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Meet Homo floridiensis, or “Florida Man”, a hominin species which roamed Florida around a million years ago, early in the Pleistocene epoch. Or would have, were it a real hominin and not something I made up.
Seriously, the infamous phrase “Florida Man” sounds like the nickname of a fake or misidentified hominin specimen which creationists would appropriate to discredit the entire field of paleoanthropology and the theory of evolution.
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In the semitropical forests of Late Cretaceous North America around 70 million years ago, Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis battles the ceratopsian Sierraceratops turneri. T. mcraeensis is a proposed species within the Tyrannosaurus genus based on a specimen from New Mexico’s Hall Lake Formation that may date between 72 and 70 million years ago. Its species name may not be as evocative or catchy as that of T. rex, but the two species seem to have been of similar size and power, so T. mcraeensis deserves some respect too (if it is a valid species after all).
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The Nile Valley queens Cleopatra of Egypt and Amanirenas of Kush are up against the wrath of the Roman legions! Can our heroines fight their way out of this predicament and defeat one the mightiest armies in the first century BC?
This is of course a fictional “alternate history” scenario I did for the sheer fun of it, but I really like the idea of Cleo and Amani teaming up against Rome. One wonders whether Cleopatra’s Egypt might have held up a little longer with more Kushite support…
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It is the 1800s in an alternate timeline, and the Zulu and the Maori are fighting over the far southern continent of Antarctica and whatever riches might lie underneath its ice sheets!
Giving both the Zulu and Maori attire suitable for the Antarctic cold while still keeping them recognizable as Zulu and Maori presented a bit of a challenge, I will admit. What I went with was wrapping their limbs with local leopard seal fur as well as giving the Zulu leather cloaks called karosses.
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This is potential cover art I designed for my recently drafted novella "Sinbad and the Lost Continent" (which I am currently in the process of editing). Inspired by the tales of Sinbad the Sailor in the 1001 Arabian Nights, it follows the story of a separate Sinbad identified in those chapters as Sinbad the Landsman, who seeks to replicate his more famous counterpart's success by searching for ancient treasures in the lost continent of Lemuria out in the Indian Ocean. Guided by the fierce and beautiful local warrior Nemong, Sinbad the Landsman and his companions must brave not only the savage holdovers from prehistory that populate the continent's wilds, but also peril lurking within their own ranks.
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A friend of mine and fellow paleoartist has had to euthanize his pet parrot “Sunnybird”, so I drew this Deinonychus with the bird’s color scheme as a gift to provide some comfort to him. RIP, little Sunnybird.
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After having been brought over from the lost jungle oasis it once called home, a Carcharodontosaurus saharicus has broken out of captivity and is now on the rampage in ancient Egypt. It has made its way to a sunlit courtyard inside one of the temples, where the Egyptian city guards hope to bring its menace to a halt to the best of their ability!
Aficionados of dinosaur cinema might recognize this as being inspired by a scene in the 1969 Ray Harryhausen film The Valley of Gwangi, in which the titular Allosaurus terrorizes a turn-of-the-century Mexican town and ends up in a Catholic cathedral.
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This is my interpretation of one of the Valkyries from Norse mythology, who would guide the souls of men who died in battle to the god Odin’s hall of Valhalla. I did this as a birthday gift for my big sister Samantha.
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This is my interpretation of Helena Walker, the protagonist of the Ark animated series on Paramount+. Since the character is from Australia, I thought her darker complexion suggested Aboriginal ancestry, so that’s how I chose to portray her, even giving her some face paint to further highlight that heritage. Plus, you have to admit tribal face paint suits the franchise’s wilderness survival theme very well.
quote:Originally posted by Tyrannohotep: This character would be an Egyptian gladiatrix who fights for the entertainment of Roman audiences. The design isn’t necessarily meant to be all that historically accurate, but given that female gladiators are known from Roman records (albeit not commonly) and that Egypt was among the Roman Empire’s most economically important provinces, the existence of a character like her shouldn’t be beyond possibility.
By the way, I wanted to try out a “cel-shading” approach (like you see in hand-drawn animation) with this piece, which is why the highlights and shaded areas have sharper edges than in most of my other work.
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In the Roman Colosseum, our Egyptian gladiatrix heroine has just delivered a lethal blow to her Germanic opponent! Whichever fighter they’re rooting for, you can see the Roman spectators are loving this!
If you’re wondering what those big leggings the German girl has on, they are supposed to be thick padded cloth which some gladiators would wear on their arms and legs.
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This is my rendition of "Lucy", a female specimen of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis which lived in Africa between 4 and 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch. Like all hominins, Lucy would have been capable of walking upright, but her species's relatively long forelimbs and curved finger bones suggest a superior climbing ability to modern humans that they would have retained from earlier ape ancestors.
