Skip to content

Posts tagged dinosaur

ankylosaurus

ankylosaurus published on No Comments on ankylosaurus

ankylosaurus is essentially the super-heavy tank of the dinosaur world. everyone wants to either ride one or watch it pummel a t-rex in the face with its club.

also just to confuse you a little, ankylosaurus is a genus within the family ‘ankylosauridae’ (members are called ankylosaurids), which is within the suborder ‘ankylosauria’ (members are called ankylosaurs). got all that? good. there will be a test later so don’t you dare forget it.

ankylosaurs are a diverse group of armoured dinosaurs, many of which don’t have a club on the end of their tail (e.g. nodosaurus). it just happens that our clubbed boy ankylosaurus was discovered first (in 1906), so both the family and the suborder got stuck with the name.

the time traveller

the time traveller published on 1 Comment on the time traveller

so i actually read the entirety of ‘the time machine’ as research for this coming series of comics, which ended up being mostly unnecessary but it was a good book so i can’t complain.

some might think h. g. wells was being bleak and pessimistic when he described a future earth 800,000 years from now where humanity has evolved into two degenerate races (one of which regularly eats the other), but personally i think it was optimistic of him to suggest humanity would survive for that long at all.

on the other hand, he thought the sun would go dim and cold in a few million years, but actually we have billions of years until that happens. so that’s a nice thought, i guess.

who is dini?

who is dini? published on 3 Comments on who is dini?

apparently i’m now committed to using this comic format at least once for every character. at first i thought i was being super original until i reread scott pilgrim and realised it was doing the whole “name, x years old, random description” schtick way back in 2004. :(

time machine

time machine published on 2 Comments on time machine

(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)

illustration day mates. this one’s inspired by the book ‘the time machine’ written in 1895 by h. g. wells. of course, in the book the time traveller goes 800,000 years into the future, not 66 million years into the past, but in this version dini is the time traveller so what else would you expect?

i hate this illustration. it’s so complicated i procrastinated on it for months because i wasn’t confident i could do it. then when the deadline was getting close i spent day after day drawing, redrawing, tweaking, and redrawing again, trying to get it to work. i’m still not 100% happy with it but i’m gonna stop here so i can have my life back.

a street in western sydney

a street in western sydney published on No Comments on a street in western sydney

(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)

it’s illustration day lads! not 100% happy with the colours in this one but i’ve spent so much time fruitlessly tweaking it that i really just need to move on with my life. hope you guys like it.

being able to do chalk art like this is one nice perk about living in a cul-de-sac in a country that doesn’t rain every second day. for reference, a diplodocus is about 26 metres (85 feet) long , and a redstone rocket (which carried alan shepard, the first american into space in 1961) is 25 metres (82 feet) tall. so i think the rocket is a little scaled down in this illustration, but if i zoomed out any further, sedna and dini would have just been tiny little specs.

souvenir

souvenir published on No Comments on souvenir

well, that ends this little dinosaur storyline. it’s not easy making an engaging comic out of a biology/geology lesson, but i hope you all enjoyed it. expect wholesome space comics to resume again shortly. :D

k-pg extinction

k-pg extinction published on No Comments on k-pg extinction

maybe the reason dini always looks a little down is that he’s having a perpetual existential crisis over the fact that him being alive is a direct result of the dinosaurs being dead. life can be a bit of a cruel irony sometimes.

sidenote, if the phanerozoic eon was a movie trilogy, i’m pretty sure the movies would be named:
paleozoic: rise of the animals
mesozoic: the dinosaurs strike back
cenozoic: return of the mammals

cretaceous

cretaceous published on No Comments on cretaceous

obligatory fun fact: the word ‘cretaceous’ comes from the latin word for ‘chalk’ (creta), because the big chalk deposits in western europe were made in the cretaceous period. so next time you’re falling asleep in class, just remember the writing on the blackboard you’re totally ignoring is actually made of dead algae that lived alongside t-rexes.

…that is, unless you’re teacher uses gypsum-based chalk… in which case never mind.

jurassic

jurassic published on No Comments on jurassic

hey, it’s that period that’s famous because of some franchise that overstayed its welcome by soon-to-be 5 movies. you know, the one with all the cretaceous dinosaurs… what’s it called again…?

to be fair though, the jurassic period is when dinosaurs came to dominate mammals and other reptiles, so maybe jurassic park isn’t such a bad name for a story where dinosaurs break out of cages and eat all the humans.

and yes, for those of you who didn’t know, birds are actually avian dinosaurs. and since crocodilians are the only other remaining archosaurs, that technically means that crocodiles are more closely related to ostriches than they are to lizards. isn’t science fun?

triassic

triassic published on No Comments on triassic

the triassic is probably the most underrated of the three periods in the mesozoic. i mean come on, its like an awesome 50 million year-long tug-of-war between archosaurs and therapsids (proto-mammals) for control of the planet, until the triassic-jurassic extinction happens and the dinosaurs go “nah mate, we’ll take it from here.”

also, my hometown sydney mostly sits on triassic rock. so if any of my fellow sydneysider friends ever go to the beach or someplace and see sandstone cliffs, remember that rock was made over 200 million years ago when dinosaurs just started kicking around.

(this fun fact is guaranteed to make you extra fun at parties.)