Liam Elward Paleoart 🇵🇸

When someone dies in our field (I’m thinking of Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues), it’d be great for someone to aggregate all the positive comments and anecdotes about them on social media and send to their family. A lot of our lives are spent in our professional work but our families might not know impact.

🧪

Pencil studies of the extant sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus focusing on the asymmetrical snout w/ single blowhole off to the side, along w/ eye

*clicking intensifies*

#sciart

Liam Elward paleoart illustration of Utahraptor standing next to a human silhouette. It is sleekly feathered and has coloration like modern birds of prey, with light and dark head markings a bit like a bearded vulture

Ran across a @paleobyliam.bsky.social illustration in the wild while idly googling... his colors for feathers always appeal to me

Thanks!!!

Yeah very difficult to conceptualize a sound-oriented organism with such small eyes on the opposite sides of like the biggest head in nature

Check out his award-winning #wildlifephotography here: www.tony-wu.com/sperm-whales

Single blowhole raised & located to side, tiny tweezer of a lower jaw that fits like a glove, the subtle curves of the melon/spermaceti...

Tony Wu's photos really capture the "battering ram" aspect of sperm whales. Their heads are so weird and their enormity only compounds this in photos.

Northern right whale dolphin (Lissodelphis borealis) illustration [Yumiko Wakisaka].jpg

Orca aka killer whale (Orcinus orca) bull illustration [Frédérique Lucas]

Many such cases

Spectacled porpoises have so much dorsal fin it seems there was none leftover for the finless porpoise

Cetaceans are such weird animals

This seems like a great moment to talk about the importance of science communication!

Science communication matters because it connects scientific research with people, giving folks information they need to make informed decisions about everything from health to hazards.

Weird!!! Is this a common occurrence in whale ontogeny?

For #WorldWhaleDay- Pacific white-sided dolphins making good use of enrichment at the Shedd Aquarium here in Chicago. I’ve always preferred this species to the “classic” bottlenose dolphin 🐬

For context, here's some examples of their usual proportions - much less elongated than the weirdos above. Maybe I just can't tell that the above pics are tampered w/ AI/Photoshop?

Under the right circumstances, at the right angle, the false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens) looks downright mythical. I wonder if they can get longer & more sinuous with age, if its individual variation, or what. Cause they mostly don't look this loooong
#WorldWhaleDay

The cetacean studies will continue until moral improves 🐬🐳🐋
#paleoart #sciart

Thanks!

I tried to go for a palette similar to those seen in modern dolphins & whales (without directly copying a living species) - somehow landed on this splotchy grey with accents of deep blue & gold.

Frédérique Lucas & Jaime Bran illustrating cetaceans:

Throwback to my first cetacean #paleoart, the extinct raptorial sperm whale Zygophyseter. This was very early on in my career (2018) & I had just begun using Photoshop.
#sciart

Thanks!

Another cetacean portrait sketch, this time the obscure, unusual Pygmy sperm whale (Kogia breviceps). Unique patterning behind the eye known as a “false gill slit”
#paleoart

Portrait study in pencil of the false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens). Trying to get a handle on toothed whale oral tissues
#paleoart #sciart

Excellent blog post & resource for paleoartists looking to reconstruct extinct whales by Markus Bühler. While the blog focuses mainly on Archaeoceti, a lot of it is relevant to whales as a whole 🐳🐋
#paleoart
bestiarium.kryptozoologie.net/artikel/foss...

"Where should I place the remora in my paleoart?"

Of course, there's a scientific figure for that (in the case of sharks at least)

Understanding of remora's “hitchhiking” behaviour from a hydrodynamic point of view (Xu et al. 2021)

Slender sharksucker aka remora (Echeneis naucrates) head

Understanding of remora's “hitchhiking” behaviour from a hydrodynamic point of view (Xu et al. 2021) Figure 1

For those unaware, remoras are the insane suction-cup-headed fish that attach themselves to large whales & sharks

Inspiration for your #paleoart of extinct Cenozoic sharks & whales: turns out remoras go all the way back to the Oligocene!

An early fossil remora (Echeneoidea) reveals the evolutionary assembly of the adhesion disc [Friedman et al. 2013]

Figure from Sharks of the World; A Fully Illustrated Guide (Ebert et al. 2021)

This is crazy, the lighting on this stock photo of a lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris) is just right to let you see the musculature
#marinebiology #sharks

Looking forward to it! Likewise, be on the lookout for some big shark paleoart in the next few months from yours truly