Old comic ideas

Long before I started posting drawings on the internet, I used to be able to come up with comics and comic ideas lickity-split, which must've been the reason why I thought having a webcomic would be a good idea. Alas, I have not been able to maintain this one on a regular basis, perhaps because I now have higher standards and it takes me longer to finish comics than before.

One of my older comics featured a Microraptor. (I mostly didn't bother to come up with names for my comic series, though I think I considered calling this one Microraptor's Diary.) It was essentially a Dinosaur Comics ripoff, with each strip using the same illustrations but different dialogue (though I sometimes cheated by changing the expressions slightly). I'd like to gloat that at least my comic actually talked about dinosaur-related topics, but, having found and reread it, that claim would not be true at all.

The general storyline of the comic was that the Microraptor came down from its perch and chatted with a Caudipteryx Similicaudipteryx and a "Cryptovolans" Jeholornis. In the last panel a Volaticotherium and an Eomaia two Liaoconodon would comment on the dinosaurs' discussions.

Updated template for my Dinosaur Comics ripoff. My original drawings are a bit too poorly-drawn and inaccurate for my liking, so I've redrawn and updated them for this post.

Then there was this series about a group of dromaeosaurids who lived in the same household for some reason I never bothered to specify.

From left to right: Updated designs for Ripper the Utahraptor, Snapper the Austroraptor, Slasher the Deinonychus, Chomper the Dromaeosaurus, Pouncer the Velociraptor, Leaper the Microraptor, and Nipper the Bambiraptor.

The comics I drew for this one were mostly short stories spanning several pages rather than four- or six-panel comics. I didn't draw it long enough for me to flesh out most of the characters' personalities and characteristics, though most of them shared a macabre sense of humor. The exceptions were Pouncer, who was essentially a prototype of Savape, being obsessed with killing (the others, though they appreciated black comedy, were not as into the act of killing as her), and Nipper, who was her personal butt monkey. A running gag was to have Nipper killed in one panel only to have him inexplicably alive and well in the next. This was really a fate that could befall any of the characters (frequently courtesy of Pouncer's bedroom doorway, which was a guillotine that decapitated anyone who passed through it), but only Nipper was ever actually deliberately killed by the others.

Personally, my favorite out of my old comic series was one starring an unnamed Microraptor Graciliraptor and its friends, Buck the Incisivosaurus and Quill the Psittacosaurus.

Redrawing of one of the strips I drew for said series.

Running gags for this one included the Graciliraptor possessing or being aware of anachronistic objects (as shown in the above strip with a book), Buck being berated for being a plant-eating theropod, Buck gnawing through things like a rodent (and making carvings of various things by doing this), and Quill being able to use his tail bristles like porcupine quills (hitting objects or other characters with his tail and turning them into pincushions).

And then there was that time I drew the entire plot of Raptor Red in comic form, but that's both too horrible to post here in its original form and too long to redraw as a more updated version.

Earthflight: Europe

The third episode of Earthflight continues the journey of the barn swallows and white storks from the previous episode as they reach Europe. Spoilers ahead.

Male white storks are shown arriving at their old nesting grounds. As they wait for their mates to return, they repair their old nests and chase off younger males that may try to steal their sites. Male swallows also arrive at their nests before females do and get around to doing similar activities. The slow-motion footage of swallows snatching airborne feathers for use as nesting material may visually be among my favorite sequences in not just this episode, but in the entire series.

This episode also shows other types of birds making the journey up north, such as common cranes, gannets, flamingos, and brent geese. In particular, barnacle geese are given a lot of focus as they fly up to their nesting grounds in the Arctic. Along the way they are attacked by a golden eagle (which is unexpectedly driven away by a flock of crows) and are forced to fly through a heavy rainstorm (which their waterproof feathers shield them from). After their young hatch, they, along with Arctic terns and skuas, manage to chase away a marauding polar bear in what may be the most awesome sequence in this episode.

Other scenes in this episode include an osprey fishing, a flock of starlings outmaneuvering a peregrine falcon, and sand martins catching emerging mayflies from the surface of a river (in slow motion, of course; Earthflight loves slow motion, to the point where I repeatedly used "slow-motion ____ grab" to describe what was going on when I live-tweeted episodes).