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These Deinonychus antirrhopus have their hungry eyes on a juvenile Sauroposeidon proteles deep in the forest of North America around 115 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period. If the young sauropod can shake the feathered predators off and reach adulthood, it will become one of the largest dinosaurs of all time, with a length ranging between 89 and 112 feet and a mass of 44 to 66 tons.
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This is another depiction of mine of the scholar Hypatia of Alexandria, who lived and studied in Roman Egypt until she died in 415 AD. A teacher and scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy who also built scientific instruments such as astrolabes and hydrometers, she became an adviser to the Roman prefect Orestes, whose conflict with the Christian bishop Cyril would ultimately drag her into the early Christian community's crosshairs. Hypatia would face a brutal death at the hands of a Christian mob who had her stripped naked and assaulted with ostraka (possibly meaning either roof tiles or oyster shells), dragged through the streets of Alexandria, and set her remains on fire. Some historians have claimed Hypatia's murder represents the "death of classical antiquity" at the hands of religious fanaticism, but it should be noted that the mob's reason for targeting Hypatia had more to do with her alliance with Orestes, himself a Christian, than anything she had taught as a scholar and philosopher.
We do not know much about Hypatia's background other than that she had a father named Theon, and her physical appearance remains unknown to the best of my knowledge. Although her name is of Greek origin, there are records of indigenous Egyptians assuming Greek names during the Greco-Roman periods, so I believe it is possible that she was of Egyptian (or other African) descent rather than strictly Greek as commonly shown in artistic portrayals.
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What if Gorosaurus, one of the giant dinosaur-based “kaiju” from Toho’s filmography, were added to Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse as a “Titan” alongside Godzilla and King Kong? I think he would make a worthy adversary for either of them!
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This is my redesign for the unmasked Adam from "Hazbin Hotel". Since he's supposed to represent the first human man on Earth, I thought he looked too much like a modern European dude, so I wanted to give him a look more like that of the earliest Homo sapiens (aka modern humans). His features, especially the prominent brow ridges, are based on those of basal Homo sapiens skulls such as the 160-kiloyear-old "Herto Man" specimen from Ethiopia pictured in the lower left corner.
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Silesaurus opolensis was an dinosauriform archosaur that lived in Europe during the Late Triassic Period around 220 million years ago. An insect-eater with a body length of around seven and a half feet, Silesaurus has been traditionally considered a member of a sister lineage to dinosaurs proper, but some recent paleontological analyses suggest that it may be a true dinosaur at the base of the ornithischian lineage (the grouping of dinosaurs that includes the duck-billed hadrosaurs, the armored stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, and the horn-faced ceratopsians). Like the ornithischians, Silesaurus appears to have had a beak covering the tip of its lower jaw (or predentary).
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Thumbnail time again! Here, we have Cleopatra and Amanirenas fighting Tarzan of the Apes, whom the Romans have forcibly plucked out of his native time via sorcery so they can have him assassinate the two troublesome Queens of the Nile in exchange for sending him home afterward. Can our heroines fend off the ape-man's attacks and then offer him an alternate route to his original time period?
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It is 30 BC in an alternate timeline, and the Romans have used a sorcerous rite powered by the time god Saturn to pluck Tarzan of the Apes out of the early 20th century into their own time. They tell the poor ape-man that they will let him return home only on the condition that he assassinate those two troublesome Queens of the Nile, Cleopatra of Egypt and Amanirenas of Kush. Can our two heroines fend off Tarzan’s attacks and then offer him an alternate path to his native time period?
This version of Tarzan, by the way, is my interpretation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original character.
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Out in the open waters of the western Pacific Ocean, a saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) attacks a common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). True to their name, saltwater crocodiles do in fact cross the ocean around Southeast Asia and Oceania, and the remains of pelagic fish have been found in their stomachs, so it seems very conceivable to me that they could attack other animals in that part of the sea. Closer to coastal waters, saltwater crocodiles have been observed hunting marine creatures such as sharks, sea turtles, dugongs, and sawfish.
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A queen of medieval Mali stands on a balcony overlooking her mudbrick palace’s grounds. I love the Malian style of architecture, but damn, those rows of posts they have sticking out of it can be tedious to draw.
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This is my interpretation of Amanra, the fleet-footed and agile Nubian warrior princess from the real-time strategy game Age of Mythology‘s single-player campaign. Not only was she fierce, courageous, and noble, but she had quite an attractive design (as far as computer-game characters with low-poly models from the early 2000s went). I truly think she is an underrated heroine!
