Between the Morae River and the Red Valley

I discussed Brynn Metheny's 'Morae River' project once before in this blog. The project dealt with life forms in a certain geographical area called 'Solturna'. The animals there at first glance looked like Earth's mammals, reptiles, or fish, so you might think that the Morae valley might be somewhere on Earth. But a closer look revealed small but telling differences in anatomy, so you might think that the creatures perhaps stemmed from a not too alternate time-line and were mammaloid, reptiloid and ichthyoid. But a few animals departed so much from regular Earth stock to make you think that they required an extremely early divergence or an unearthly origin. Brynn gave no clue as how to place her creations, and preferred a fluid interpretation. Earlier this year she unfortunately decided to stop working on the Morae River. But that should those who never visited the site from doing so, as it is a great project even if it is no longer updated.



Luckily she did not stop producing odd animals. Far from it! I gather that she is making 'creature design' her career, which hopefully means that there is much more to come. There are several places where you can admire her work: she has a site on Deviant Art where she goes under the name of LenoreKitty. She has a site under her own name, brynnart.com, as well as one going by the name of Fishhook studio. I selected a few paintings for you to see here, and expect that they will make you hungry for more.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

The pygmy esorifleu

As you can see, this is an arboreal creature with a strong bill, like a parrot's, and six limbs. The middle pair are placed at the top of the animal and are directed upwards, whereas the front and aft pairs are directed downward. There is also a tail, which looks like it is prehensile. This animal can only be a brachiating carnivore. It looks somewhat like my marblebill, to be found on the Furaha site but also in this blog (here and here). A fairly large design difference is that the esorifleu using its middle pair of limbs to swing from, whereas I chose the front pair. Brynn wrote me that the pygmy was designed for a creature design contest. I think the marblebill and the esorifleu are nice examples of convergent speculation.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

Elegant hunters

And indeed they are. Mind you, the prey look rather dashing as well. The beaks of the hunters remind me of the mouth of a deinichthys. At first glance their body design seems to say 'bony fish from Earth', with its vertical tail, fin rays, gills and dorsal fin. But then you notice that instead of one pair of pectoral fins there are two, giving a jolt to the idea of what exactly they are. What I do not know is whether you have to know that two pairs of pectoral fins are impossible for that jolt to occur. Anyway, four gill slits is an unusual number as well.

I would like to see more of their prey, whose 'Bauplan' seems much more unearthly. I like the bumps on the front of the flippers. Not many swimming animals have those, but humpback whales have very knobbly leading edges on their enormous flippers, and in their case the turbulence they cause actually seems to help. Is that the end of a siphon I see on their sides? Are those expiratory outlets?

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

'Mamma'

No classification problems here: that's a perissodactyl unguloid, or a hoofed animal with an odd number of toes. But are those concentric structures external ears? Perhaps the animal is not Terran after all...

What I like a great deal about this one is how the animals are not simply shown in side view, but are much more three-dimensional. The calf's head cannot be seen, and the mother's head is turned away a bit as well. This is where the trained artist shows herself, I think.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

A work in progress

Lacking a name, let's call it a 'wip'. If I see correctly there is just one pair of eyes, and the other markings on its head are nostrils and ears. Even so, this animal is more alien than the previous one, with the sail on its neck and particularly the spikes at the base of its tail. Now what are these doing there? They are not placed well for attack or defence, so perhaps they are for display purposes, and display to members of the same species always boils down to sex. Do the spikes serve to impress other wips, or do they provide tactile stimulation during procreation? I had better reign in my imagination here...

It's a beauty though.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

Another work in progress

If it is, we might as well label it a 'wiptoo'. It is interesting how this head and neck study immediately evokes the notion that we are looking at a very large animal. One reason must be the relatively thick neck. Large animals need proportionately thicker limbs, and that goes for necks too (see here and here for the reasons). Apparently we are so used to seeing the results of these laws of nature that we immediately draw conclusions from seeing their results. Alternatively, of course, this could be a moderately sized animal from a heavy-gravity world, but I do not think so: its eyes are also small in relation to its body. They seem to be camera eys such as vertebrates have on Earth. While bigger animals generally have bigger eyes, eye size does not increase directly with body size, so large animals have relatively small eyes. As with neck thickness, the observer takes these cues and judges the size of the animal, consciously or unconsciously.

Its skin glistens. You can tell from the linear nature of the reflections that its skin is smooth, and I wonder whether it is wet because it just emerged from a swamp or something similar or because the skin itself is wet or oily. A large animal with a permanently wet skin would need a permanently moist and saturated environment. Perhaps it lives as brontosaurs were once thought to do: in humid steaming swamps.

Click to enlarge; copyright Brynn Metheney

There are no animals on this painting, but the image contains a promise. The website of the Red Valley project is already up, but there's not much to see yet. We are promised that animals will appear there in the Fall, so hopefully Brynn won't keep us waiting too long. She wrote me that she is not going to reveal all about the planet: "I might know details about the whole of the planet and such but as far as my viewers are concerned, I'd like it to just be about this valley." I agree with that sentiment: always leave the viewer or the audience hungry for a bit more, and a hint that there is in fact more does wonders to whet the appetite. She added: "I want the flora and fauna to feel alien enough but I want viewers to rel`te to them as well."

