the stress season

Hello people,

this blog is barely open for two months now and I am damn happy to see it already attracted some regular readers.
And as we speak, you probably wait for the next update ( wich will focus around gypceros ).
Sadly the reason why I didnt update in a while is still up to date: I have banners to finish, christmas stuff to finish, there is a christmas comic wich I really reall would like to finish until christmas and I have a damn huge project running wich is due in the first week of january. So you can guess how stressfull this time is for me right now.

These things said: I doubt I will be able to update the next two weeks.
I hope you are not mad at me.

Akantor - anatomy

Hello People,
Todays post is a special post! Because this piece is actually a giftart.
Dedicated to Akantorkriller from YT
After finishing the MHFU-Walkthrough I thought it was nessecary to show him some appreciation.
Actually: a lot of appreciation.
For a great time, being helpful and humorous and generally an awesome hunter.
So this times Anatomy of the epic Akantor is dedicated to AKANTORKRILLER

( Rock on! )
( big version )
(regular white anatomical version )

evil shroom

Two posts in one day? WOOOHOO! But thats exactly how I rolled today.

This time I went for something different. No Monster hunter or Pokemon stuff.
Mario fans will know this little bugger all too well.
(Jump on it!)

Of course, gumbas dont seem to actually have a skelleton. But maybe its partly cartilage. The most difficult part though where the Legs.... since the original Gumba has none.
But I think I created a somewhat acceptable solution.
What do you think?

Kut Ku anatomy - muscles

Now that I have the anatomy references I needed I can finally give the Kut Ku skelleton some flesh.
( big picture again. sorry!)

I am sure there are still a lot of flaws. if you like to point them out, just go ahead and send me an e-mail. I am always open for constructive critics and development.

The worst part was the tail for me. And I am sure the Masseter muscle at the jaw has to be stronger and thicker. And I left out most of its facemuscles including the earmuscles.

Monster hunter arm collection 1b - body

Today I added some... body to the bones. To show the shape of the arms in the way they would look if they where complete flesh and bones.
I don't want to call this "flesh" because I am planning on showing actual muscle structure and call this part "flesh". I am just waiting for a specific package to finish research and add muscles and tissues to these bones.
So the next part of this collection will be either "skin" or "meat".

( outer bodyline )
( covering bodyline )

Monster hunter arm collection 1a - bones

( Please look here, since picture is BIG )

Todays project was literally an armfull of work.
I decided to compare the arm-anatomy of the several dinosaurlike Monsters from Monster Hunter. They are officially classified as a subspecies of "bird wyvern" wich I see as a problem because... wyvern have wings. So I will stick with the classification "dinosaurlike monsters".

(from left to right)
The first subject of this project is the monstrous and enormously dangerous Deviljho. If you compare his arms to any other dinosaurlike monster in the game the first thing that catches the eye is its enormous high shoulderblade and its small size. In game it is the biggest "Brute wyvern", still its arms are tiny. He is the Tyrannosaurthing of Monster hunter, putting all of his danger in battle into his size, jaw and tail, crushing his enemies with his pure muscleweight.

The next one is Iodrome. The only other dinosaurlike monster in MH with two digits besides Deviljho. Like Deviljho, he puts most of his battlemoves in his legs, bite and his poisonous spit, so it doesnt really need much clawpower. Yet its armmuscles are unusually big.

Quite different from the next subject. Gendrome. Its claws are more hooklike and designed to slice. Its arms are quite slim, containing only of efficient muscles and ligaments. Though its moves are mostly the same as for Iodrome and its main attack is a nice bite with two big stingpoison teeth, it uses its arms much more than Iodrome.

The next one is the ( in my view) most fascinating of the three dromes. Velocidrome. He may be the first and weakest of the dromes, but his arm anatomies are quite unusual. He has no digits. in fact he is missing all digitbones. Those elongated claws are no digitbones, but bones of the palm. How this happened is still quite a mystery to me ( I am working on this. ) The velociprey has no poison or elemental weapon. All its power comes from its jaws and claws, resulting in the claws on arms and limbs being enormous. Surprisingly its armmuscles are quite scarce. Actually its just enough musclemass to give the lower arms enough downward motion to slam the claws into flesh.

From the three oldschool monsters I come straight to the three new boys on the block. Great Jaggi, great Froggy and great Baggi.

Great Jaggi. I personally like to call him Captain Hook. For hopefully obvious reasons. Also the small Baggi have a somehow hookshaped claw as the third digit. Such hook-claws are pretty useful to catch fish. And remembering that their nests are often near rivers and waterholes it doesnt seem that as impossible of an explaination. It has strong muscles all along the arm, wich is also usefull, since they might have to hold on tight to the caught fish and fish can emit a lot of energy when struggling.

