Speculative Biology

Some old old (2017-2018-ish) speculative biology pieces. Not up to my current quality standards, but they were some of the first pieces I did to get any sort of traction online and people still find them and comment on them every once in a while. I'd like to revisit some of this stuff some day. I'm at least proud of how ambitious I was with the paintings, even if a lof of the elements don't really work. The debt owed to Wayne Barlowe should be obvious.

Biojet

The so called “biojets,” one of a variety siliconavium, or “silicon birds” found on Copernicus-51. They are the first, and so far only, silicon-based life forms discovered in our galaxy, an especially odd fact considering that all other known Copernican lifeforms are carbon-based. Their entire wingspan acts as a solar panel- its layers of subcutaneous semiconductor cells convert sunlight directly to energy. Their solar diet is lightly supplemented by nutrients from more traditional sources.

Their evolutionary origin is one of the most contentiously-disputed open questions in modern xenobiology. Theories range from the conservative to the spectacular, with the hypothesis that they are descended from the biosynthetic drone-stock of a vanished civilization gaining surprising traction in recent years.

Hyperswallow

Hyperswallows are named for their distinctive bifurcated tail arrangement. Like all siliconavium, they subsist mostly off of solar energy. Hyperswallows, however, take this to the extreme. Living at the planet’s poles, they take advantage of the extremely long days caused by Copernicus-51′s Earth-like axial tilt. During the month-long polar days they spend nearly all of their time basking in the sunlight, recharging, so to speak. Twice a year, these majestic flyers migrate from pole-to-pole to maximize their time spent in daylight. It is during these cross-planet migrations that they ingest most of the non-solar nutrition they require for the year, hunting small prey as they cross the temperate and equatorial zones.

Hypergazelle

Hard to get a good look at the damn things- they’re fast as hell and twice as skittish.

Fisherman

Fishermen are a highly-specialized species of the Ambulatoria class of bipeds that are prevalent across the planet Yáolán. They make their homes in the saline swamps about the Hóng Ocean, the wide, shallow sea in the southern hemisphere that is home to an enormous diversity of species.

Their name comes from their distinctive hunting method. The fishermen plant themselves among the roots of the semi-aquatic swamp forests and lower their mouth-hands below the surface. In their mouths are fleshy lure organs that attract prey which the fisherman snatch up gleefully in their toothy jaws. They spend most of their waking lives fishing

I included a detailed view of the “head,” which is really just a bony outcropping for sensory organs. The brain is buried deep in the fisherman’s armored central skull-carapace. The head protuberance contains the swaths of light-sensitive tissue that serve as eyes for members of Ambulatoria, and many other groups on Yáolán, as well as antennae for smelling.

Also included is a detail of the fisherman mouth. The lure mimics both the optical appearance and bio-electric signature of a blue jet-snake, a common variety of radially-symmetric aquatic life, named for its sinuous body and its method of locomotion. The electrical capabilities of the organ are important, as electrocational senses are often more highly developed than sight in the aquatic lifeforms found in the Hóng Ocean.

Wyrm

Wyrm is the generic name for any land-dwelling descendant of the ubiquitous aquatic jet-snake. Numerous further divisions can be drawn: for example, between those that have kept their hereditary radial symmetry and those that have lost it in adapting to life on land.

The wyrm pictured here is a purple wyvern, a denizen of the leaf-prairies. Purple wyverns are capable of powered flight, but prefer to move mostly in low, swift glides. Their speed and maneuverability is augmented by their jet-nostrils, the intakes of which can be seen here at the neck. A modification of the ancient jet-snake adaptation, these allow the wyvern to breathe in and expel huge volumes of air to propel themselves forward with prodigious speed.

Red-Crested Wyverns

Two red-crested wyverns, predators of the prairie.

It is noteworthy that Yaolanese flora - even “true” flora as opposed to half-plants or pseudo-plants - tends to be much more motile than the terran plants with which we are familiar. They are typically composed of a few, or sometimes only one, leaf-analogue structure, controlled by regulator muscles that respond to subtle changes in light to position the plant such that the maximum possible radiation flux is always incident upon the leaf face. The effect of this behavior is quite striking on the leaf prairies, where thousands upon thousands of ochrestalks track the position of Yaolan’s sun in near-perfect synchronization over the course of the day before returning to a vertical standing position overnight to minimize radiation heat loss to the cool night sky.