If I had to choose, this may be my favorite Earthflight episode. It may have been because most of the storylines were well wrapped up, or because I found the footage especially spectacular, or because European wildlife doesn't often get much airtime in documentaries. The one thing I may nitpick is that we never see what happens to the brent geese, uniquely of all the migrating birds they showed. They're shown flying along for one scene but are never given any followup, and it would've made the episode even better rounded had they done so.

Earthflight: Africa

Okay, let's see if I can break this just-one-post-a-month thing I've unfortunately been keeping up so far this year.

The second episode of Earthflight focuses on African birds, primarily vultures, flamingos, and African fish eagles. Spoilers ahead.

The dynamic between the flamingos and fish eagles is similar to that between the snow geese and bald eagles in the first episode, and after this episode I wondered whether such a storyline would be a recurring thing for this show, but that turned out not to be the case. Unlike the snow geese, however, the flamingos are also beset by baboons and hyenas on their journey. Dawnemperor remarked that the flamingos appeared to be the Butt Monkeys of the episode. (I first watched this episode with several members* of the paleontology forum Hell Creek on the Hell Creek chatbox, where we did live commentary on the show. It was great fun.) Eventually though, the flamingos do settle down at a lake where they get to perform their courtship displays to one another.

*Cheers to DawnEmperor125, Kazanlak, Pilsator, Sharkosaurus, Stewmorg, and Tomozaurus.

Besides hunting flamingos, the fish eagles get some other very cool footage in this episode, from fishing to fight scenes with other birds, including a marabou stork and some steppe eagles. It's hard to deny that a primarily fish-eating animal can be quite badass after those sequences.

The episode also covers the wildebeest migration, which we've probably all seen a hundred times. I don't know about the rest of you, but as spectacular as the migration is, it gets a little stale when you turn on the TV and find that every other wildlife documentary is covering it. Fortunately Earthflight puts a fresh spin on the event, covering things from the vultures' point of view. I think I like the vulture sequences best of all in this episode, because they showcased some rarely-shown occasions, such as a vulture being preyed on by a lion. And, appropriately, later on we see a mass gathering of vultures trick another lion into leaving its kill unguarded. This is, after all, a documentary about birds, and stinking synapsids can continue stinking.

A few seabirds get some airtime as well, and we get to see gannets plunge diving en masse and kelp gulls feeding on the remains of great white shark kills. Surprisingly, the episode ends on a cliffhanger as the white storks and barn swallows the episode had been following intermittently cross the Mediterranean Sea on their way to Europe, with the note that the next episode will cover the birds of Europe as well as the fates of these travelers. That also makes this the only episode to draw an actual connection with the episode that follows it. (Okay, the second to last episode does draw a connection with the last, but as I will explain later the last episode is thematically vastly different from the others.) I think they should've drawn these connections more often if only for the sake of consistency, but I understand that this may not have been applicable in all instances.

I really liked the effect of the background music in this episode. (I don't think it's actually all that different from the other episodes, but I found it particularly noticeable.) At some points you could even tell what species of bird the show was transitioning back to even before they showed up on the screen, as though they all had distinctive leitmotifs. My only gripe with this one has nothing to do with maniraptors, but with the fact that spotted hyenas are implied by the narrator to be mostly scavengers, when we've long known that this is generally not the case. (Some populations of spotted hyenas do indeed subsist primarily on scavenging, but this could've been made more clear.)

Earthflight: North America

Apologies if this is turning into the Maniraptor Media Review Blog. I tend to post these because they're easier to put together than other types of posts and there's a lot of material I can cover, so they're good filler when I don't have time (or, I'm sad to say, motivation) to finish more substantial stuff (which, as it turns out, is most of the time).

Earthflight is a recent BBC One documentary that premiered towards the end of 2011 and finished airing earlier this year. Focusing on flying birds from around the world, this documentary specializes in aerial shots of its subjects, utilizing various methods of filming, including cameras strapped to the backs of birds. The resulting footage is truly spectacular. Spoilers ahead!