The great Froggi is the newest of the dinosaurlike monsters. Its still a mystery to me, since I wasnt able to observe this species yet and the games including them wheren't available at this time. Surprising are the claws of this creature, who actually look more like HOOVES. I have no real idea yet what this means. But I will add all information here as soon as I gather it.

The last one is Baggi. Sadly the most unimpressive of this bunch. His arms are filled with powerful muscles, but its claws are relatively short. It probably uses them like a bear. ( its obvious. i didnt meet him yet either. sorry.

Deviljho anatomy skull

And back I am from the holidays to show of a nice new skull for you ppl.

Todays objective was the Deviljho.

A brute-dragon from monster hunter tri (or is it just a gigantic baggi?)
Anyway, the final drawings can be found here: (due to size)
(black and white sketch)
(coloured drawing)
As some of you might realize, the Deviljho skull has no earhole. It surprised me as well, but I checked it on an official sheme from capcom:
(linkylink)
Seems like our dear monsterking is deaf, because instead of an earhole he has this ridiculous big muscle. It bithered me somehow. But I am not here to brag about videogame physics. otherwise this whole bog would be useless.

I added a picture of the different process stadiums, for those who are interrested. I use SAI and usually make the shadows with the brush tool.

Kut Ku anatomy - skull

I doubt its a secret anymore. I love skulls. Skulls and feet. They are bodyparts wich are highly informational and funktional.
Still i lack the training when it comes to certain perspectives. So I used this mental image of a Kut Ku skull to draw different angles.

Cephalos anatomy

my second skeletton. Well at least the start of one. This time its cephalos. The sandwyvern.
[link]

its head is shaped like a shovel....

Kut Ku anatomy

I am and always be a biologist at heart.

This here is my idea of a Kut Ku skelleton. wingless and with wings.
Kut ku: [link] and [link]

The thing I am least happy with are its wings. Its difficult to figure out how it works (or is supposed to work) and its actually missing somebones. It is NOT like a bat wing, yet not like a pteranodon wing either.

I do think the ears are made out of skin, since they are foldable, so I left them out of this one. Still i gave him big earholes in his skull. he also has a strog and thick breast and collarbone to provide the big chestmuscles with a proper ancor, like in a birds chest. Still it is able to run pretty fast, so I gave his legs some of the attitudes of an ostrich.

EDIT 1 : Eargear
[Link]
I fiddled around with the muscles of the kut ku "ear". what it needs to spread its ears.

Horsea of Brehm

There are two main regions where to find a horsea in Kanto.
First are the seafoamislands and its surrounding waters.
The Horsea there match the most cummon species of horsea known by trainers.
Even though it is also found in the open waters especially at midday time, it usually lives on the shores and in the watercaves of seafoamisland, wich grant it a big safety in their labyrints of waterfilled caves against predatory pokemon.
One main characteristic of the horsea is its snorkle-like trunk. It uses it to feed on microorganisms and algae, wich are its main food.
Scientists now try to turn this into an advantage by breeding a special type of tiny horsea to use them as biological algae-killer in aquaristics. But data an this project is still rare.
Horsea of the seafoam islands are not built for speed. Their small fins are their only drive. Horseas streignt is a high portion of agility and a lifestile wich does not demand much.

The second main place to capture a horsea are the many big lakes of the safari-zone. But those horsea are way different from the open water ones.
Zoologists guess that once the Safarizone wich is now situated in a large hollow was part of the open sea decades and millions of years ago.
But the climate changed and the sea level sunk and left the safarizone as a big lake behind. The horsea had to adapt to lake water now.
Further in time the waterlevel in the lake sunk and the safari zone came to exsist as a large grassland with only some big lakes left.
But time left its scars on the horseas there. They are way different build than their open sea cousins. They surroundings of the safarizone horsea are large underwaterforests of algae, seaweeds and waterplants. Different to its open water cousin it is able to use its tail as an arm to cling to plants. Its tail is also longer. Moving through those waterforests by clinging from one seeweed to another became its main movingstile, wich is why its backfins are smaller than those from the open sea horsea.
Also its colour is adapted to the main greens of the lakes waters.

Vaporeons of Brehm

I like to immagine Pokemon as real animals.
And Animals of the same class can differ a lot depeding on where they live and of what ecosystem they are part of. So I started by showing the different variants of Vaporeons .

