Wild Earth Integration

Well well well… if it isn’t Monday again.

Today, I thought it would be nice to show you an illustration I’ve been working on for awhile. Ta-dah! As many of you know, I’m a bit of a plasticine fiend, so it’s nice to get to show you these as I finish them.

But what’s Monday without a few facts that you could whip out at a cocktail party. I think it’s high time for a Wild 5 again.

And so I give you, the Wild 5: Bear Edition –

• Never ever try to outrun a bear. It just won’t happen. Although they look big and lumbery, they can run as fast as a horse. So picture them as large, furry, carnassial-toothed horses. *nods*

• Most people know about a few species of bears – the grizzly (like my clay friend), polar bear, black bear and of course, Yogi, are fairly famous. The spectacled bear, Asiatic black bear and sun bear are less famous. But just as awesome. Go Google them, I’ll wait.

• If you ever ate even a small part of a polar bear’s liver (not that you should, just sayin’) – you would most likely die. Like most arctic seals, a polar bear’s liver is insane-o high in retinol (also known as Vitamin A). To put it in perspective your liver should have about 575 IU of Vitamin A per gram. A polar bear has roughly 24,000-35,000 IU per gram. Moral? Please don’t eat polar bears.

• Some bears faced a pretty cruel past. Bear bile farming is one example. Kept in small cages known as ‘crush-cages’, many Asiatic black bears are unable to move or stand for their entire lives, while an IV removes their bile. Needless to say, this is an awful fate for any animal, so efforts are constant to stop bear bile farming in Vietnam and China. If this bothers you as much as it does me, you can pop by here to learn more, or make a donation directly to my site and I’ll send it to the right people.

• A male bear is called a boar, while a female is called a sow. This is not because they are related to pigs. In fact, I actually think if you encounter a male bear, you ought to be calling him ‘Sir’. But that’ just me.

Have a beary good week, all!

(Can you blame me? Really?)

Good morning on this snowy day!

Just wanted to pop in and show you a teaser of some new clay illustrations I’ve been working on for some Wild EduCards (flash cards for your little one, done Wild-Jess style)!

These cards will be available by download in the Trading Post soon (that flashy new link up top) for a very reasonable price – one buck!

This sort of reminds me of Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper, no? Please don’t lick your computer.

Details:

I’ve been working on some new illustrations for a book I’m putting together. This is the first one. Incidentally, chameleons are great self-help gurus.

Details:

My first plasticine zebra!

It is a truth universally accepted that if you don’t stand out, you’re much less likely to rock the boat. People might call this being a wallflower, but in the wild, blending in can save your hide. What can we learn from the camouflaged creatures out there?

Tiger stripes make sense. The shimmering gold and black plays tricks with your eyes, so much so that you can’t make out their bodies, which are inevitably stalking their prey in the grass with a ghost-like coolness. (Admit it, tigers are to cool as Tom Cruise is to kooky). They look like the grass, the grass looks like them – score one for camouflage, the world makes sense again.

So, what about the zebra? A black and white horse in the middle of the browns, yellows and greens of sub-Saharan Africa? What kind of a monochromatic joke is this? Would it not make more sense for them to blend in? The secret lies in the bigger picture.

It’s called disruptive patterning and it’s pretty much one of the coolest tricks of the wild trade. Here’s how it works. Of course, if a zebra were out there on its own, its stripes would stand out like a sore thumb. Or more accurately, it would stand out like something bright, black and white in a land where browns and greens abound. They’d be eaten up in a heartbeat.

But here’s the catch. Hardly ever is there just one zebra. Instead, they’re always hanging out together in large groups. Social animals have safety in numbers on their side. Zebras take it one step further. Disruptive patterning works so well because their predators can’t tell where one zebra ends and other begins. Their audacious stripes confuse everybody, so lions (or anyone else looking for a meal) don’t know where to attack. To a lion, a herd of zebras can look like one big, black and white blob. So, even though they stand out, they’re really as safe as almost anything else in the Sahara.

What can we learn from this? If it suits you, you can choose to blend in. You can be like everything around you and never worry about rocking the boat. But if you decide to be different – like a zebra, fear not.  Because soon enough, others will notice your bright stripes and they’ll join you.

Then, before you know it, you’ll be running with a whole crowd of zebras and you’ll wonder why you were so worried about standing out.*

*In case you missed it, I’m not just talking about what you wear!

New art, new art! Here’s the original:

And here’s the clay version!

So who is this guy? Archaeopteryx (besides being ridiculously hard to spell a few times in a row) is also known as the ‘original bird’. He is thought to be the missing link between birds and dinosaur evolution. In other words, he’s a pretty important discovery!

The first Archaeopteryx (let’s just call him Archie) was publicly announced in 1861, right after the late and great Charles Darwin published the infamous Origin of Species. Fine timing, I say! We have since found 9 other specimens, all of which have lent evidence to the theory of evolution.

The coolest thing about Archie isn’t that he was around 150 million years ago (crowsfeet, anyone?), but was that he had one awesome feature — Archie had feathers. Now, whether or not Archie was a real flyer or more of a ‘glider‘, we don’t really know. But his tail feathers were quite broad, which tends to imply they were used to get his body off the ground.

Of course, if there’s one thing scientists are notorious for, it is not being able to agree. Some folks think that Archie was a tree-dweller – climbing his way through the branches to find food. These guys think that flight evolved as animals glided down trees. (This is known as the ‘trees down’ hypothesis.) Other scientists believe that birds evolved flight by running along the ground and finally lifting themselves into the air. Surprise, surprise – this is called the ‘ground up’ hypothesis.

Either way, Archie was a pretty awesome find and although the combination of reptile + feathers may sound menacing, he was only about the size of a large chicken!