The Devonian feet of the Furahan marblebill

I really should stop having fun with incomprehensible blog titles. Anyway, too much work again left me no time to write a solid scientific essay. So I will just relate the story of where the 'branching toe theme' originated. The previous post was about redesigning the marblebill, and Spugpow had observed a novel branching pattern of the marblebill's toes.

Click to enlarge.
From: Gould SJ, Ed. The book of Life. Ebury Hutchinson London 1993.

To see where that came from, we have to go back, either to the Devonian or, more appropriately, to books on palaeontology up to about 10 years ago. The image above is from such a book, still available from Amazon in the UK and in the USA. No doubt you have seen similar images before, illustrating how Earth's tetrapod legs evolved from the fins of fish. In the middle right, you will see such a prototypical tetrapod leg: one bone in the upper limb, two parallel bones in the lower limb (the radius and the ulna), a bunch of small bones as a sort of shock absorbers, and five (well, seven) parallel digits with several bones in series. That is basically our arm or our leg. The middle image on the left shows the bones in the ancestral fish limb. Do you see the resemblance? If you do, good for you. I never did, as to me the branching patterns seemed completely different. In effect, the two boned destined to become the radius and ulna may start parallel where they touch the upper limb bone, but their lengths are quite different, and while there are no other bones connected to the radius, some do connect to the ulna. In fact, if you start at the upper arm, there is just one other bone at the front of the limb before you reach the 'lepidotrichia' (the stiffening rods in the fin), but there are three at the hind end of the fin.

Click to enlarge.
Sébastien Steyer. La Terre avant les dinosaures. Copyright Belin 2009

This branching pattern was never explained in such books. In a newer book by Sébastien Steyer, (who by the way is not just a palaeontologist but one of the driving forces behind the future book on future animals I discussed here earlier) you will find the images above. Mind you, besides the French and Dutch versions it is also available in English. The left part shows the fin/limb skeleton of Ichthyostega, and to the right Sébastien has shown a series of limbs showing intermediate forms. Very well, I believe the transition happened, but have never stopped wondering about the branching patterns.

Click to enlarge. Copyright Gert van Dijk

So here are some old sketches. The one on the left in the middle row is more or less our current branching pattern: all fingers have equal numbers of segments (phalanges) and in the middle one of that row I experimented with different patterns: you could first split a limb into two parts and have these two each split into two more, etc. That would be equally 'consistent' in the sense that the number of steps from wrist to tip of a toe is the same. But in the right one on the middle row I played with another way of branching, in which some bones both give rise to a new bone and also continue downwards themselves. In the bottom row I developed the latter pattern some more, finally arriving at the right one, which looks like Ichthyostega's skeleton.

Click to enlarge. Copyright Gert van Dijk

And finally some sketches that show the design taken to extreme consequences. The left one is designed for a marshland creature that needs to spread its weight over a large surface. Mind you, I would never equip Furahan animals with legs that split that far up. I do not think that that makes much sense, as it will double the weight without appreciable advantages. Toes are good for many things: one good thing about them is that they extend stride length, and another is that they help spread weight, act as shock absorbers and help direct forces. Are more toes and longer toes therefore better than few short ones? Well, for these purposes, yes. But there is always a need to conserve mass and energy, so fewer and thinner bones have advantages too. As always, there is an optimum.
The foot on the right is suitable for a very heavy animal of a not too athletic build, rather like an elephant. Its toes are mostly there as shock absorbers and a means to transfer ground forces. They are good for standing and walking sedately. This particular design is not at all suited for athletic animals though, as the toes do not help extend stride length at all: they are much too short for that and hardly bend at all. If you want toes for an athletic animal, think of the feet of a chicken or a tyrannosaur. Well, now you known why I not like the feet of many of Barlowe's animals in 'Expedition' that much: he equipped active athletic animals with unsuitable elephantine feet.

But I digress. In the current Furahan redesign, I decided to build the anatomy of hexapod feet on a pattern that I thought I saw in the fin/feet of Devonian amphibians, that never seemed to be explained. So that is where the marblebill got its feet.

