Tim Morris' Art and Project Blog

 Hello again, Many of you may be familiar with my speculative alien project "Exobiology 101" , which explored the hypothetical biology of animal-like complex organisms on different earth-like and not-so-earth-like planets. It has been criticized for being to brief in the scope of each planet, but as is indicated by the title , it's only a brief introduction, in the style of a high-school textbook.  Here is the original project again, for those who are not familiar: https://xenobiology.weebly.com/ I had developed 4 other planets to be added to this project at a later date, but the work going in to writing the establishing material or each biome became way to complicated for me to commit to, more complicated in fact than the rest of the project. Writing summaries of plants and invertebrates was all well and good, but the specific statistics of the nature of heavenly bodies, orbit, gravity, gaseous atmospheres and most of all the alien biochemistry, was just too tiresome f...

 Hello again, I hope you will all excuse me for not doing the Sectember challenge, I had done a lot of work on "Demons of the Deep" just before that and was a bit out of ideas. But I do have this, which I was meaning to post in September. This piece came to me when I realized that all of my speculative-Exobiology-style aliens, while well-reasoned enough, always somehow evade being cute by aesthetic human standards. This may not matter much, because humans only find the appearance of animals that echoes newborn mammals, to be "cute". What is objectively cute on an alien planet may look hideous to humans, who knows?? But I sort of brainstormed and landed upon sort of "jumping spider-fox-owl-moth" alien thing that I think future space-farers on an earth-like planet would find really cute. So here it is, the scientifically plausible cutesy alien critter, the "Awwien". All images, designs and writing on this blog are the property of Timothy Donald M...

The novella "Flatland - a Romance of Many Dimensions" is an interesting and transcendent classical publication, where all men and women exist in a kingdom within a universe consisting of only 2-dimensions. It is an interesting though-experiment to consider a world that is a simple flat plane, ike a map, and beings can only see the edges of eachother. More info about it can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland But how would a 2-dimensionsl universe work? How would it come about? And how would life there come about, and exist within a 2-dimensional biome? A little while ago, I tried to figure it out, with the help of my longtime-friend Mette Aumala. - The universal plane began as an infinitely dense and tightly coiled spiral, containing all the chemical elements that would go on to make the universe. During the “big smear” it uncoiled, fragmented and expanded ever outward, sideways and along, creating a 2-dimensional plane onto which various simple 2-dimensiona...

 Hello again, This blog-post will feature various creatures from chapter headers that I did for "Fellow Tetrapod", that were not of the sapient species or races. Theree are a few, so lets get started. - Our Toxoplasmotic character, Fling, is constantly accompanied by her semi-domestic pet Jaguar, Fancy Death. This is not only a whim, but is necessitated by her religion, and enabled by the particular strain of parasite she hosts. This is Mr Grumbles, General Graa's mount and companion. He is basically a Homo erectus, which were in fact domesticated by the Pick in Graa's timeline, though he does not fully resemble the erectus from our timeline, as much selective breeding has been done for purpose. The Metrurian fortune-teler which Koen cooks for has the privelige of dining on a seafood soup composed of some elements that would make a human Palaeontologist salivate for other reasons, including a domesticated, meat-bearing Plesiosaur. Koen puts both his Palaeontological a...

Hello again, This time we are visiting a concept that I started with last year. What if a refugia existed that had held Cretaceous species after the K-Pg extinction, and subsequently also many creatures from the Paleocene and Eocene. This we can imagine would be a large island subcontinent that had particulars of weather, isolation and location to circumvent the Cretaceous extinction among others. So here are some of the most interesting creatures from this scenario. - Descendants of the "Condylarth" Hyopsodus, which was already something like a rodent, here takes the niche of Rabbits and even Capybaras (as shown here). The Pantodont Titanoides has given rise to hefty Chalicothere-like browsers with big tusks.     The small alligator, Allodaposuchus, gives rise to a new lineage of Notosuchian-like terrestrial crocodiles. Most of the surviving Dinosaurs look rather boringly like known forms, but Thescelosaurus-like Ornithischians have become larger, quadrupedal selective feede...

 For a couple of years now, I have been collaborating with the fantastic Sci-fi author, Daniel Bensen. We have been working to assemble a sci-fi story about a scenario in which man has been contacted by a convention that spans the many alternate timelines of earth, those that have produced Sapient, civilization-building species, ones with advanced technology, ones like us. We call this story "Fellow Tetrapod". It was a long and arduous process, but it turned out that we collaborated very well. I provided my services as a conceptualist and creature designer, along with Dan who is also very proficient at this. I was also the main illustrator of chapter-headers. In order to promote this work of fiction, I am posting a rogues gallery of the many and varied persons which we meet in this book. Each species that we see is part of the  Convention of Sophonts, which is very exclusive, divisive, weird, and potentially teetering ever on the verge of an inter-timeline war. Those who wish...