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PeteriDish β Colors! 2
Published: 2012-04-02 20:04:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 1028; Favourites: 22; Downloads: 9
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Disclaimer:Animals are not to scale and are still in early development. Many of them will be subjected to further changes.
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Comments: 57
Wow thanks! This will be more than useful!
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Thanks! I am not sure they are actually textures, part of it is my desk (which is wooden and full of scratches, and I was such a fool that I didn't put anything underneath the paper), part of it is the rather poor pencils I used which didn't really color "evenly", part of it is my scanner which is not too exquisite and overexposes everything, and part of it is the editting to "somehow" get the "original" color back...
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Oooh tell me about it, the amount of time I spend reworking the colours after scanning ... 
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Very nice! You could probably convince me those are real sea slugs!
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Thanks! They're definitely inspired by them and by marine flatworms, but their internal anatomy is different.
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Oh, all right. Still, good job!
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Thanks! There are still many ideas and posible changes I have in mind!
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I realie a lot of these are incredibly earth-like, but I hope that some anatomical sketches will help to solve this problem. They are very simple organisms without a "centralized" nervous system, the eyes individuals only have the neurons densely packed in the head region, but they don't have nerve chords as such. they have external digestion, in many species, the entire ventral surface is their mouth. I have an idea for specialized small-sized filter-feeders with "baleens" on the underside, which would essentially be a "brush" of setae.
What is interesting,though, is that all the squirt-like, anemone-like crinoid-like and jellyfish-like creatures are colonies of symbionts which are so dependent on each other that they can't live without one another, and both, the "solitary" and "colonial" creatures come from primitive worm-like ancestors. The worms are characterized by having a single eye and a finger-like proboscis on the head, which is sometimes tipped with a single claw. It you look at the octopus-like symbionts, these claws form ring-like "mouth".
The symbionts started off like hollow cylindrical colonies which branched off to all the shapes you can see. I will yet have to come up with how to make them a little bit different from what you can see on earth.
The thing is, that the symbionts take up the niches of crinoids, squirts anemones, cephalopods, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and even starfish, or that it is very easy to imagine them forming visually similar forms to those earthly creatures, it looks like "darwin finches to the extreme" but the seas on earth are full of incredible number of animal phylla, and this idea kinda takes off the diversity of having many very differrent lineages...
I have trouble with thinking up new anatomies, I have made a "crown of thorns" which would essentially be something like a "thorny limpet", the most "alien" feature of that critter is that it has concentric oral and anal openings, so it would kinda have an "inner lip", which would be sucker-like with the anal opening in the middle, and an "outer lip" which would also worl like a sucler and it would "continue" to the rest of the body which has this thorny shell on top.
Now I started to think if this arrangement would work for my "xenosnails": [link] What do you think?
I also got an idea for making the "capslig" with two "caps" instead of just one, and the "fully-shelled" forms will have a "hinged" shell on their back, which is a way how to get "bivalves" in the game...
But I'll be thinking hard about the shell shapes, I think there are quite many interesting possibilities, like haveing two cylinfrical shells instead plate-like or bowl-like ones, and if the "slug" retracts, those two cylinders will come together to protect it. What do you think?
I was also thinking that one of the "slugs" could have the shell formed like a showel or at least a cone to aid in digging in the substrate, but those ideas will yet need some time...
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These ideas would probably work, and I'd especially like to see them applied to the Quasitestudo.
The cylindrical shells idea sounds a little inefficient, but it would probably work out all right.
If these symbionts take up such a wide niche... well, that's impressive! Do they fulfill similar niches on land (land snails, slugs, etc)?
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Thank you! There are just "early in development" ideas, so many things still can change.
I think of he symbionts as exclusively aquatic, either marine or freshwater, but not terrestrial. I think land will only be populated by terrestrial "molluscoids." but not those symbionts. I've got some ideas what their colonies could look like, but I still haven't sketched them.
I have changed my mind about the "limpets, slugs, snails and kin" of this world. (I don't know if you've seen these pictures:
[link]
[link]
but they're outdated now, even though many of the ideas will "make it" to be changed in line with my current idea)
The thing is, that I really liked the idea of multiple separated "feet" or suckers, so I kept that idea, but I have trashed the concept of "concentric mouth and anus," because it doesn't really work the way I thought it would. I still sneaked this basic idea in the new anatomy, because I decided to give them "loop gut" which terminates into an "anal trunk" probing into the oral cavity.
Some predatory species will have a "claw" or "stinger" on the end of the anal trunk, and they will use this organ to stab their prey.
I also realized i didn't include the reproductive system, which no one who commented on the anatomical picture spotted, and so I've taken care of that too.
I think most species will be hermaphroditic, if not all of them, so each individual has ovaries and testes. What's interesting, though, is that the female "organs" terminate in a trunk-like "false penis" which I will yet have to name properly. The "true" penis will be stuck inside this hose-like organ when mating
The external anatomy also changed, there no longer is a concentric "inner foot" and an "outer foot", now there is an "oral foot" and two "lateral feet". (the openings of the reproductive organs lead to each of the "gaps" between the "lateral feet."
In the limpet-like species, the "oral foot" is between the "lateral feet", but in the slug- and snail-like species (including the Quasitestudo and Pseudocaretta lineages) the "oral foot" is the "head region" of the animal and the "lateral feet" form the "body" of them. This makes the creatures very asymetric, because the "vulva" would be in the rear end of the body between the "lateral feet" and the penis would be on the left or right side of the "head," between the "oral sucker" and one of the "lateral feet."
