The Filter Feeding Aerial Pentaform of Ashlesa 5.2

Ashlesa 5.2 has a rich set of near-isolated ecosystems. Among the few entities that can cross the vast deserts of the planet are the flying Pentaforms, of which explorers have identified two species.

Where the other is an aerial predator, this one is a filter feeder, a solitary flyer.

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The Machine of the World, by Phenderson Djèlí Clark

Phenderson Djèlí Clark’s flash fiction, The Machine of the World, is one of the stories that will be coming on Season 2 of The Kaleidocast, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to make my observations as it emerged into Meta-Brooklyn, recorded here in my sketchbook.

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Cimmeria, From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology

I am deeply honored that the Kaleidocast podcast has invited me to illustrate some of their upcoming stories for Season 2. I’ll show you another one shortly, but I’m just so happy with this one, I had to show it first.

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Iridescence: Evolution’s Love Letter to Color

Iridescence has evolved on Earth several times, as in the nacre of mollusc shells, the feathers of birds, and the shells of insects like beetles.

They all share a common structure: nanoscale molecules that refract different wavelengths of light depending on the angle that the light reflects.

It is very hard to draw.

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The Giraffatitan, often called Brachiosaurus

It turns out that the creature we’ve been calling “Brachiosaurus” — the one with the super-weird nostrils on top of its concave head — is not the same clade as every other one we’ve called Brachiosaurus for the last century. No, the one with the weird nostrils (not, as I was taught, for snorkeling as a submarine gargant, as it would have been unable to breathe with all that water pressure) is now called a Giraffatitan. Which is a pretty wonderful name.

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Finding the Boundary Between Plant and Animal

We have a really exciting opportunity to speculate the crap out of things right now! NASA just announced that not only did it find a solar system, Trappist 1, with seven terrestrial planets, but three of them are in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist!

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Fractal, Modular Physiology

What might physiology look like if a creature has no circulatory system or other differentiation with which we’re familiar? How might that affect its methods of reproducing? Its social life? Its evolutionary process, itself? Let’s explore the idea a little with this modular, fractal critter I’m calling the Phia. Or at least some pieces of it.

…which is much the same as the whole.

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