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Description
Eventually the cadborosaurus carcass depicted in the famous pitchers from 1937 was found preserved in an old warehouse that was due to be demolished.
By then most of the acetone in the container was gone and the remains were in a very bad state, but the scant DNA traces found were good enough for analysis.

The results were fascinating beyond the wildest expectations: It turns out cadborosaurus wasn't a boring surviving plesiosaur or a random misidentified current-era animal, but a distant descendant of non-mammalian synapsids!
It is, specifically, a very highly-derived descendant of procynosuchids, perhaps Procynosuchus itself.

Cadborosaurus has the ability to obtain 100% of the oxygen it needs from water, a skill unparallelled among tetrapods. For that purpose they have evolved a series of tubercles on the skin, which actively pump water through the folds of their highly-vascularized tissues.
Surprisingly, these very complex features seem to have originated from the pores already present in the ancestral synapsid skin. While it may sound surprising and far-fetched, please have in mind that whiskers and boobs also originated from the same structures.

It is believed this skin breathing ability originally evolved in the young to supplement their lungs, since it works better in smaller sizes and also it may have helped them to spend longer time underwater to escape from obligate air-breathing predators such as birds, pterosaurs and sauropterygians.
It is theorized that eventually the skin breathing ability became perfected enough as to sustain larger body sizes, so some species started to retain it even in adulthood in the few niches where it provided an advantage over air-breathing.

The adaptation to deep sea is believed to have happened sometime during the Late Cretaceous and it turned out to be a safe bet: They have remained in there since then, without much change in the last dozens of millions of years.

Cadborosauruses spend most of their lives in deep waters worldwide, feeding off carrion, crustaceans, mollusks, jellyfish, seaweed, fish and lots of other things as well.
They are known to frequent hydrotermal vents too.
Their extremely slow metabolism allows them to subsist from smaller prey items than would be expected for an animal of their size. They can also lie dormant for long periods of time if the water is cold enough, without needing to feed in the meantime.
They have very long lifespans and grow during the entirety of their lives until they become so large they asphyxiate or starve.

The eyes are vestigial and react only to low-requency radiation, perhaps as an adaptation to locate nearby hydrothermal vents by their infrarred glow and to flee from the ocassional deep-diving cetacean.
The remnants of the lungs also constitute a poorly-understood, seldom-used, sonar-like apparatus that doubles as a hearing organ. The main senses are touch and electroreception, both of them located in the fleshy snout.
The brain is among the simplest and relatively smallest among tetrapods, likely as a result of their low-oxygen metabolism. And other than the vertebrae, skull and ribs, most bones are poorly ossified and overall the skeleton has been simplified and reduced.

Now, how come something as inadequate as a tetrapod managed to carve a niche for itself in the deep sea, among far better adapted fishes and invertebrates? The answer, comrades, is simple: Because of its long, flexible neck.
This one simple trick (teleosts hate it!) allows it to clean an area of food without having to spend energy moving its body around. It just hovers over the terrain while it rummages all over it with its highly-sensitive snout, picking it clean of anything edible. Then they just lazily ondulate their skin flaps to move on to the next patch and so on. They also use it to ambush more agile prey such as fish and whatnot.

The specimen from the Naden Harbor pitchers was among the top 5% largest/oldest individuals. It came to higher waters in search of food because it was starving, but it was so weakened it was easily dispatched by a sperm whale.
The next day the whale got into a fight with a giant squid and lost. Upon death, it reflexively vomited its last dinner. For a day and half the partially-digested carcass floated around decomposing further, until yet another sperm whale found and ate it. Hours later, that poor whale was murdered and later it got dismantled at Naden Harbour.
The rest is history.

--------------------

btw, I personally don't believe in the authenticity of the cadborosaurus. I think it's either a badly damaged corpse of known animal (or part of it), or just random pieces of trash and debris swallowed by the whale.

Also, sorry for not posting in such a long time. I have many drawings, which will be posted periodically during the following weeks. This is the most recent of the lot and was finished today but the next post will be from, like, June. And so on and on, you get the idea.
I hope y'alls will enjoy the wide variety of theme, style, mood, concept and colour exhibited by the lot.