A marblebill in progress (also known as the becdacier)

No time this fortnight to write anything elaborate, unfortunately. Some posts take much more time than others. The ones that take most time are those that require checking the physical aspect of some matters, not just because finding sources and digesting the content takes time, but usually also because I then need to do some programming of my own or I have to make some specific illustrations. In short, the heavy science bits take a lot of time. Over the years I have written quite a few words on such subjects, and I started wondering whether I should perhaps bundle them, work them over, write some new chapters, and produce a book on the biomechanics of alien life. Something like 'Darwinian creativity in a Newtonian Universe'. The title is probably much too enigmatic for the book to sell, but perhaps it could be a subtitle. Mind you, it would be completely separate from the Furaha book. But would anyone buy it? Let me hear what you think.

Anyone, I have been working on an update of the marblebill. I showed you another such update once before, and the marblebill is on the Furaha website but featured previously on this blog as well. You may recognise some general update principles. The eyes on stalks are now less prominent, but certainly still occur in various species. There is also eye specialisation. The images below are taken from the sculpting program Sculptris, a free programme I recommend unreservedly.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The marblebill is an arboreal brachiating predator, and has two forward facing eyes to help it judge distances and fixate its prey. As is the case for dragonflies, the size of the ommatidia (the individual eyelets in a compound eye) depends on where you are in the eye: they are smaller in the part of the eye facing directly forward. This increases visual resolution at the price of sensitivity to light. The marblebill is a diurnal creature, which makes sense I think: you would need impossibly good vision to allow an animal to hurl itself from branch to branch at high speed at night.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

There is another pair of eyes, the 'oculi posteriores'. Note that these were not posteriorly placed in ancestral hexapods, whose four eyes were placed around the head. What became the anterior eyes were once the bottom ones, and the posterior ones are the former upper ones. Anyway, in the marblebill lineage the upper ones, alresdy in the posterior position, over time migrated outwards, providing an all around vision, not just in the horizontal but in the vertical plane as well. For an animal living in three dimensions this is more important than for a grazing animal. One result is that it would not be easy to sneak up on a marblebill. Not that there is any other predator up there in the trees that would perform such sneakish acts anyway: it would be too dangerous. The marblebill also does not need much vertical vision for its territorial disputes, as these involve no sneaking whatsoever, but are announced frighteningly loudly. But detecting prey is another matter, and for that these eyes are superb.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is the painting in progress. I used to work out perspective and draw everything completely without any aid except for the occasional ruler, but I now make use of what the digital age has to offer. So I exported the sculpted head into Vue infinite, made certain the lighting came from the correct direction, adjusted the perspective angle and produced two renders. Cut out the head, place them on a separate layer in Painter 12 (to be deleted later), and everything is in place to start painting. Now all I need is the time to do so...

Why sight is superior to echolocation

In the previous post some characteristics of echolocation were discussed, and the results were somewhat worrying as far as a comparison with vision is concerned: echolocation involves 'shouting to hear a whisper', meaning that its range is limited and the sender is loudly proclaiming its presence.

Optics of pinhole and lens eyes. Source here

In my opinion there are two other major difficulties with echolocation that favour vision. The first is the ability to locate objects: with eyes such as ours it is very easy to locate objects. Rays of light can be bent by lenses and can reflect from surfaces, but in between they follow nice straight lines. That is the reason why even a simple pinhole camera such as in the image above will produce a good image: any particular point on the retina can only be lit be rays coming from a direction specific to that point. Such a pinhole will not let much light in, and solving that by increasing the pupil will blur the image. If you put in a lens you can have a large pupil for lots of light with a sharp image. Problem solved. The point of all this is that seeing an object is almost the same as knowing where it is.

From: Animal Eyes (2nd Ed.), Oxford; copyright Land & Nilsson

Above you see an image of lineages of eye design, leading to pinhole eyes and eyes with lenses. Those who wish to read more about eye evolution should read the new edition of Land and Nilsson's 'Animal Eyes'. It also describes the very high number of eye designs (there are even eyes based on mirrors!). Another very nice book is Evolution's Witness, with hardly any physics but boasting numerous examples of wonderful eye designs.

From: Animal Eyes (2nd Ed.), Oxford; copyright Land & Nilsson

In 1994 Nilsson and Pelger calculated that a good camera eye with a retina and a lens could evolve from basic elements without any localizing ability in fewer than half a million generations. With one generation a year this amounts to a geological blink of an eye (sorry for that one), meaning just half a million years. Vision can apparently evolve so quickly and conveys such a large advantage that some say it explains the runaway evolution known as the Cambrian explosion. In a very short time things such as armour, speed and vision evolved. Giving animals an unobtrusive ability for precise long-range sensing may just have been the impetus to start this accelerated runaway evolution: claws, shells, teeth and brains co-evolved quickly. Perhaps vision was not the only factor jump-starting the process, but the idea is too powerful to ignore a role for vision altogether, I think. It is tempting to think that most planets with complex life would have their own 'Cambrian Explosion' in the early evolution of complex animals. Of course, the label 'Cambrian' would not apply on Furaha, Snaiad, Nereus, nor on real exoplanets. We need a more general name for the phenomenon; how about the 'Sight Spark'? (and if it sticks can I copyright it?).

