Yet more orphaned concepts - Happy Spectember!

Hello again. Another blog post, another batch of orphaned concepts from the vault.
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This one was supposed to be a descendant of the Kiwi, perhaps in a timeline where conservation managed to prevent its extinction. This particular form is a bit bigger and bulkier, and feeds upon crustaceans and other invertebrates on the shores of beaches and estuaries.

This is some sort of Palaeozoic shark, bearing denticles and long, semi-retractable jaws.

This was a concept that Raymond Tobin and I came up with for the Speculative Dinosaur Project before it died off. A kind of false-ground-sloth with a prehensile, trunk-like lower lip.

This is a re-draw of a series of nondescript, blind sand-burrowing creatures from more than a decade ago. I think this one could be a mammalian burrower from a very far future, many hundreds of millions of years after humans.

A turkey-sized palaeognath bird that is a predator, mainly dispatching prey with its large clawed, plume-less wings.

A fast-swimming, endothermic descendant of turtles, hundreds of millions of years after mankind.

Stanton Fink challenged me to draw a 2-ton pantherine cat, something like an enormous tiger. I struggled with the idea, but this is the closest I got to a final product. The main issue is that a lithsome flexible spine of a carnivoran does not work at weights over a ton, so in order to be an efficient predator, it would need a stiff backbone like an ungulate.

An armored, terrestrial dry-skinned descendant of the cane-toad. It has ceased cutaneous respiration, having large lungs and an upright gait.

A unicorn-like creature descended from the same ancestor as the Pig-Footed Bandicoot. A "marsupial unicorn".

A bipedally running armadillo.

A giant, bipedally running Leptictid which is an apex predator.

A Leptictid predator related to the one above, that pursues its prey on all fours.

A terrestrial air-breathing descendant of the Gurnard fish, walking on leg-like fin-rays.

Another fin-ray walking Gurnard, but instead somewhat convergently spider-like in shape.

A large terrestrial monitor lizard, which converges upon primitive Archosaurs and Aphanosauria, with an upright gait and higher metabolism. Presumably a creature from some millions of years after mankind.

An omnivorous, bear-convergent descendant of patherine cats.

Some sort of terrestrial, air-breathing squid.

A Chasmosaurine that has a rather extravagant arrangement of horns.

Another bipedally-running Armadillo.

A terrestrial, flightless pitta-shaped bird which has an oversized bill for catching and dispatching small vertebrates. Originally intended for New Zealand in the Speculative Dinosaur Project, I called it the Pineapple.

A giant, sprawling, terrestrial Tetanuran theropod, presumably a heavy brutish scanenger. In order for a theropod to become quadrupedal, the animal must either sprawl, or modify the wrist.

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© Timothy Donald Morris 2024


 

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