--------------------

Regarding the design itself:
Many of the ideas and references that went into this concept are from here:
tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/16/cad…

Someone in the comments mention the procynosuchus origin, but I actually got the idea years ago from someone in Reddit who in response to my aquatic gorgonopsid sugested procynosuchus as a more likely forefather for aquatic forms than gorgonopsids.
I chose to make my reconstruction fatter than most. This is because the "carcass" from the pitchers seems rather damaged, but amazingly everyone always leaves it like that, as if the animal in life wuz supposed to look like a contorted, partially-digested skeleton with some papery skin tightly wrapped around it.
I chose not to. Instead I reconstructed it as a living, breathing animal who needs to have organs inside, whose contours have been rounded by a blubbery skin required for hydrodynamics, energy reserves and thermal inertia, just like in TRUE and ACTUAL marine tetrapods.

I think its underwater breathing ability is very far-fetched. I was just trying to do my best to spin a credible and interesting yarn that would justify some of the outlandish claims made in the paper mentioned by the article from TetZoo. I wouldn't put my hands over fire to defend the plausibility, accuracy and/or realism of the idea, it's what I mean to say.

Also it was fundamental to make it an abyssal creature, since I think there would be no other way to justify why such a large, notorious animal hasn't been discovered yet.
I guess something about its senses would make electronic gizmos notorious and bothersome, so they would actively avoid them and remain undiscovered.
So, it's remote, it can stay underwater forever and it actively avoids us. Very undiscoverable, in my humble opinion.

Also, please note: This creature is not meant as a direct, immediate descendant of procynosuchus, that's why it doesn't look like a normal procynosuchus but with fins stuck on, and that's why it has features that have no obvious precedent in the ancestral form.
There is as much evolutionary distance between these two guys as there is between primitive cynodonts and whales. What I mean to say is, there are many many many many many transitional forms and diverging lineages (all of them extinct now, btw) spanning between procynosuchus and cadborosaurus, but I'm too lazy and time-constrained as to draw and detail each and every one of them.
That doesn't mean they don't exist, or that procynosuchus is supposed to have remained static until suddenly one of them laid a cadborosaurus egg.

Regarding the drawing itself, it was obviously meant to imitate the style of, like, an infographic from an old National Geogarphic magazine or smth. It was done without references, going just by memory and feel.

Description
Eventually the cadborosaurus carcass depicted in the famous pitchers from 1937 was found preserved in an old warehouse that was due to be demolished.
By then most of the acetone in the container was gone and the remains were in a very bad state, but the scant DNA traces found were good enough for analysis.

The results were fascinating beyond the wildest expectations: It turns out cadborosaurus wasn't a boring surviving plesiosaur or a random misidentified current-era animal, but a distant descendant of non-mammalian synapsids!
It is, specifically, a very highly-derived descendant of procynosuchids, perhaps Procynosuchus itself.

Cadborosaurus has the ability to obtain 100% of the oxygen it needs from water, a skill unparallelled among tetrapods. For that purpose they have evolved a series of tubercles on the skin, which actively pump water through the folds of their highly-vascularized tissues.
Surprisingly, these very complex features seem to have originated from the pores already present in the ancestral synapsid skin. While it may sound surprising and far-fetched, please have in mind that whiskers and boobs also originated from the same structures.

It is believed this skin breathing ability originally evolved in the young to supplement their lungs, since it works better in smaller sizes and also it may have helped them to spend longer time underwater to escape from obligate air-breathing predators such as birds, pterosaurs and sauropterygians.
It is theorized that eventually the skin breathing ability became perfected enough as to sustain larger body sizes, so some species started to retain it even in adulthood in the few niches where it provided an advantage over air-breathing.

The adaptation to deep sea is believed to have happened sometime during the Late Cretaceous and it turned out to be a safe bet: They have remained in there since then, without much change in the last dozens of millions of years.

Cadborosauruses spend most of their lives in deep waters worldwide, feeding off carrion, crustaceans, mollusks, jellyfish, seaweed, fish and lots of other things as well.
They are known to frequent hydrotermal vents too.
Their extremely slow metabolism allows them to subsist from smaller prey items than would be expected for an animal of their size. They can also lie dormant for long periods of time if the water is cold enough, without needing to feed in the meantime.
They have very long lifespans and grow during the entirety of their lives until they become so large they asphyxiate or starve.

