i read the hobbit in 3rd grade and i thought it was really lame. however i liked bilbo baggins for some reason and i was fully convinced he was some sort of rabbit/mouse thing until i saw the lotr movies and was really, really confused
i was rewatching the rite of spring segment from fantasia and i've got to wonder. Why Did We Draw Archaeopteryx Like That. i remember toys having that same, boomerang arm shaped pose too. it's like a monkey lizard more than a bird.
Ooh okay this is a fun one cause while it technically is an Archaeopteryx and is listed as such in the production draft, I don’t think the design is based on Archaeopteryx at all!
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To me, this “Archaeopteryx” almost exactly resembles something else, the fascinating historical phenomenon called Proavis.
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Proavis, or Tetrapteryx as some four-winged interpretations were called, was a hypothetical prehistoric creature that was proposed in the early 20th century as a best guess at what the unknown ancestor of birds could have looked like. The illustration above was drawn in 1926 by Gerhard Heilmann, a Danish artist and amateur scientist who argued that birds evolved from non-dinosaurian archosaurs like Euparkeria. In his 1916 book Vor Nuvaerende Viden om Fuglenes Afstamning and the 1926 English translation The Origin of Birds, he presented Proavis as the imagined midpoint between a scaly ground-running archosaur and Archaeopteryx, which at the time held the title of The First Bird.
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Other versions of the same hypothesis, like William Beebe’s Tetrapteryx above, were published and discussed around the same time, but it was Heilmann’s Proavis that gained immense popularity to the point that bird evolution was considered essentially “solved” for decades. It was also painted by Zdeněk Burian, one of the Old Greats of palaeoart, which kept the concept alive in dinosaur books for decades as well.
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Of course further study has shown this hypothesis to be incorrect and that birds are instead members of Dinosauria (and honestly Heilmann either missed or ignored a lot of evidence for a dinosaurian origin of birds even in the 1910s), but the Proavis to me remains a beautiful and fascinating concept that represents scientists and artists striving to understand the prehistoric world and the passage of evolution, much like we still do today!
And of course, its popularity in the early 20th century put it at the perfect time for Fantasia’s artists to take… let’s say heavy inspiration from Heilmann’s imaginary Proavis when depicting a creature that was intended to be Archaeopteryx the whole time! The pattern of feathers matches up almost exactly, although the larger leg wings might have been inspired by Beebe’s Tetrapteryx as well:
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So to get back to your original question that led to this whole deep dive, artists didn’t actually Draw Archaeopteryx Like That except when they were mistakenly drawing something that wasn’t Archaeopteryx at all! If you want to read more about the Proavis and Tetrapteryx I recommend this Tetrapod Zoology blog post by Darren Naish, he does into more depth about the history of the concept and some of the unusual evolutionary ideas that Heilmann used to arrive at this weird and cool imaginary creature!
had we discovered Microraptor yet, and just misidentified it, or is the fact that we just HAPPENED to discover a small, gliding dinosaur with four feathered limbs a coincidence?
Nope, Microraptor was completely unknown and wouldn’t be discovered for around 80 years!
Beebe’s Tetrapteryx having four wings was actually based on his observations of bird embryos developing winglike feathers on their legs which were then lost, and drawing the conclusion that they must have had a four-winged ancestor.
Not only is this in line with our current understanding that ancestral states are sometimes reflected in embryonic development, but he was actually entirely right! While Microraptor wasn’t part of the direct lineage that led to modern birds, much closer genera like Anchiornis and even Archaeopteryx show that long, stiff feathers on the legs are indeed the ancestral condition of modern birds!
^ our current view of how Archaeopteryx looked based on more recent reexaminations of the fossil material, from Longrich, 2006.
change your icon/pfp and put something coherent in your blog description or you’re going to get blocked bcs people think you’re a bot
this site is built around reblogs, so please actually reblog posts(especially art and fics!!)
you can set your likes and follows to private
checkmarks here are a meme and mean nothing
follower counts are private and we like it that way, so get used to not judging people by that metric
drama and discourse is boring, use your blacklist and block button liberally
DON’T CENSOR YOURSELF!! we can swear and say kill and make fun of corporations all we want, and if you tiktok-ify your tags people who have things blacklisted for whatever reason will still see them, and people who want to see that content won’t be able to find it!! spell words out normally, you won’t get in trouble!!
tumblr live is sketchy as hell and full of fake accounts, if you decide to use it anyway may god have mercy on your soul o7
be nice to the reddit refugees, they’re our friends <3
This model has taken me so long but I got some help from a friend with the sculpt detail but other than that everything was done by my own two weirdly shaped hands
Goddddddddddddd Cleavon Little was cute. Fuckin’ hell look at him.
i love watching wilder’s eyes in this scene - he’s watching every fucking muscle twitch, every micro-expression. he isn’t gonna drop that “morons” until he KNOWS he’s got him.
my god, they were both so good.
“you know… morons” was not in the script. All the points to Gene Wilder for getting Cleavon Little to corpse that hard on camera. Also props to Mel Brooks for leaving that take in the movie.
Blazing Saddles is what happened when Mel Brooks (Jewish WW2 vet) and Richard Pryor (Black man who grew up in shittiest conditions possible) got in a room, decided to throw their collective fucks out a window and see how many groups they could piss off in two hours.
This.
All true, but there’s something else worth talking about:
Brooks and Pryor knew EXACTLY how far to go, and where to stop. Brooks has talked about this–he would happily show a Black man escaping the noose, but not one being lynched.
There are important limits to this sort of comedy, a delicate balancing act of how to strike for maximum effect but not to punch down. And a lot of people who are saying “you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today” don’t get that.
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