Back to sound

Seeing how a pinhole eye is simple and works well, how about evolving a 'pinhole ear'? Suppose we place lots of microphones on the inside of a sphere and cut a hole in front of the sphere to let sound in. Wouldn't each microphone only pick up sound from the bit of the world it 'sees' through the opening? If so, we would have an ear with perfect localising ability. Alas, no. Sound does not travel in neat straight lines but travels around corners. You can hear people talking through an open door even when you cannot see them.

Sound 'bending' around a building. Source here.

How the size of an opening affects diffraction of sound. Source here.

When sound waves hit objects, those interfaces form new sound sources, a process called diffraction. In the misbegotten 'pinhole ear' idea, the 'pupil' would simply act as a new sound source, so all microphones on the 'retina' would receive sounds from all directions. As a location device this would be utterly useless.

The physical reason why sound bends around corners and light does is not that diffraction is limited to sound. But in fact diffraction affects light and hence vision too. The effects of diffraction depend on wave length, and the wave lengths of sound have a range of a few cm to 15 or more meters; those of light are measured in micrometers. The diffraction of light is seen at microscopic scales, but that of sound occurs at the scale we live in, that of doors and people.

So the physics of sound conspire against it providing an easy way to tell where a sound is coming from. Evolution solved that problem as it did others, but the solution requires combining the signals from two ears (I know that using two eyes improves distance detection, but you can do it with one eye, and locating the direction of an object needs just one eye). Tiny differences in arrival time of a sound at two ears allow a suitable brain to calculate the direction of the source of a sound in the plane of the ears, but not whether it is to the front or the back nor up or down. Finding out things like that call for ingenious trickery such as tilting heads or complexly shaped outer ears that subtly change the characteristics of a sound depending on where it is. Wikipedia has a nice article on the subject. Some animals (owls!) perfected the art of sound location, but theirs is a small niche compared to the ubiquity of good camera eyes.

Mind you, I have no idea why there are no animals with more than two ears. Having four, placed at the corners of a tetrahedron, would be nice. Then again, perhaps there are arthropods with more than two functional ears. I have never heard of any but have not looked either. Are there any?

An unfair advantage of sight over echolocation

I wrote above that I thought there were two more difficulties with echolocation. The second one is based on the fact that echolocating animals have to produce their own signal, limiting the range at which they can detect anything. How about vision? There was an omission in the discussion, and it is a glaring one: the sun! (sorry about that one too). Sunlight, free for all and there regardless of whether anything of anyone is using it, is what allows vision to work as a long range sense. Compared to echolocation this free gift to sight is not really fair.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

The images above were made for the previous post: the right one showed what echolocation might be like, with some energy coming from the 'camera', only illuminating objects close by. Compare that to the left image, a visual scene lit by the much more powerful sun.

But vision is not always available, and echolocation has a chance when there is no light. On rotating planets like ours, sunlight is only available for half the time, so the night would seem a good time for animals to start echolocating. But that is not the case; most animals prefer to more or less shut down at night. In previous discussions on when echolocation would be better than vision some dieas came up: caves, planets with permanent fog, planets without suns and seas underneath ice caps. One region seemed to have been forgotten though: the deep dark seas, where the sun does not reach. Shouldn't they be filled with echolocating animals, squeaking and pinging away? For Earth whales, the ocean floor may be too deep to reach, but fish were there a long time before the first whale ancestor took its first dive. Why are there no echolocating fish? I asked experts, but they did not know either. Fish have suitable ears and brains, and nothing seems to stand in the way of them evolving echolocation. But they have not. Or is echolocation simply too much like a burglar who enters a silent dark house and then starts shouting 'Hellooo!'? I do not know.

However, I do know of one final twist in the comparison of echolocation and vision; but I will keep that for the last post on this subject...

Echolocation: a sound choice?