Each episode of Earthflight covers birds from a different continent; the first being about North America. Three species of birds get much of the spotlight in this episode, snow geese, bald eagles, and brown pelicans. One of the overarching stories of the episode is the migration of the snow geese up to their breeding grounds in the Arctic, with individual groups of geese combining with each other along the way to form one giant flock. Whenever they stop to feed and rest, they are vulnerable to attack by bald eagles, but they are also shown to be very difficult to catch, as the sheer number of geese makes it difficult for the eagles to target single individuals. (The program even makes the assertion that snow geese are the favorite prey of bald eagles, but I'm not aware of any studies that support this.) Towards the end of the episode, an eagle finally manages to isolate a young snow goose from the flock. What ensues is awesome; I'll say that much.

Other bald eagle behaviors broadcast include both fishing and stealing fish from grizzly bears. Of special note to Mesozoic dinosaur enthusiasts is the mantling behavior displayed by one of the eagles, where the raptor spreads its wings around its food to hide it from competitors, as this is a behavior that has been suggested for dromaeosaurids. (That salmon it was feeding on looked really good, by the way.) Also potentially surprising is the sequence showing a group of bald eagles tossing a carcass around in what appears to be play.

Brown pelicans, on the other hand, are shown flying along the Pacific coast. They dive for fish out at sea as well as catch spawning grunion on beaches. The brown pelican sequences are also a good demonstration of the fact that even though Earthflight focuses primarily on birds, it also gives us an interesting look at the other animals the birds fly over. Most memorably, the pelicans pass over a group of leaping devil rays.

Scenes featuring other types of birds in the episode include red-tailed hawks hunting free-tailed bats, cowbirds traveling alongside American bison, egrets taking advantage of the strand-feeding behavior of bottlenose dolphins, California gulls catching brine flies, and turnstones and dunlin feeding on horseshoe crab eggs. Coots and mallards also show up, but mostly to serve as prey for bald eagles.

As mentioned previously, the footage in this show is nothing short of spectacular and many behaviors are rarely showcased. I've heard some complaints about the narration being "twee", perhaps due to the frequent use of metaphors and some anthropomorphism. Personally, however, I find it leagues better than some of the highly inane and sensationalist narration in certain other "documentaries", far from unbearable. If you don't mind the narration and like documentaries on birds, Earthflight is a must watch.

Incidentally, is this really the first dinosaur-centric blog to review this documentary, and more than a few months late at that? Jumping all over Dinosaur Revolution but shirking Earthflight? Shame on you, shame on you all. (I kid, of course.)

Raptormaniacs Revamp

Well, this is embarrassing. Being a self-proclaimed maniraptor enthusiast I've always considered birds to be maniraptors and insisted on feathering maniraptor depictions, foolishly believing these to be the correct, mainstream view.

Having read the new paper Claw & Troll (2012) "The End of the Debate: Conclusive Evaluation of the Birds are Dinosaurs Hypothesis Theory Using SRC, with Further Comments on 'Feathered Dinosaurs'", published in Nowhere (which you can read if you pay a really, really, really high fee), however, I have realized that the Birds Are Not Dinosaurs (BAND) hypothesis is clearly more parsimonious than its oft-touted alternative. Far from having no good evidence or research on the subject at their disposal, BANDits are in reality the oppressed minority who are brave enough to challenge the oppressive majority view.

To summarize, in their new paper Claw and Troll demonstrate that they haven't read exhaustively review all pertinent literature on bird origins in the past two decades, providing the long-overdue 99999th first objective, unbiased look at the subject. Utilizing the extremely unscientific useful, universally applicable method SRC (Spewing Random Crap), they show that the actual ancestors of birds are thecodonts (monophyletic group™) crocodiles Longisquama pterosaurs anything as long as they're not dinosaurs. It's not like there are no better candidates than dinosaurs for which we can clearly trace the evolution of all avian traits through the fossil record. In any case, there just is absolutely no way in a zillion years that birds descended from dinosaurs, for lots and lots of good reasons Claw and Troll mention, which are all really complicated and make no sense so I won't discuss in depth here. Most of them involve poking massive holes in the fallacious birds are dinosaurs theory by pointing out the glaring lack of certain avian traits in theropod dinosaurs (the group of dinosaurs commonly and erroneously thought to have given rise to birds). The fact that all these traits are indeed known in non-avian dinosaurs is mostly ignored, but that's a mere minor setback. The BANDit view is still stronger by far. They also note that the possibility birds evolved from a tree-gliding ancestor indicates that birds can't have descended from dinosaurs because all dinosaurs lived only on the ground and would die immediately of spontaneous logic combustion if they left it even for a second, as is common knowledge for anyone well acquainted with 1970s children's books. There was also a complicated discussion on finger configuration that greatly supports the BANDit theory, but their reasoning appeared really flimsy sound to me so I'm running with it.

