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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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