I just start blogging again, and I’m suddenly busy with more paying work than I’ve had all year. Out of necessity, I’m posting an older acrylic painting and putting off another post on early whales until next week. I’m sorry, but this is good for me; I do have to make a living. I live in a country of excess and I may have been exaggerating a bit in my “We’re Back” post when I compared my net worth to that of a second rate - third world subsistence farmer, but I certainly am among the blog world’s version of “trailer trash”. The problem is that in my head there are all these things I wanted to do in a certain order, and now I have to change course a little, redirect my energy, and reschedule my timing.

Luckily, the deviation from what I’d planned is fairly small. I’ll still be working on North American ground sloths and other Pleistocene animals and, of course, whales. There might even be a whole new additional website about cetacean evolution and phylogenic relationships.

Today however, I’m posting an acrylic image I did a few years ago. It portrays a time at what is now Fossil Butte National Monument, when southwestern Wyoming looked and felt like Florida.

This image has been seen before at Chris Clarke’s Creek Running North (shameless link, as Chris is back blogging). The head of the massive Brontops emerging from the river can also be found at PZ Myers‘ Pharyngula (another absolutely shameless link - I always get many more hits when PZ links to me), as one of his many revolving header illustrations. Brontops was the culmination of his line. Eight feet (2.3 meters) to the high point of his back, this final “thunder beast” died out at the end of the Eocene, leaving its relatives - horses, rhinos, and tapirs - to carry on the business of being perissodactyls.

Speaking of rhinos, the smaller animal getting out of Brontops‘ path is the early “running rhino” Hyracodon. While small here, its close relatives in Asia would evolve into the largest land mammal yet discovered, Paraceratherium (formerly the Baluchitherium or Indricotherium of my childhood). Hyracodon’s build was very horselike. In fact, while skeletal and dental characteristics identify Hyracodon as a rhino, superficial features may well have been extremely close to its contemporary, the three-toed horse Mesohippus. Had I placed the neck a bit higher on the shoulders and moved the orbit further back on a slightly more gracile skull, I could well have used the same painted image as representative of that small, browsing horse.

And now, just because I can…

This painting is another private commission piece done in the late 1990s. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the previous image except that I painted them both in acrylic on canvas within the same year.

This little prosimian is the lesser bush-baby, Galago senegalensis, a current resident of dry forest and thorn bush regions of Africa.

Both of these paintings were scanned off the originals on my first small scanner and had to be pieced together in Photoshop. At least at this size I did seem to blend the pieces back together well enough. The only thing lost from the originals was some of the subtlety of color (especially in the skies). Back with more whales and other things next week.