Top left: Arctic Vap. This Vaporeon lives in the icey deserts and always cool coasts. It has evolved way smaller ears, because bigger ears would result in a high loss of warmthenergy. Actually every part of this Vap is build so it can resist inhuman cold weather. Its massive body saves a lot of warmthenergy and gives away only a bit because of the smaller surface in relation to volume and the very thick fur, containing of lots and lots of thin hairs. Its arms and legs are shorter than a usual vaps and it has no ruff or backfinrow for the same reason it has such short ears.

Top right: Open sea Vap. This Vaporeon lives in the neverending deep blue of the high seas. Its whole life is based on speed, wich resulted in a highly efficient streamlined body and thin legs. While swimming it usualy folds the ruff and backfinrow backwards while swimming, so it can be even faster. There have been seen OSVaps who jumped out of the water with 80km/h.

Middle left: Swamp Vap. The foggy, muddy brown waters of the swamp are this Vaporeons homelands. It has shorter but stronger legs due to the fact that it often has to crawl through very shallow waters. The brown fur is a good camouflage for it when it drifts toward an unsuspecting victim before attacking fast. It has no ruff because a ruff would only hinder it when crawling through the roots of swamptrees and algae and the danger of being caught up in them with a ruff is too high.

Middle right: Inland waters Vap. Those Vaporeons have the habit to travel from lake to lake. Their habits doesn´t differ much from a usual or river Vap, but I decided to show it here because the IWVap is one of the very few Vaporeonspecies that is poisonous. Its tail has a thorn at the finbase wich can be stabbed into enemys. Its poison is highly painful when injected and a docter should be visited during the following five hours. Sometimes during mating season even other male IWVaps die in battles due of the poison of a stronger vap.

Under SwampVap: River Vap. The river Vaporeon lives, like the name says in floating fresh-waters. Like the Swamp Vap it has shorter legs so it can also crawlswim over sandbanks and gravelbanks or thin parts of rivers. It also travels from river to river overland, even though this is rare. They usually have a constant home in a mudhole in the wich they dig. RiverVaps and IWVaps use to hold a wintersleep. Because IWVaps don´t dig their own holes they sometimes throw RiverVaps out of their holes to seize it for themselves.
The rivervap has also an interresting huntingmethod. It stands in the stream with the ruff puffed up, so fishes who swm against this invisible wall get directed straight to its mouth.

Bottom left: Deep sea Vaporeon. It has some glowing spots arround its side and its cheek to attract prey. Also his eartips and tailfintips glow in the dark. It has speciallised large ears and Large fins to detekt every possible pray as soon as possible in a multiple range. It also has huge eyes because it lives in the twilioght zone of the deep sea, where only a hint of the sunlight manages to come through. The place where it is nearly completely dark in the ocean deps but still has SOME sunlight.
Don´t wonder about it´s belly being so round. Many deep sea creatures have very extensive stomaches so they can eat pray nearly as large as themselves. And they have to, because you don´t find pray everyday...

Bottom right: Male and Femal common Vaporeon. The Vaporeons how we know them. The females are a bit smaller, without the ruff and backfinrow. Usually even an inch paler than the males. The other Vap-races don´t show such a high difference in gendershape. Only the Arctic Vaps, where the females are bigger, more aggresive and have longer canines.

Links

My other sides:
Wohinn-dex
Tophatkraken
Snowedbarbwire
Deviantart (regular)
Furaffinity
Squiby
Twitter

Other interresting sides:


(and for the people with too much time on their hands)
clickables:

this pages purpose

Bits and Bones was created as a page where videogames meet biology.
You ever wanted to know the skeletal anatomy of a Kut Ku or a Gumba?
Or liked to know the biodiversity of pidgeys and vaporeons depending on their habitats?
Or do you like to read about the possible evolution history of Cephalos?
Then this place is where you want to look for it.

Though Pokemon and Monster Hunter are the main topics, I will for sure venture through other games in order to find inspiration for anatomy or behaviourarticles or developments.

About

Artist: Alexandra Damjonat
Born and Living in: Mönchengladbach, Germany
Nicks: jamew85, gepardenforelle, tophatkraken, suppenhyaene
Country: Germany

Was an artist since her early days and drew since the kindergarten. Combined with an extraordinairy interrest for biology and anatomy since she was a small kid, she likes to create biological explainations and pictures about things usually not depicted as natural.
Another addition to this is her love for videogames, wich started very early with an old school gameboy and a NES-system.
Combined this creates an interresting trial through Videogame-biology.

Note: I recently dropped my biology studies because of money problems and now am in search for a job.

Contacts: jamew85@gmx.de