Halichoeres's drawings

[Halichoeres]

Brochoadmones milesi
Early Devonian
colored pencil on heavy-toothed paper

This one looks so much like a knife fish 

You caught me! The coloration was partially influenced by a reticulated knifefish, although I brightened it up a lot.

[Shonisaurus]

By the way Halichoeres What drawing techniques do you use? For example oil on canvas, digital illustration, etching in your paintings. This Devonian fish with its colors has left me surprised by its beauty.

[Halichoeres]

By the way Halichoeres What drawing techniques do you use? For example oil on canvas, digital illustration, etching in your paintings. This Devonian fish with its colors has left me surprised by its beauty.

Thank you, very kind. It depends. I do everything in pencil first, usually a 2H technical pencil, though sometimes I use a 3H if I know that the end result is going to be light colored, or an HB if I know it's going to be really dark. I use archival pens for black-and-white work, usually Pigma pens with several tip sizes. I use Derwent watercolor pencils for most color work, though I sometimes supplement with marker if I want large expanses of very saturated color. The Brochoadmones is entirely watercolor pencil. The Tethymyxine was mostly pencil but involved some gray and pink marker.

[Halichoeres]

This week's "Sunday Fish Sketch" challenge on Twitter was to draw a coloring book page, so I drew a selection of animals from the Carboniferous Bear Gulch fauna from Montana, USA.

Clockwise from top left:
Discoserra (an actinopterygian)
Damocles (a ratfish, I think so named because it has a "sword" hanging over its head)
Harpagofututor (an eel-like chondrichthyan, possibly closer to ratfishes than to sharks)
Bairdops (a small, shrimplike crustacean)
Lepidasterella (a sea star)
indeterminate productid brachiopods
Carbosesostris (a polychaete annelid)
Rainerichthys (an iniopterygian ratfish)

[Jose S.M.]

That would be a pretty great page! It goes perfect with the coloring book aesthetic

[Killekor]

That coloring book page look really well made. I like it!

Killekor

[Halichoeres]

Thanks, guys I definitely learned from this exercise--I would compose it differently if I were to do it again!

[Bokisaurus]

Nice, what at odd assortment of fishes

[Shonisaurus]

By the way, your love of Halichoeres ichthyology, has always emerged, that is, of all life. I mean that your love for ichthyology has been vocational since childhood? What are you most passionate about extinct or existing fish? I understand that your life is a life devoted to the study of marine fauna, independently that I know you are an ichthyologist. On the other hand I congratulate you for these magnificent illustrations.

[Halichoeres]

Nice, what at odd assortment of fishes

Bear Gulch was very, very strange!

By the way, your love of Halichoeres ichthyology, has always emerged, that is, of all life. I mean that your love for ichthyology has been vocational since childhood? What are you most passionate about extinct or existing fish? I understand that your life is a life devoted to the study of marine fauna, independently that I know you are an ichthyologist. On the other hand I congratulate you for these magnificent illustrations.

Thanks for the kind words. I have been interested in animals since I was very young. There is a story in my family about me talking the ear off a friend of my parents about aphids, and he, not speaking English well, thought I was talking about elephants, resulting in great confusion (I was about 4 years old and think I did not yet know the Spanish name for aphids). I started focusing more on fishes than other animals in college because they are so diverse and, in my mind, somewhat underappreciated. I study modern freshwater fishes professionally, but I definitely find the marine ones fascinating as well, and I often wish I had gone into fish paleontology instead.

[Halichoeres]

Haven't had much time for drawing lately, but I dashed this one out on Sunday. Only part of the head and almost nothing of the pectoral fins is preserved, so those parts are somewhat speculative.


Ptyctodopsis menzeli, known from the Devonian of Iowa, USA. It's one of those strange 'placoderms' that show some degree of convergence with the ratfishes (chimeras), whose ancestors lived at the same time but looked very different then.

[Shonisaurus]

Beautiful drawing of an armored fish. Honestly, armored fish are interesting marine prehistoric animals starting with dunkleosteus and ending with the ptyctodopsis armored fish that you have masterfully drawn.

[Halichoeres]

Haven't had too much time for drawing lately, but I whipped up this †Siamamia last week:


†Siamamia naga is a stem-group bowfin. Actually, every fossil bowfin is a stem-group bowfin, because there's only one species (or complex of closely related species, depending on whom you ask). The living species (Amia calva) only lives in North America, but they used to live all over, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. This one, as you might guess, is from Thailand, and lived in the Barremian (Early Cretaceous). Unlike modern bowfin, which have cycloid (round) scales, †Siamamia had ganoid scales (thick, diamond-shaped, more like those of a gar or a bichir). It had teeth in the dentary, premaxilla, maxilla, and vomer, so good luck escaping if it got you in its mouth. Like the modern bowfin, the anterior naris was widely separated from the posterior naris. Modern ones have a little fleshy tube in the anterior naris, but I left it out of this reconstruction because who even knows with soft tissue structures like that. Compared to the modern bowfin, I've also reconstructed it with a shorter dorsal fin, more similar to the related †Sinamia.

[Halichoeres]

I did this for #SundayFishSketch on Twitter (theme: New Year's Resolutions).



NB: Griphognathus was thoroughly aquatic, but had robust pectoral fins, so might have been able to haul itself for short distances over land. It was a lungfish, not a tetrapodomorph, so it isn't ancestral to tetrapods, nor was it involved in the water-to-land transition. The plants are Sciadophyton. A little bit anachronistic, but I wanted to try my hand at it.

[Halichoeres]

Brembodus ridens (Tintori 1981). Norian (Upper Triassic) of Italy. Colored pencil on heavy-toothed paper.

[Shonisaurus]

By the way, how many species of extinct fossil fish exist today including recently extinct species since the arrival of man? It's something I've always wondered.

Regarding the magnificent drawing dibulo. I congratulate you.

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

Your Griphognathus looks fantastic, and your work as a whole looks great as usual.

[Halichoeres]

Your Griphognathus looks fantastic, and your work as a whole looks great as usual.

Thanks very much!

By the way, how many species of extinct fossil fish exist today including recently extinct species since the arrival of man? It's something I've always wondered.

Regarding the magnificent drawing dibulo. I congratulate you.

Thank you! Your question is difficult to answer. In 2002 Jack Sepkoski published a compendium of marine fossil genera, which included 2996 vertebrates. 617 of those were crown-group tetrapods (mostly reptiles and mammals), which leaves 2379 marine fossil fish genera. Some of those genera include many species, whereas some contain only one, but let's ignore that for a moment. Sepkoski's total does not include fishes found in freshwater deposits. About 41 percent of known living fish species live in freshwater. Let's assume that the ratio was similar, on average, across the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Deep ocean fishes almost never fossilize, but freshwater fishes frequently do, so there are very likely about as many extinct freshwater fishes with a fossil record as marine ones. Moreover, hundreds of genera have been described since 2002. So let's say, conservatively, there are about four or five thousand described fossil fish genera. The number of species I couldn't begin to guess--over 100 species have been assigned to Bothriolepis, for example, although it's not at all clear that they each represent distinct lineages.

[Dinoreplicas]

Consistently good work.

[Halichoeres]

Consistently good work.

Thank you, very kind.

Here's one I did recently:


Icarealcyon malagasium, Lower Triassic of Madagascar. It's a holostean, probably a stem-bowfin, and the original describer posited that it could fly with its greatly expanded pectoral fins. I think the placement and structure of the fin were probably not good for flight, and the rest of the fins are also greatly expanded, so I think they had more of a display function.