The eyes are vestigial and react only to low-requency radiation, perhaps as an adaptation to locate nearby hydrothermal vents by their infrarred glow and to flee from the ocassional deep-diving cetacean.
The remnants of the lungs also constitute a poorly-understood, seldom-used, sonar-like apparatus that doubles as a hearing organ. The main senses are touch and electroreception, both of them located in the fleshy snout.
The brain is among the simplest and relatively smallest among tetrapods, likely as a result of their low-oxygen metabolism. And other than the vertebrae, skull and ribs, most bones are poorly ossified and overall the skeleton has been simplified and reduced.

Now, how come something as inadequate as a tetrapod managed to carve a niche for itself in the deep sea, among far better adapted fishes and invertebrates? The answer, comrades, is simple: Because of its long, flexible neck.
This one simple trick (teleosts hate it!) allows it to clean an area of food without having to spend energy moving its body around. It just hovers over the terrain while it rummages all over it with its highly-sensitive snout, picking it clean of anything edible. Then they just lazily ondulate their skin flaps to move on to the next patch and so on. They also use it to ambush more agile prey such as fish and whatnot.

The specimen from the Naden Harbor pitchers was among the top 5% largest/oldest individuals. It came to higher waters in search of food because it was starving, but it was so weakened it was easily dispatched by a sperm whale.
The next day the whale got into a fight with a giant squid and lost. Upon death, it reflexively vomited its last dinner. For a day and half the partially-digested carcass floated around decomposing further, until yet another sperm whale found and ate it. Hours later, that poor whale was murdered and later it got dismantled at Naden Harbour.
The rest is history.

--------------------

btw, I personally don't believe in the authenticity of the cadborosaurus. I think it's either a badly damaged corpse of known animal (or part of it), or just random pieces of trash and debris swallowed by the whale.

Also, sorry for not posting in such a long time. I have many drawings, which will be posted periodically during the following weeks. This is the most recent of the lot and was finished today but the next post will be from, like, June. And so on and on, you get the idea.
I hope y'alls will enjoy the wide variety of theme, style, mood, concept and colour exhibited by the lot.

--------------------

Regarding the design itself:
Many of the ideas and references that went into this concept are from here:
tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/16/cad…

Someone in the comments mention the procynosuchus origin, but I actually got the idea years ago from someone in Reddit who in response to my aquatic gorgonopsid sugested procynosuchus as a more likely forefather for aquatic forms than gorgonopsids.
I chose to make my reconstruction fatter than most. This is because the "carcass" from the pitchers seems rather damaged, but amazingly everyone always leaves it like that, as if the animal in life wuz supposed to look like a contorted, partially-digested skeleton with some papery skin tightly wrapped around it.
I chose not to. Instead I reconstructed it as a living, breathing animal who needs to have organs inside, whose contours have been rounded by a blubbery skin required for hydrodynamics, energy reserves and thermal inertia, just like in TRUE and ACTUAL marine tetrapods.

I think its underwater breathing ability is very far-fetched. I was just trying to do my best to spin a credible and interesting yarn that would justify some of the outlandish claims made in the paper mentioned by the article from TetZoo. I wouldn't put my hands over fire to defend the plausibility, accuracy and/or realism of the idea, it's what I mean to say.

Also it was fundamental to make it an abyssal creature, since I think there would be no other way to justify why such a large, notorious animal hasn't been discovered yet.
I guess something about its senses would make electronic gizmos notorious and bothersome, so they would actively avoid them and remain undiscovered.
So, it's remote, it can stay underwater forever and it actively avoids us. Very undiscoverable, in my humble opinion.

Also, please note: This creature is not meant as a direct, immediate descendant of procynosuchus, that's why it doesn't look like a normal procynosuchus but with fins stuck on, and that's why it has features that have no obvious precedent in the ancestral form.
There is as much evolutionary distance between these two guys as there is between primitive cynodonts and whales. What I mean to say is, there are many many many many many transitional forms and diverging lineages (all of them extinct now, btw) spanning between procynosuchus and cadborosaurus, but I'm too lazy and time-constrained as to draw and detail each and every one of them.
That doesn't mean they don't exist, or that procynosuchus is supposed to have remained static until suddenly one of them laid a cadborosaurus egg.

Regarding the drawing itself, it was obviously meant to imitate the style of, like, an infographic from an old National Geogarphic magazine or smth. It was done without references, going just by memory and feel.