Friday, November 11, 2011

Avisapiens saurotheos


Within the very same Tet Zoo article that re-introduces the aforementioned Bioraptor, you will also see Nemo Ramjet's Avisapiens mentioned. Naish first brought Ramjet's image to our attention in November of 2006, in another blogpost entitled Dinosauroids Revisited, which I also highly recommend.

Avisapiens was born out of frustration with the hackneyed presentation of vertically-postured bipedal dinosauroids perhaps popularized by the very human-looking dinosauroid concieved by Dale Russell. The text within the image reads:
Products of primate chauvinism, the current models of erect, humanoid sentient dinosaurs are hopelessly wrong. With a horizontally slung body and the dexterous beak as the prime manipulator, Avisapiens saurotheos is a more feasible sophont, proudly bearing the hallmarks of archosaurian ancestry.
This exciting brand of dinosauroid, which pays due respect to science rather than pure fantastical whimsy, I find much more interesting than the rather trite and overused reptillians to which we are commonly subjected. There is evidence of a burgeoning reaction to the out-dated anthropocentric versions of speculative, post-Cretaceous maniraptora, and Avisapiens represents the best of that effort. I'm particularly fond of the phrase "primate chauvinism".

The artist and creator of A. saurotheos, Nemo Ramjet, has quite an impressive collection of dinosaur and dinosauroid-related work at Deviantart, including some mind-blowingly excellent "dinosauroid cave-art":


Avisapiens is certainly one of the more exciting versions of the dinosauroid I've seen, even if it is only a singular image and an appended paragraph. The image is powerful enough to speak volumes. It's like a quiet, controlled nuetron-bomb igniting within your imagination. The image is subtle; it doesn't force-feed you any information. It lets you do the work.


Here is an another dinosauroid of Ramjet's design from his DA site, refered to as the "Gigantopithecus to the Dinosauroids' H. sapiens". He also notes that, "they walk through dark forests with staffs as long as telephone poles, howling and singing as they go."

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