There would be gills/lungs on the other half of the animal than where the male organ is housed, and there would also be an opening on the other side of the "head," between the "oral sucker" and the other "lateral foot," but i'll yet have to draw the anatomy of those "slugs."
I have made yet another interesting body plan of the "slugs," I called it "sea butterfly", because the outline is rather similar and I think of those as colorful coral reef inhabitants.
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Interesting.
Is the "claw" on the end of the anal trunk poisonous in some species? Just a thought...
In the slug-and-snail species, this suggests a far more widely distributed anatomy (and I'm going by the newest picture, as well), one seperated by musckle and blood vessels, than what is found in most terrestrial species. It seems like a somewhat inefficient setup (and not very conductive to speed, but I don't think that was ever a priority with these guys), but it also seems to make the creature far more resistant to localized injury than most terrestrial animals.
I'm sorry I can't do justice to these responses of yours...
Keep up the good work!
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Yes! I think it could indeed be poisonous in some species!
I don't know what did you exactly meant by "widely distributed anatomy separated by muscle and blood vessels" 
We have a blind spot in our eyes because the nerves have to go through the retina in order to get in the brain, because the sensitive parts of our retinal cells face backwards! Is that an efficient "design?" Of course not! Cephalopods don't have a blind spot, because their retinal cells are "turned the way they should be," they were "luckier" to have the ancestors they had. But their ancestors didn't give them the necessary "building blocks" to enable them to inhabit and "conquer" the dry land, but vertebrates were successful, even though we don't have as good eyes as cephalopods.
One nerve connecting two separated parts of Giraffe's brain makes a laughably wasteful "U" loop from the brain, down to the giraffe's neck, near the giraffe's heart and then back up! Is this how you would "design" giraffe's nervous system if you had the chance? You see, but this "problem" dates back to fish, where this nerve was still very short (fish don't have a distinct "neck", do they?) and even in the majority of vertebrates, this isn't a big problem, because the necks remain relatively short, but when the neck grows, and the "farthest reach" of the nerve stays in place, this nerve has to grow in length too. Why didn't the nerve stay the same lenght even when the neck was lengthenning? Well, genetics.
And this is the "genetic baggage" I was talking about. Rudiments, vestiges and derived anatomies limited by the ancestral morphology, parts of the DNA that are no longer active, but the parents still pass on these "useless" genes on their offspring... Terrestrial animals still have gill-forming genes, birds have teeth-forming genes, genes for forming scales and genes for growing long tails and so on.
Even animals "inefficient" in some way can be incredibly successful here on earth, I don't see why it shouldn't be true for another planet. In fact, all living organisms are inefficient in some way, just some are a little more efficient than others and that's why they survive.
And, yeah, they might be slow, but not all animals have to break "racetrack lap records," right?
I hope I wasn't too harsh in this comment, i'm glad you like my work and I appreciate your interest! I just felt the need to explain myself a bit.
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No, no, I understand what you're saying. It wasn't meant as a criticism on my part so much as an observation. Keep up the good work!
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Thank you! I didn't really mean to soundlike I don't like when people point something out. Of course not! I'm glad you're interested in my work! But stil... I don't quite inderstand what you saw as "inefficient" in these creatures. Was it that they have three separated "feet" or "suckers"? but, you see, these three "body lobes" aren't only connected in "one thin point", the "bridge" between these three parts is rather large, it's like if you had a main "body blob" with the lateral "feet" and the oral sucker comming from it, so these animals really aren't "three body blobs with one common >>knot<<" I hope this clears up the things a bit.
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Oh, all right. I guess I misunderstood. I thought of them as those "three body blobs". Thanks for clarifying things!
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No problem, you're welcome! 
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OH GOD! RUN BURD RUN!
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whaaaa...??? Run? Doesn't a BURD got wings? :iconlozcatplz:
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He's a retarded burd XD
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I really like the patterning on XVI. I feel like I've seen that type of pattern on a deep-sea brittlestar. Is that where it came from?
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I don't think it came from there, but I have seen a muraena and a sea snake with similar pattern... ^_^
Thank you very much for your interest and comment, these are still far from being serious attemmos at depicting them.
What do you use to color your dawings?
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I use very soft, waxy colored pencils-- Blick Art and Prismacolor, mostly.
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Thank you! I'll see if I can get them or something similar here!
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The company that makes Blick pencils is Koh-i-noor, which I believes is based in the Czech Republic, so I'd suggest checking them out for good quality colored pencils.
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Yeah! I know Koh-I-Noor! 
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Thank you! They still need a lot of work though!
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Well im liking them a lot are you going to color from now on or just color a few?
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Well, working on body plans is just as important as working on color schemes...
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Yeah i hear what you mean XD
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I guess I have revealed myself! Oh NOOOO! My secret plans are out in public!!! xD
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Wow, that amazing. What is it about this project?
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They are creatures from the same alien planet as all the other creatures I've drawn so far, I have been thinking about them for a while but I had to wait until this point to reveal more about them, because I needed time to develop the idea a bit.
You can actually see my first attempts here:
[link]
[link]
[link]
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then all the drawings of aliens that are made ββfrom the same planet?
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Yes. Everything you have seen from me are meant to be organisms from one planet.
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Wow thanks!
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