Tag Archives: speculative biology

Posted on June 29, 2022 by dan

The creatures of my alien planet Junction and how to turn speculative biology into a story. Here is the presentation Many thanks to Charlotte Bowman,  Henry Thomas, and everyone at Specposium  

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Conodonts 2

Posted on May 20, 2022 by dan

(see posts like this a week earlier by signing up to my $1 patreon) You might remember my first radiation of conodonts last month. Now it’s time for phase two of my art/evolution experiment. With the aid of a dice, … Continue reading →

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Conodonts

Posted on April 1, 2022 by dan

(see posts like this on my Patreon one week earlier) Partly this came from a conversation we’ve been having at the Spec Evo forum, and partly from some musings I’ve been having on the random aspects of evolution. More on … Continue reading →

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Tottering Horrors

Posted on March 25, 2022 by dan

(see posts like this a week earlier on my Patreon) Experiments with an idea that never made it into Interchange. Imagine a fish that gets onto land, not by pushing on the ground with its fins, but by using its … Continue reading →

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The Deep Future

Posted on March 21, 2022 by dan

Over on the speculative evolution forum, Science Meets Fiction asked this cool question: “What might life look like if it had ten times as much time to develop since its world’s equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion?” I can’t do it … Continue reading →

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Some Kind of Alien

Posted on March 14, 2022 by dan

This originally came from a GAN-generated image (here, 2nd row, 2nd from the right). I like the bauplan I came up with to make sense of the AI’s work: Four limbs , one at each vertex of a rhombus, with … Continue reading →

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Flights of Foundry Specbio panel

Posted on January 9, 2022 by dan

This is the video of the specbio panel I moderated last year at Flights of Foundry. I’m a little slow getting started, but my guests had some excellent things to say, so  please skip ahead a few minutes and hear … Continue reading →

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Giant Mouse

Posted on December 10, 2021 by dan

I made a challenge for the participants in the Build a Better Monster workshop: make a mouse the size of an elephant. In my original sketch I gave it a long mobile tail (moving the elephant’s trunk onto its bottom), … Continue reading →

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Building a Better Monster 1/4

Posted on November 26, 2021 by dan

This is part 1 of a speculative biology workshop I gave to Amber Royer’s Saturday Nite Write group. We had a great time with the first exercise: what would a mouse look like if it was the size of an … Continue reading →

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Fishes out of Water

Posted on November 26, 2021 by dan

Some experiments with walking fishes. Start with a fish (0) – this one is a teleost. Note the pectoral fins are right above (dorsal of) the pelvic fins. The first tetrapods (1) evolved from lobe-finned fishes with the pelvic fins … Continue reading →

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