Tuesday, March 12, 2013

A spotlight on Echinoderm Art

Things got a bit busy this week  and I've been discovering the wonders of the natural history side of DeviantArt!

MANY creative and wonderful artists out there and I thought it would be cool to showcase some of the notable ones, especially the ones that can be compared against the "originals"

Frankly, I'm pretty impressed. At one time, a LOT of these animals were known only to a handful of specialists in the world. And NOW?People make them into art!! That's amazing!

Here's a few...
Enypniastes! The deep-sea Swimming Sea cucumber! I blogged about these HERE.
Here are some video of the original inspiration!


SEA PIGS! The sea cucumber called Scotoplanes! I wrote a bit on this HERE.
OINK!
and holiday classics!
An interesting one with a Chinese art theme

A digital sea pig

Here's a link to a neat one called "Sea Pig Nouveau" that sadly, was not embeddable..but click here.

and of course, here's the original..

What follows here are some PALEOZOIC fossils, with added colors and "reconstructed" onto a Paleozoic sea bottom as if they were alive...
I try to compare some of these with actual fossils...

Ophiocistioids! Strange Paleozoic forms! I wrote about these only awhile ago HERE.
Here is an actual fossil of the ophiocistioid Eucladia from Yale's collection

Cystoid echinoderms from the Paleozoic!  I'll blog more about the various Paleozoic echinoderms some day, but there's easily as many extinct echinoderm fossil groups (most of them with stems) as living groups.   This image has a nice assortment of them from the Ordovician of New York..
Here are the three primary critters for comparison! The light olive one in the upper right corner, wrapped around the bryozoans is called Cupulocrinus jewetti
Image by Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki
The artist indicates the blue individual as the cystoid Pleurocystites squamosus 
Image from Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki
Here's another.. the brown one with all the unusual spines? tentacles along the sides? Is identified as Glyptocystites multiporus. Here's a fossil from the Ordovician in Ontario for comparison
Image from Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for this wonderful piece of articles and facts. I worked at Marine Life Park, Singapore and have to say i have been debunking alot of myths they had on several marine life animals based on your research. thank you, so much.

ChrisM said...

thanks. Just to clarify a lot of the content I've written here is taken from published research that is mostly not done by me.

scott vergiels said...

Glyptocystites and its relatives ,nowadays referred to as the Rhombifera ( In the past they were lumped in with several other groups in a catchall phylum called the Cystoidea)have appendages referred to as "brachioles" the apparent large hole on the right side of the theca held the many small plates of the periproct,often not preserved.