In January I wrote a post on whether detecting heat could supplant vision, and concluded that it was, in fact, just a form of sight. I wished to tackle echolocation next, but wondered where to start: with echolocating animals in fictional biology? Other possible questions would be which atmosphere would be best, which frequencies to use, how it can be compared with vision, etc. In the end I decided to start -there's more!- with a post on the nature of echolocation; so here we go...

The basic principle is simple: you send out a sound and if an echo returns, there is something out there. As everyone knows, dolphins and bats are expert echolocators., but it is less well known that some blind people are quite good at it, and that they in fact use their occipital cortex to process echoes, a brain region normally busy with analysing visual signals. That direct link between vision and echolocation is perhaps not that surprising, as both senses help build a spatial representation of the world outside: what is where?

A major difference between vision and echolocation is how distances are judged. In vision, judging distances depends on complex image analysis, but in echolocation the time between emitting a sound and the arrival of the echo directly tells you how far an object is away. The big problem here is that echoes are much fainter than the emitted sound. The reason for that is the 'inverse square law', something that works for light as well as for sound.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The image above explains the principle. Sound waves emanate from a source near the man in the middle and spread as widening spheres (A, B and C). As the spheres get bigger, the intensity of the sound diminishes per 'unit area'. A 'unit area' can be a square meter, but can also be the size of your ear. When you are close to the source your ear corresponds to some specific part of the sphere, and when you move away your ear will correspond to a smaller part of the sphere: the sound will be less loud. Now, the area of the sphere increases with the square of the distance. If you double the distance from the source, the area of the sphere increases fourfold, and the part your ear catches will decrease fourfold. To continue; increase the distance threefold and the volume decreases ninefold. Move away ten times the original distance from the source, and the sound volume becomes 100 times smaller!
In the image above, only a tiny fraction of the original sound will hit the 'object', a man, at the left. Not all of that will bounce back, and the part that is reflected forms a new sound: the echo. The echo in tun decreases immensely before arriving at the sender, and that is the essence of echolocation: to hear a whisper you have to shout.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

As if the 'inverse square law' is not bad enough, there is another nasty characteristic of echolocation. At the left (A) you see a random predator using echolocation. Oh, all right, it's not random, but Dougal Dixon's 'nightstalker' (brilliant at the time!). It sends out sound waves (black circles) of which a tiny part will hit a suitable prey; there's that man again. As said, the echoes travel back while decreasing in strength (red circles).
There will be some distance at which a prey of this size can just be detected. Any further away and the returning echoes will be too faint to detect. Suppose that this is the case here, meaning 10m is the limit at which a nightstalker can detect a man (as mankind is extinct in the nightstalker's universe no-one will be hurt).
Here's the catch: most of the sound emitted by the nightstalker travels on beyond the prey. These sound waves can be picked up easily by other animals further away than 10 meters (I assume you recognise the creature listening there; it's pretty frightening). For animals out there the sound only has to travel in one direction and none of it gets lost in bouncing back from the prey. The unfortunate consequence of all this 'shouting to hear a whisper' is that the nightstalker is announcing its presence loudly to animals that it cannot detect itself!
This suggests that echolocation could be a dangerous luxury. One way to use it safely would be if other predators cannot get to you anyway. Is that why bats, up there in the air, can afford echolocation? Another solution would be to be big and bad, so you can afford to be noisy? If so, echolocation is not a suitable tool to find a yummy carrot if you are an inoffensive rabbit-analogue. The carrot does not care, but the wolf-analogue will.

---------------------

Getting back on topic, we now know that echolocation tells you how far away an object is. To make sense of the world you will also need to know where the object spatially: left and right and up and down. With hearing this is more difficult than with vision, but it can be done. The spatial resolution of bats is one or two degrees (see here for that), which is impressive but still 60 to 120 times less good than human vision. For now, let's take it for granted that an echolocating animal can locate echo sources. Next, let's try to visualise what it may be like.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a scene with a variety of objects on a featureless plain. The objects have transparency, colours, shadows, etc. At one glance we see them all, as well as the horizon, the clouds, etc., without restrictions regarding distance, all in high resolution. The glory of vision, for all to see.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Colour is purely visual, so to mimic echolocation it has to go. All the objects are now just white. They are also all featureless, but that is for simplicity's sake only: vision and echolocation can both carry information about things like wrinkles and bumps, so I left texture out.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

