Feigning Cats and Dogs
After a two-month hiatus, here are some recent ProCreate drawings. The earliest canids and felids didn't emerge till 40 and 25 million years ago, respectively. They were preceded by, and in some cases lived alongside, unrelated, now-extinct mammal groups with similar adaptations. In the Paleocene (66-56 MYA), there were the mesonychids -- ironically cousins of the ungulates, or hoofed mammals.
Ankalagon is one of the oldest and largest known mesonychids, hailing from mid-Paleocene New Mexico. Named after a vicious dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion (the prequel to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), I based my drawing of this beast on the more complete Synoplotherium and on a melanistic leopard (albeit with different spots and as nod to the fact that Tolkien's dragon was black).
Later in the Paleocene came the oxyaenids, a more cat-like group of predators. Patriofelis was a leopard-sized member of this family from the Late Eocene of Wyoming and Oregon. This digital painting is a colored version on a much earlier 24" x 18" sketch, with markings and coloring based loosely on lions, thylacines, and red pandas (the later of which, like Patriofelis, is arboreal).
The dog-like hyaenodonts emerged around the same time as the oxyaenids, and for a long-time were grouped together with them in a nebulous group called the Creodonts. Unlike the oxyaenids, these non-hyena relative survived past the Eocene extinction (c. 34 MYA) and as late the end of the Miocene (about 5 MYA). Hyaenodon is the group's namesake and best-known member. My sketch and subsequent painting are based on Hyaenodon horridus, a wolf-sized species from the Early Oligocene of North America. I based its coloration on the tiger-like coat of some mastiffs, which Hyaenodon have an impressive bite force.
After a two-month hiatus, here are some recent ProCreate drawings. The earliest canids and felids didn't emerge till 40 and 25 million years ago, respectively. They were preceded by, and in some cases lived alongside, unrelated, now-extinct mammal groups with similar adaptations. In the Paleocene (66-56 MYA), there were the mesonychids -- ironically cousins of the ungulates, or hoofed mammals.
Ankalagon is one of the oldest and largest known mesonychids, hailing from mid-Paleocene New Mexico. Named after a vicious dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion (the prequel to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), I based my drawing of this beast on the more complete Synoplotherium and on a melanistic leopard (albeit with different spots and as nod to the fact that Tolkien's dragon was black).
Later in the Paleocene came the oxyaenids, a more cat-like group of predators. Patriofelis was a leopard-sized member of this family from the Late Eocene of Wyoming and Oregon. This digital painting is a colored version on a much earlier 24" x 18" sketch, with markings and coloring based loosely on lions, thylacines, and red pandas (the later of which, like Patriofelis, is arboreal).
The dog-like hyaenodonts emerged around the same time as the oxyaenids, and for a long-time were grouped together with them in a nebulous group called the Creodonts. Unlike the oxyaenids, these non-hyena relative survived past the Eocene extinction (c. 34 MYA) and as late the end of the Miocene (about 5 MYA). Hyaenodon is the group's namesake and best-known member. My sketch and subsequent painting are based on Hyaenodon horridus, a wolf-sized species from the Early Oligocene of North America. I based its coloration on the tiger-like coat of some mastiffs, which Hyaenodon have an impressive bite force.
