Assorted Fishes For The Big Book, May 2020 (Patreon)

For no particular reason, I decided to draw some more fishes for The Big Book today. All belong to groups that need slightly better representation in the book. First of all, we have the 'mid' Cretaceous Moroccan actinopterygian Erfoudichthys rosae, described by Pittet et al. in 2010 and argued by them to probably be a member of gonorhynchiforms and likely closely related to milkfishes, ladyfishes and kin. It's only known from it skull, so the look of the body is speculative. I decided to give the animal a slender, elongate form based on that of the extant milkfish Chanos, the result being a total length of about 30 cm. A peculiar feature is the protruding, squared-off process on the lower jaw - I wonder what it was for?  Erfoudichthys is named for Erfoud, in the south-east of Morocco. I think I've been there.

The big fish beneath Erfoudichthys is the large Concavotectum moroccensis, another 'mid' Cretaceous Moroccan actinopterygian. Concavotectum was described in 2008 and is known from a good 3d skull, the size of which suggests a fish perhaps 1 m long. We don't know its precise appearance but do have complete skeletons from other members of the same group - the tselfatiiforms, on which more below. Assuming that Concavotectum was proportioned like its close kin, it was 'carangiform', with a long, probably tall dorsal fin and scythe-like caudal fin. If you look for images of Concavotectum online, you'll encounter Joschua Knuppe's very nice reconstructions. I deliberately didn't want to follow exactly what Joschua had done, but in the end I couldn't help but be inspired by his take on this animal. I imagined the fish having a travelly-like vibe and was mostly inspired by the colour scheme and pattern of the Yellow-stripe travelly.

Some sarcopteygians

Now to something very different - I've also just drawn two sarcopterygians. I need more lungfishes and finally got round to doing a life reconstruction of Sagenodus, a Carboniferous form from France (and elsewhere). This animal appears to have looked superficially like the living Neoceratodus and I used a whole body reconstruction provided in the technical literature (I confess that I don't yet know where it came from) to produce this illustration...

Secondly, I've been meaning for ages to illustrate the remarkable coelacanth Foreyia maxkuhni from the Middle Triassic of Switzerland, described by Cavin et al. in 2017. As you can see, it's a really amazing fish, something like a coelacanth trying to be a parrotfish. The holotype skeleton is complete and fully articulated, and I didn't need to do much more than trace its outline to bring the animal to life.  It's about 20 cm long. As you can see, the animal has a beak-like snout (albeit no true beak, as per parrotfishes [the beaks in these fishes are formed of fused teeth, not rhamphotheca]), a tall and spiky hump on the back of its head, and a covering of tubercles and bony lumps. In devising a colour scheme and colour, I wanted it to look a bit like a brightly coloured reef fish (if you check other people's reconstructions, you'll see that they've really gone to town on this idea), but also to be coelacanth-like. I've now done quite a few coelacanths in an effort to depict the diversity of the group - but I need to revisit them and might have to redraw some or many of them, argh! That will be reported here in due time.

Finally, back to tselfatiiforms

Having finished Concavotectum, I was keen to compare it to the other tselfatiiforms I've done. This is partly because ... when there are years between my efforts to reconstruct member of a group, the respective illustrations can look different - annoyingly different - in style, level of detail and even line thickness. So, I dug out the tselfatiiform drawings in my files - turns out there were just two others (Eusebichthys and Pentanogomius) - and composited them into a montage, together with the Concavotectum. Do the illustrations look similar enough that it isn't jarring to see them together? Well, you tell me...

Ok, that's that for now. I should probably get back to squamates soon but I'm also feeling the need to illustrate more archosaurs. Thanks as always for your support!