In sight the main source of light is the sun shining from above, but in echolocation you have to provide your own energy. To mimic that, the only light source left is at the camera. The resulting image looks like that of a flash photograph, for good reasons: the light follows the inverse square law, as does sound. Nearby objects reflect a lot of light (sound!) for two reasons: they are close by, and part of their surfaces face the camera squarely, turning light directly back at the camera. This is an 'intensity image'.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

However, you can see nearby and far objects at the same time, but that is not true for sound. Sound travels in air at about 333 m/s, so sound takes about 3 ms to travel one meter. An object one meter away will produce an echo in 6 ms: 3 ms going to the object and 3 ms travelling back. The image above shows the same scene, but now the grey levels indicate the distance from the camera. Light areas in the image are close by, dark areas are further away. This is a 'depth image', formed courtesy of the ray tracing algorithms in Vue Infinite.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

Now the scene is set to mimic echolocation. Let's send out an imaginary 'ping'; each interval in time determines how far away an echo-producing object is. For instance, the interval from 6 to 12 ms after the 'ping' corresponds to objects 1 to 2 meters away. While the depth image tells us how far away objects are, the intensity image tells us how much of an echo is produced there. To make things easier for the human eye a visual clue was added: echoes returning early are shown in red, while those returning later are blue. Above is a video showing three successive 'pings'. As the echoes bounce back, areas close by will light up in red, and objects furet away will produce an echo in blue, later on. I blurred the images a bit to mimic the relatively poor spatial resolution of echolocation.
I personally found it difficult to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the world using such images, but my visual system is not used to getting its cues in such fashion.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

One easy processing trick to improve the image is to remember the location of early echoes. The video above does that, by adding new echoes without erasing the old ones. The image is wiped as a new ping starts. More advanced neuronal analyses could take care of additional clues such as the Doppler effect, to read your own or an object's movement. By the way, the above is in slow-motion. In real life echoes from an object 10 m away would only take 60 msec to get back. Even without any overlap you could afford 16 pings a second for that range. That is not bad: after all, 20-25 frames a second is enough to trick our visual system into thinking that there is continuous movement.

So there we are. Is this simple metaphor a valid indication of what echolocation is like? Probably not, but it does point out a few basic characteristics of echolocation. Echolocation must be a claustrophobic: no clouds, no horizon, just your immediate surroundings. It would seem the meek cannot afford it, as it may be the most abrasive and abusive of senses.
Is it therefore completely inferior to vision? Well, yes and no...

Salsa invertebraxa

Some books cannot be classified into a category with any ease; 'Salsa invertebraxa' is definitely such a book. It deals with fictional animals, which criterion by itself reduces the number of books in the putative category enormously. It is not told in a pseudoscientific manner as if the life forms in it actually exist. Dougal Dixon's books are pseudodocumentary in nature, and so is Barlowe's 'Expedition'. If Snaiad, Nereus or Furaha ever make it into book form, they will also fit in the same pseudofactual category. 'Salsa' does none of that; its focus is to tell a story of life through images. It deals with fictional insects functioning as characters with heart and wit, and does this admittedly surprising job brilliantly, I think. I first learned about it through the magazine ImagineFX, and then soon found it on the Behance site. I was intrigued but puzzled by the wonderful but complex images. I found reviews, but the reviewers seemed at a loss to describe what to make of the book. The author, Mozchops, has a page on DeviantArt as well as his own site. If you are interested you should visit all these sites, as they show a fairly large number of the digital paintings Mozchops produced for the book (there is a still larger number of unpublished paintings in the book though. When I found the site of the publisher, Pecksniff Press, I needed but a day or so to decide that I just had to have the book. It was promptly delivered a few days later, but meanwhile I had already contacted Mozchops (Paul Phippen), who was kind enough to explain one or two things about his work. So what is 'Salsa invertebraxa'? You could describe it as a 'graphic novel' telling the story of two insects, comrades from different species travelling through a forest. They are pranksters, stealing eggs from spiders and centipedes. They adorn themselves with the moulted exoskeleton from a cicada-like insect. Decked out in such fashion, they capture colourful caterpillars, suspend them from threads and ride them through the air as if they themselves are knights in armour sitting on war horses. While true, this description might cause the book to come across as silly or even childish. It is neither. It is in fact an extremely complex work that does not give away its secrets lightly. Working out the story needs attention to detail, and there is more to the story than just the above synopsis. The images themselves need careful analysis, because they are full of details and because the artist makes no concessions nor steps down to clarify what it is about. The reader has to rise to the challenge, one I personally enjoyed. There are bits of sparse text, but the words are there to evoke an atmosphere, certainly not as a legend to explain the images. I found myself studying the book several times, and only then did the story start to become clear in my mind. If you like your fantasy biology straight, with little arrows pointing to biological details, you may not like this book. But you would risk missing the incredibly capable artwork. There are certainly enough odd insect shapes in there to satisfy those who like alien animals. Or perhaps their shapes are the result of an alternate evolution on Earth; who knows? I do not think everything in this biology can work. For one thing, I very much doubt that there is space in an insect's head for the neural machinery needed to produce an intelligent prankster, but this is one of those instances where such criticisms are completely beside the point. Ignore it. On rereading the above text, I still doubt that it gives you a full idea what the book is about; you will probably have to read it yourself. I will show a number of images I chose that Mozchops was kind enough to send me in a high-resolution form.

