Welcome back!

This is going to be an entry for _0Alice0_'s current art contest, themed by Wise-Fox: new beginning. I couldn't resist phrasing it a tad more dramatic in the title and you will see why.

By now, some of you may have noticed my fascination with history, and it actually extends to prehistory. When I was but a little elementary student I wanted to grow up to be a paleontologist, and an echo of that wish still dwells deep in the back of my head. So, the subject of new beginnings immediately reminded me of mass extinctions. It's quite a dramatic break to breach the issue of but my mind had already began rumbling. There were multiple mass extinctions in earth's history and maybe the most infamous one is the
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, marked within the rock all over the world through, accordingly, the K-T boundary. It famously led to the extinction of every non-avian dinosaur, pterosaur, mosasaur, and plesiosaur - besides about three quarters of all Mesozoic animal and plant life - and therefore the vast diversification and distribution of mammals within the vacant ecological niches.

Now, between the era of non-avian dinosaurs and the mammals really getting large and in charge, things do happen. Starting the Paleogene (following the Cretacious period) results in roughly ten million years called the Paleocene (note the c). I don't want to bore you all to death with time frames within time frames, and defining eras is much debated in history-related sciences. But with almost all big (say: heavier than about fifty kilogramms) animals gone and mammals on the rise, around 55,5 million years ago, we can start the Eocene. And that's exactly where I wanted to go!

You see, it's been named Eocene for with a short but intense period of CO2 emission, earth's fauna adapts to global warming and changes accordingly. (Or goes extinct. You know, as they do from time to time.) This is what they quite literally called a new dawn, with Eocene coming from Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn.
Phew, that's quite an introduction! I was basically on the road of drawing the mammal's, our, rise to evolutionary success. First I thought of literally drawing Eos, the rose-fingered, giving free an early mammal from her loving hands. Well, even my purple prose pendant of drawing knows boundaries, so I decided to instead make it facing the viewer, walking in front of a dead individuum of a then extinct group. And the first big mammals developed in that time, so that was a rich pool of choices.
And then I cheated.
I certainly could have chosen an extinct group closer to the Eocene, something from the Paleocene. But I knew, then and there, that I wanted the background to be a big ass dinosaur. Which leaves us with a gap of around ten Millions years, but how epic would it be to have a mammal like that in front of a dead giant!

Chosing a mammal was the easier part. I guess, a lot of you did also watch the BBC series Walking with Beasts (which nowadays is a liiittle outdated) and rooted for the Leptictidium mother, just like I did. But the first mammals that, according to my knowledge, grew bigger than a wolf were Pantodontae. One of them, Coryphodon ("pointy tooth"), survived from the Paleocene into the early Eocene and reached the size of a small rhino. It seemed to have looked a lot like a hippo and probably lived a similar semi-aquatic lifestyle. Remains have been found in the northern hemisphere an even north the arctic cycle.

So we have this swamp-dwelling, semi-aquatic animal of decent size, and I wanted to match it up with a dinosaur in a similar environment. I'm an amateur, so everything I tell you is from my mostly internet-based research and a lot of (maybe outdated and simplified) documetaries, so take everything with a grain of salt. But when I think of semi-aquatic dinosaurs, I think Spinosauridae. And when you say northern, I say Baryonyx.

Baryonyx walkeri ("Walker's heavy claw") lived in the early Cretacious (remember, I did admit cheating) and was a gharial-like snouted theropod with relatively long arms and, I suppose, heavy claws. It had webbed feet, as seen in fossilised footprints, a small crest, and dorsal spines - though nothing noteworthy compared to his African cousin, Spinosaurus aegypticus. Its teeth seem evolved to catch fish but apparently it also preyed on dinosaurs. The size estimates vary but I found numbers around 2,5 metre in height and 10 metre in lenght.

For composition I wanted to go easy, having a dawn (because I'm subtle like that), the body of a dead Baryonyx with it's head turned away from the viewer, and Coryphodon walking towards the viewer. (Also I resisted a speech bubble, "I win", but it wouldn't fit anyway, because both of them went extinct in the end.) I did a few semi-mountains as a fainting effect at the horizon and put some rock on the sandy ground I saw in Eocene scenery reconstructions, but the focus should stay on the animals themselves.

I am no paleoartist. I didn't have a clue on what to colour them other than a wild guess and Wikipedia pictures. By now, I also ran out of time. So I set my trust into the loving paleoartist community and looked up other reconstructions. Coryphodon, living similar to a hippo, often is depicted with according colouration. It seemed logical to me, and I emphasized a blue undertone as to set him up from the other elements. I feel bad for putting composition and colour scheme before science and accuracy, but I knew that, with work limiting my time and my query being long, I couldn't invest enough research time and effort to satisfy my own aspiration. So I'll enter the contest with this piece being explicitly not an illustration intending accurate reconstruction! I can only hope to achieve something along that line later. I'd certainly love to!
For Baryonyx and his plumage I've been influenced by TreyTheExplainer and his YouTube videos - go check out his channel if you're interested in paleontology, anthropology, or cryptology! - and gave him a rather large coverage of protofeathers (pycnofibers? Or are that just pterosaurs?), leaving ot his snout, feet, hands, and belly. It made sense to me that those parts were rather scaly to fit the semi-aquatic lifestyle. The pose doesn't make the crest and dorsal spines visible that well, so I put some thought into his neck that looked as if it could feature a throat pouch-like structure like a pelican's. I've seen reconstructions with that as well. The colours and the stripe pattern on his face and tail were inspired if not taken from DeviantArt user yoult and his depiction of Baryonyx (https://www.deviantart.com/yoult/art/Spinosauridae-01-257550094) who got inspired by sea birds - another connection that made sense to me.

I was badly out of shape drawing creatures, but I hope, I didn't let you down with that. A lot of thought went into it - though not as much as the motif deserves -, and I tried my best with the pose I so headstrongly chose without giving in to frustration (dinosaur feet from that perspective were ... new to me).

This picture is an A5 format and drawn with multiliners of different sized tips from 0.05 to 0.3 as well as a brush pen. Colouration is done in water colours, more water colours, and some white lacquer marker. It's also a little wave to my childhood dream and my passion for paleobiology ... and a little bit of bragging. That not-a-hippo guy's ancestors were tiny creatures dwelling in the shadows and look how big he is now. Not as big as you, spiny boy, but we're having a new start, a new dawn, and we're on our way figuring out what we can become with all that free space.
Hey, were mammals! We survived.