From what Brynn has done in the past, I think she will succeed. The text on the Red River site also states: "No regions, no classification, just this place as it is." Oh very well, I get the message: I should stop trying to classify these animals to see where they belong and what makes them work.



Hmmm; as if I could...

Radial Robots

'Radial robots'; for a title that isn't too bad. I was tempted to add words with 'r' such as 'rampaging' or 'ravaging', but I resisted, as that ran the risk of rather ruining the effect, rendering it ridiculous.

Back to the matter at hand. When I first thought of a radial walking pattern, resulting in Furahan spidrids, I was content to visualise the gait by writing some programmes in Matlab. The results are shown on the Furaha page, and some were featured in the blog as well (here and here). I never imagined I would see really see spidrids walk. Literally, of course, I never will, unless creative bioengineering kits become available quickly, which is unlikely. But walking robots have emerged on the scene since I thought of the spidrids, and among them radial leg designs, as opposed to bilateral symmetry, seem to be quite popular. You can even buy kits to build one yourself. As these designs probably evolved independently, it is interesting to see how parallel these forms of evolution have become: convergent speculation? I therefore surveyed the internet to see whether their anatomy and gaits resembled those of Furahan spidrids. As most of the robots out there seem to be hexapods, I made a quick hexapod version of my originally octapod spidrids (if you need information on spidrids, go to the land section of the Furaha site and select 'walking with...'). A mutation, if you will.

Mutated spidrid; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here it is. I cannot call it a spidrid any longer, as that name evoked spiders, and therefore eight legs. Suggestions are welcome. The beasty walks with the simplest possible gait: that is a double tripod gait, in which the six legs are divided into two groups of three. The three legs of a group move in unison, and the two groups are exactly out of phase. Provided that each leg touches the ground longer than it is off it, there will always be at least three lags on the ground (either that or six). This gait, together with sprawling legs, provides excellent stability. As discussed previously, this is useful for very small animals, soupy atmospheres or a very low walking velocity. It also doesn't require subtle neural control, making it suitable for today's rather dumb robots. It is also a bit boring, which is why my spidrids walk with different gaits, but that is another matter.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Next, a scheme to show how the joint anatomy works. Spidrids are very simple: there is a joint at the 'hip', in which the entire leg can rotate clockwise or anti-clockwise. The rotation axis is vertical, indicated by a shiny metal axis and a red arrow. All other joints are simple hinges allowing the segments of the leg to be stretched or bent, and the axes are horizontal, indicated by more shiny axes and blue arrows. Now that the basic spidrid anatomy and gait are clear, it is time to see whether the robot creators have evolved completely different approaches, or whether they evolved the same ideas.

The first video is of a hexapod robot from this YouTube source. As soon as you see it move you will see that its leg anatomy is exactly that of the spidrid: there is one vertical axis at the hip, and the leg itself only contains horizontal axes. The gait is simple as well, in that the legs move in two sets of three, just like the animation above. I like the clunking sound it makes, as if a whole battalion of Cybermen comes clunking down the street. It does one thing my spidrid animations do not (as yet): it changes gait, in the sense that it moves from a circular rotation to walking again (I could have programmed that, but that is a lot of work...).

Here is another one (source here), and this one has a more biological feel to it, in the sense that the movements seem smoother and less mechanical. It does have the same basic anatomy though. Its gaits seem more diverse.

Just to show that radial robots are not restricted to six legs, here is an eight-legged one (source here), more reminiscent of the original spidrids. With eight legs there are many ways to move the legs, and the risks of falling are diminished, as it is easier to spread weight-bearing evenly around the centre of gravity.

Click to enlarge; source here

Finally, just a look at this one suggest a radical departure from the norm. It has four legs, but that is not the point, as it still clearly has a radial anatomy. The legs do not seem to be attached in the usual fashion: where they touch the body the joint seems to be a simple hinge with a horizontal axis. In fact, all its joints seem to have horizontal axes. So how does it move its legs in more than one direction? How can it walk if all its legs can do is stretch and shorten? The answer lies in its design: this robot is fundamentally different. It is part of a project in which the robot has an internal representation of its body, so it can learn to move once more after its legs have been damaged. In short, it is a lot more intelligent than its dumb brethren. If you want interesting movements, always add a brain (an insect type of brain will do).

And this video shows how it moves: it tilts its body, and that takes the place of (anti)clockwise leg rotations. By varying the tilt of its body the reach of its legs becomes much more varied than with an immobile body. In fact, with the anatomy it has, body tilt is the only way forward (pun intended). What a clever design! I love it.

Does this mean that the 'usual' radial design is flawed? I think not. There are good reasons why this design was invented several times, for robots as well as spidrids: it is simple and allows good mobility. Now, if the robots develop more interesting and sophisticated gaits, we are in business: model spidrids in your own home; what more could you wish for?