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

Here is an early scene of the two protagonists flying about; the one on the left has clublike extremities while the other is mosquito-like. Just note the shimmer of the wings of the 'mosquito'; it takes skill and belief in your skills to dare paint motion-blurred wings like that, with so little indication of what you see.

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

This image is out on the web already, I think. The two heroes encounter an army of termites, armed to the teeth. I include it so you will get a feeling for how the text adds to the image.

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

Obviously, I could not resist including this one. Regular readers may remember that I did some calculations regarding 'ballonts' some time ago. I had to conclude, to my considerable irritation and disappointment, that my idea of filling Furahan skies with ballooning plankton was not going to work: small ballonts do not work. Luckily, Mozchops had not read that and had designed animals like that. He provided a twist to the idea that I like very much: you are probably all aware of the peculiar mating flight of some dragonflies: the male clasps the female by the neck using claspers on his abdomen. Together the two then fly around to deposit eggs in suitable places. Well, in Mozchops' view the male has a balloon instead of wings, and so the two can float around serenely. Aren't they wonderful? It makes me wish to ignore my own reasoning that small ballonts cannot work...

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

This is one you may have to look at for a while. One of the protagonists, the one with the clubby legs, is riding a caterpillar, as colourful as the saddle cloth of any mediaeval war horse with pennants trailing behind it.

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

At the end of the book the two are met by a host of insects working together as a troupe, the purpose of which is our guess. I wish to show it to you so you can see the inventiveness of the insect shapes. Note the one flying on the right, with its near-mechanical shape and its protruding tongs. The multi-species insect armada contains some of the most wonderful insect shapes in the book.

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

Click to enlarge; copyright Mozchops 2011

Here, a host of insects, from small to majestic, takes to the skies in an exodus the reasons of which we are not told. Mozchops was kind enough to send me an early sketch of this painting, which is an exclusive for this blog. I would like to draw your attention to one insect at the left, the one with twin booms sticking out backwards. I love its shape, with its twin booms evoking the shape of aircraft such as the P38-Lightning. Note that the entire painting is filled with many such inventions. Other people would probably be content to paint just one such design on one painting; here, we are spoilt for choice. All in all, this may be one of the oddest books I have, but it certainly is also among the ones I like best. It certainly deserves more attention, and I hope that this post helps bring that about.

The order electrus

From time to time I search the internet in a search for interesting machines that could lend themselves to be turned into an animal design, or that represent a technical version of a -much older- biological principle. For past examples, see here or here.

While doing so, I came across a website of a countryman of mine, one Jarno Smeets, who was apparently working on human powered flight. That has been done more than once, using propellers driven by a bicycle gear and chain transmission. But what this inventor proposed was that he was going to take of using his arms to provide the propulsion, by flapping the wings. Now that is simply not going to work: human arms are not strong enough to flap wings large enough to lift a human. I lost interest, until my attention was drawn to the site by other sources: now the site had a video purporting to show that he had actually done it. I did not believe it, which was just as well as otherwise I would have been one of many people fooled by the blog: it was all a hoax! The artist/perpetrator was Floris Kaayk. Here it is.

The video is cunningly made: it has all the nice clumsiness of a rather poorly executed home video. There is even someone shouting excitedly into the camera that the flight should have been recorded with another camera, from in front. What you do see is something flapping into the air from quite some distance, and then there are some shots of him flapping, and shots taken from a flying vehicle.

