there are crayfish, cuttlefish, starfish and shellfish. This motley collection makes you think that the word 'fish' originally may only have meant 'edible water animal'.

Click to enlarge © Brynn Metheney

Here's another fine drawing: a blue-throated hulompolus. I love the contrast between the gaudy dewlaps and the otherwise relatively boring dull gray exterior. The 'BTH' is a reptile according to the text; it lays eggs, but a reptile with external ears? Its hearing is said to be good, so it having ears is no mistake. Obviously, we are not in Kansas anymore. So where actually is the river Morae? Is this alternate evolution on Earth, or are we somewhere else entirely?

Click to enlarge © Brynn Metheney

A quick glance at the two animals shown here betrays how they get their calorie intake: these animals kill for a living. They are red-tailed mardiks. The scars on the nearest animal, with its one blinded eye, are a brilliant idea. I think that this is the first time that I have ever seen a recognisable individual of an imaginary species instead of just the general one. I wouldn't be surprised if people pick up on this notion and start adding things such as nicks to ears and broken teeth to their creations from now on. The mardik looks like a mammal and might be one; the spines and the apparent bony scutes on its neck could be explained away while still keeping it an Earth mammal, but then again, it might just be called a 'mammal' as shorthand for its general form. An other word might be used, such as 'mammaloid', but that sounds pretty horrible. 'Mammalian' could do; I once came up with 'mammalien' as a pun to use for a similar purpose. Anyway, none of this solves the riddle of where and when to situate the river Morae any smaller; quite the contrary.

The author prefers to keep us in the dark regarding how all of this fits together. I do not think this makes a big difference. After all, one of the tricks of a good science fiction novel is that it should leave you wanting to know more about the world you've just read about. Speculative biology is no different. A certain way to spoil that thirst for more is to write lengthy essays explaining absolutely everything about how a particular world works. That gets boring quickly. The river Morae doesn't do that at all. In fact, it is at the opposite point where I think I haven't seen enough, so I want more! Luckily, there are remarks in the text suggesting that there more is to come. Good! You can already order a book, published by using one of these novel 'lay out your own book and we print it' firms. It looks attractive, and I will certainly order one, right after posting this blog entry.