Furthermore, as a followup to their 2011 paper, Claw and Troll conclusively demonstrate that no actual feathered dinosaur fossils are known. Compsognathids only preserve long collagen fibers, which probably formed a basilisk-like ridge on the back, even though other animals found in the same deposits don't preserve "collagen fibers" and it's actually not that hard for professionals to distinguish between fossilized collagen and feathers. Oviraptorosaurs are obviously birds, not dinosaurs. Finally, Claw and Troll intentionally avoid discussing deinonychosaurs because deinonychosaurs are cool, which automatically excludes them from being feathered, fossils be damned. Beipiaosaurus and Dilong aren't mentioned, but whatever, they've already dismissed every taxon that matters anyway.

Given this highly convincing research, I have seen the light. This comic will have to go through a complete revamp.

References
Claw, A. & Troll, I. M. A. (2012) "The End of the Debate: Conclusive Evaluation of the Birds are Dinosaurs Hypothesis Theory Using SRC, with Further Comments on 'Feathered Dinosaurs'". Nowhere 0 (0): 0. DOI: 42.15854/4095922.2012.15588802.

Happy World Sparrow Day!

March 20 has been designated World Sparrow Day, in recognition of one of the most common, most familiar, and most ubiquitous of all known maniraptors, Passer domesticus, the house sparrow. It is a true sparrow, a passerid, as opposed to American "sparrows", which are actually buntings.

Male Passer domesticus photographed by Fir0002, licensed.

Female Passer domesticus photographed by Diliff, licensed.

It is the most widespread of all wild birds. Its native range covers much of Eurasia, and it has been introduced to all other continents besides Antarctica. It thrives in urban regions, but it's far from being bound to cities and can survive in any environment save for tundra and dense forests.

The house sparrow is frequently maligned, particularly as an introduced species, as it is an aggressive species that takes over the nesting cavities and feeding stations of native birds, and will even kill off the young (and sometimes the adults) of its competitors.

While often considered pests, endeavors to eradicate sparrows (in this case the Eurasian tree sparrow, not the house sparrow, though closely related and very similar) in China ironically led to massive destruction of crops. Although adult tree and house sparrows feed mainly on seeds, the young are fed a diet of insects (as is often the case for many birds), and grasshoppers, major devourers of crops, are their most abundant prey.

Female Passer domesticus feeding young with a caterpillar photographed by Alan Vernon, licensed.

Perhaps surprisingly, for all its adaptability and ubiquity the house sparrow is declining in many parts of the world, especially within its native range. In fact, in the Netherlands it is an endangered species! In North America the house sparrow may be an invasive pest, but as the attempted eradication of Eurasian tree sparrows in China shows, in its native environments the species is as much a key part of the local ecosystems and as deserving of conservation as any other native bird.

I'm sure Dinky here agrees, don't you?

... Dinky?

...

Favorite Maniraptor of 2010 Results

Last year I put up a poll on the blog for everyone's favorite newly-named maniraptor genus. Here's a pie chart showing the results.

Balaur won, what a surprise (by which I mean not a surprise at all). Fortunately, Haplocheirus came in second place, followed by Linheraptor. I was surprised to see that Xixianykus had gotten a (comparatively) decent amount of votes.

Now, the time has come for a new poll. I have tried to avoid taxa that are technically still in press and will probably be officially published later this year. We didn't get a double-killing-clawed dromaeosaurid last year, so this one looks somewhat more unpredictable. Let the voting begin!

Edit: Pamparaptor is misspelled on the poll. As I can no longer edit the poll, it'll be there for the rest of the year.