Antarctic brantasaur
The Allogene period is a time of faunal jumble. Even as part of the Cenozoic, other classes of animals are now sharing the throne of dominance alongside the mammals, resulting in an unfamiliar biodiversity in contrast to our Quaternary days. As for birds, it wasn’t just the once unassuming European robins who took to the seas and replaced the whales. As Antarctica warmed back into a green eden again, it would be an opportunity for many foreign lifeforms to colonise. Legacies of Canada geese, arriving from New Zealand (in turn, introduced there by humans millions of years ago), were one of the first of these colonisers. Grazing the southern pastures en masse, they would explode in population and take over Antarctica. Over the next millions of years, the geese would specialise in different niches to avoid competition from one another, and now, fifty million years after the Quaternary, it’s a Jurassic Park of geese descendants, eerily reminiscent of their dinosaur ancestors over a hundred-million years gone.
The biggest of these dinosaurian legacies, and the largest animal walking the Allogene planet, is the Antarctic brantasaur (Brantasaurus rex). Named as a pun of two famous dinosaur species, and sometimes even comically nicknamed "goosezillas" by some random future explorers, these gentle giants rival even the brontosaurs they’re named after in size, with bulls getting around a titanic fourteen metres long, five metres high, and twenty tonnes heavy. From head to tail, these big birds bear no trace of a feather entirely, replaced by crags of huge scutes for defence, and for giraffe-like necking contests with rivals for a mate. They only ever have fluffy feathers as swift little chicks, but lose them as they get even larger, warmer and sturdier. Their wings are also reduced to tiny vestigial stubs, each tipped with more scutes and a single claw. Brantasaurs live a similar lifestyle to the elephants and obvious sauropods of long ago. Grazing the Antarctic prairies with their low-hanging necks, they travel in view-scraping herds across the continent, communicating to eachother with a series of resonant rumbles and honks, similar to their Canada goose ancestors, but even deeper. They also knock down trees in their path, growing the area of the prairies, making them a major ecosystem engineer on the continent. Thanks to its enormous size, a fully-grown brantasaur doesn’t have much predators to worry about, and can live to a hundred years, giving it a great knowledge of its vast Antarctic home.
My second Spectmeber piece, yet the format of my Bestiary pieces has also now again seen some change. The scientific name of the animal is back in business, wanting to give it a vibe like an "antediluvian" animal artwork from antiquity, straight out of the Naturalist’s Library. Me as the figure for scale is now just no more than a shadow. The look of this illustration of me makes me want to cringe, especially that this was based on an old vibe I had in the summer, the typical "aspiring" Dean Lomax-wannabe kind of kid from Britain, fed by tunes of Barracuda and Renaissance Affair, not to mention the cringey "silly" aesthetic rummaging the internet these days. You can pretend that this is just a random human, especially that I’m not even fully-grown yet.
