Sunday, March 25, 2012

Anolis turnover


This cartoon was done for a friend who studies evolution in Anolis lizards.  The theme here is that as the climate warms in the tropics, habitat specialist species that rely on cool temperatures in the shade of the forest may be displaced by robust habitat generalist species that move into the increasingly warm shadows.  Anolis, as well as other types of lizards, have speciated by partitioning their diverse tropical environtment, and may be homogenized by climbing temperatures.  The friend for whom this cartoon was made also has a thing for tattoos, hence the ink on that bullisome lizard.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Happy St. Patrick's Day



This weekend at SXSW in Austin, Glen Hansard pointed out Ireland was rid of snakes by St. Patrick, which essentially rid Ireland of both the feminine symbol and paganism.  There shortly came a plea to "Bring the snakes back to Ireland," so this cartoon was bound to happen.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Peltocephalus



The 9th Annual Symposium on the Conservation and Biology of Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles (i.e., the joint meeting of the Turtle Survival Alliance and the IUCN Tortoise & Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group) hosted a large group of South Americans presenting various studies from that continent for the opening day session, so it seemed appropriate to paint a turtle from South America for the conference auction night.  This stylized rendition of a Big-Headed Amazon Turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus) sold for $5,000 on August 16, 2011.  Learn about the upcoming 10th Annual Symposium... at www.turtlesurvival.org.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

4 details.


Keeping with the last post, another cartoon requested of me at least a dozen years ago, for another story.  This time I was supposed to produce a gorilla charging a man swinging an axe near an uprooted tree with paper blowing out of the roots' hole.  That's all I ever knew.  I was told the drawing was spot on for what had been invisioned, right before I was told the story wasn't being written after all.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Arena Giraffe Millennia



Over a decade ago, a friend said I should draw a cartoon tailored to a story he was dreaming up about a man trapped in a large abandoned arena with a herd of giraffes.  Every thousand years a dime-sized hole would briefly open in the side of the arena, and through this hole the man would frantically make his case to passersby.  It might have been more sensible to select time intervals of a hundred years, or to concoct a less absurd idea altogether, but the friend was quite young when he thought of this story that was never written.