I was intrigued by the elaborate nature of the hoax and found that he Mr Kaayk had done more work bordering on the fantastic. I would like to show you one video in particular, 'The Order Electrus', as it comes close to the usual topics of this blog. It is a documentary showing 'life forms' consisting of electronics parts, running around like little robots. If ever artificial life comes into being, and I cannot think of any reason why this should be impossible, it will not look like this. But that does not matter too much here. As is often the case, when there is enough of a sense of humour, the need to be critical evaporates. I love the film's tongue in cheek attitude. As nature documentaries go, this is a very nice one. It follows here, but if you wish to see it in more detail, please visit Mr. Kaayk's website.

Moebius, Major Gruber, and Rusps (Rusps II /Archives V)

Click to enlarge; copyright Casterman 1995

Click to enlarge; copyright Casterman 1995

Click to enlarge; copyright Casterman 1995

Jean Giraud (also known as Moebius or Gir) died on March 10 this year. I first encountered his work in the seventies, probably in the magazine 'Métal Hurlant'. I do not think anyone disputes that he was a Grand Master of what the French call the Ninth Art ('Neuvième Art'): 'bandes dessinées', or 'comics'. You might that, regardless of his qualities, his work does not really belong here; while he did draw alien animals and plants, you could see that they were never meant to be realistic. The ones above prove that point, I think, while also underlining the facility with which he drew. To get another view of that, here is a YouTube take of him at work.

'

Click to enlarge; copyright holder unknown to me

The image above appeared on the cover of Métal Hurlant in 1976. Such images came as a welcome shock at the time. The way had perhaps been prepared by underground comics, but there still was else nothing like it; remember that science fiction films were not mainstream at all, and that computer-generated imagery was in fact science fiction. The cover impressed me so much that it stayed in memory to the present day. Major Gruber, the main character, just exudes character (stiff upper lip anyone?), as does his alien assistant. But look at that 'wall' behind him: it is part of the head of an animal slain by the 'great human hunter' Major Gruber. You cannot see the head well, partly because it is such a large animal, and partly because it is obscured by lettering, which does not hurt the design. This seems to be a magnificent example of telling a better story by not telling all of it.

So when does the major meet rusps? Well, he doesn't really, but just wait. Once rusps had evolved their imaginary existence, their place in the ecosystem required attention, so specialised armoured predators started ramming their way through the rusps' carapaces, keeping their heads tucked away below their bodies to avoid being blinded or decapitated by the rusp's whips. But after imagining this first onslaught, the question came up why rusps would stand still while attacked in this way? Could even a troupe of such predators bring a rusp to its many knees? Perhaps, but the losses to the predators would probably be unacceptable. An obvious solution would be to introduce a mega-predator, so large and strong that it could attack an adult rusp and expect to win. For reasons unclear to me I do not find that concept appealing; for now, adult rusps do not suffer from predation. But rusps die anyway, and a dead rusp constitutes a mountain of succulent meat.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Above is my first image of an animal working its way into a rusp carcass, at left. The right panel shows a specialised rusp predator, or perhaps a scavenger. It is not fast but very sturdy, and its two 'raptorial appendages' have developed into two different shapes. The left one is the prototypical blunt instrument, while the right is more useful as a scraper, to reach those parts where other scavengers cannot.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

My sketchbooks show more versions of this particular scene, in between a variety of other topics. Here are three different versions from different periods. Do you see the influence of Moebius' scene in the back of my mind? The scavenger looks back towards the camera in the same way as the major looks into it. As for the dead rusp, I contemplated showing it as a wall of carapax over a tangle of collapsed legs, directly facing the camera; but would anyone understand what they were looking at? In Moebius' case, the wall was recognisable as a head. The three-quarter views represent moments where I thought I should provide more clues, while the straight-on views were more daring in this respect: the viewer would not know what kind of animal was dead here.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

I later felt that perhaps the perspective of the predator was too complex. To see if I could improve on the sketches, I recently did a quick rough sculpt of such an animal in Sculptris (above).

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

I then imported the model into Vue Infinite (left), and exported the image into Painter 12 to paint over. Some very rough brush strokes indicate the structure and legs of the rusp. It is not too bad, but still definitely needs more work; perhaps the design works better on a square canvas. Once I feel that I can do the idea justice I will finally paint that scene, and I will be glad and than to have been inspired, as have many others, by Jean Giraud / Gir / Moebius.

Click to enlarge; from 'Faune de Mars'; copyright Moebius.
This is from a small book only available through Moebius' official site here.