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This is a commissioned piece I did for a follower on DeviantArt who wanted me to draw an Afro-British superheroine of their design. The character is supposed to have the power to transform into a were-leopard as well as possessing other leopard-related powers. In all honesty, I feel that the orange costume in the reference images my commissioner sent me looks a bit too much like Vixen from DC Comics, and a yellow suit would better suit a leopard-themed character anyway, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the character’s established design either.
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Wanted to do a throwback to this 2019 piece of mine today...
This is my depiction of a little-known personage from the annals of imperial Chinese history, namely a woman named Li who was the mother of the Emperor Xiao Wuwen (373-397 AD, during the Jin Dynasty). According to the official chronicle “History of the Jin”, Li got her start as a concubine and and weaver whose colleagues had showered her with abuse for her being “tall and black” as well as a “kunlun” (the Chinese word for darker-skinned foreigners). Thankfully, this would ultimately play out like a classic Cinderella story for Li, since she found herself nominated as Empress (as in imperial consort) out of all the concubines.
I don’t think anyone knows for sure what Li’s ethnic heritage would have been, assuming she was a real person to begin with. The Chinese often used the word “kunlun” for African people, but in other cases it could apply to Negrito, Indian, or even “Mongoloid” Southeast Asians (e.g. Cambodians, Vietnamese, or Malays). Since none of those other ethnic groups are known for having distinctly tall stature like Li, however, I chose to go with an African interpretation for my portrayal of her.
By the way, the phrase Li is saying is supposed to be Mandarin Chinese for “Haters gonna hate!” Go show those catty concubines, my Empress!
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This is a head portrait of Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis, a proposed earlier cousin of T. rex thought to have hunted in the American Southwest around 72-70 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. For the most part, T. mcraeensis would have resembled its later and more famous relative, even reaching a similar size, but a shallower lower jaw suggests its bite might not have been quite as powerful as that of T. rex (although, make no mistake, it would have still ranked among the most powerful of any terrestrial carnivore known to science).
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These two represent a couple of basal Homo sapiens from Africa anywhere between 300,000 and 70,000 years ago, before our species dispersed out of the continent and throughout the rest of the world. I based their facial features off those of specimens like Jebel Irhoud, Omo Kibish, and Herto Man, although their influence may be more apparent in the man here since male humans tend to have more prominent brow ridges than females in any population.
Unlike some of my previous drawings of early modern humans, I wanted to give these ones less ragged clothing with some designs painted on them, analogous to the designs some later Aboriginal Australians would paint on their loincloths.
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Two thumbnails tonight. First is Astorgosuchus attacking Paraceratherium in Oligocene Asia, and the second is a Paleolithic huntress with her pet Megantereon in Pleistocene Africa.
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A Paleolithic huntress in Pleistocene Africa is showing some affection to her tame saber-toothed Megantereon. Humans may never have been able to fully domesticate any saber-toothed cats as far as we know, but I can still see some adopting cubs and raising them to be hunting companions. It would be like how people have trained lions and tigers to perform tricks in historical circuses.
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25 million years ago in Asia during the Oligocene Epoch, the crocodilian Astorgosuchus bugtiensis attacks a juvenile specimen of the giant hornless rhinoceros Paraceratherium bugtiensis.
Astorgosuchus was a close relative of true crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) that is estimated to have grown up to 26 feet long, making it a bit longer than the largest saltwater crocodiles today. There are memes going around the Internet claiming even larger sizes nearing 30 feet in length, but a paleontologist buddy of mine who specializes in reptiles tells me these are likely exaggerated. Goes to show you once again that you can’t trust everything you read on social media.
That being said, we have found juvenile Paraceratherium bones with crocodilian tooth marks, and it’s possible a predatory Astorgosuchus left them behind.
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This is my rendition of one of a fictional race of sapient fish called the "Deep Ones" that appear in H.P. Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". In that story, the Deep Ones offer a small New England coastal town wealth in both jewelry and fish in exchange for the right to interbreed with its citizens, thereby conferring onto them their immortality and ability to live underwater. The results of this inter-species admixture is portrayed as a subject of horror for the narrating protagonist, which is of course in keeping with Lovecraft's unfortunately of-his-time views on "miscegenation". For my money, however, the Deep Ones in his story don't seem so bad as long as their relationships with the humans is strictly consensual.
I actually have recently drafted a short story featuring these creatures, but my version of them is much more malevolent toward humanity than Lovecraft's, abducting them for sacrifice to the "Great Old Ones" they venerate. The story is a simple tale about a Paleolithic African woman and her tame saber-toothed cat fending off a Deep One raid, with both already having a bad history with the creatures.
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