I recently discovered that most of the extant animals influencing Northy's design are actually one clade and had a day-long fangirling episode. Let's go over these influences and others in more detail.
The little exercise I did in paleoart before the "living" design is what I've described as a "filter" to attempt and make Northy's non-human traits less chimaeral but still inclusive. I'll have little rants that break down previous incarnations of the character but coming into the present look the previous one was explicitly just a lot of animal parts mashed together- and I think that's cool, but it wasn't, you know, me enough. Like I'm certainly gonna have characters that run with that concept, but that's not the concept I wanna basically inhabit as a skinsuit for internet funsies. What followed were attempts to integrate more of the weapons/industrial themes, and it just became a lot to manage all the animal and robot parts together. So, I decided there would be only one animal in addition to the robot parts. But it was a trick because it's actually like fifty.
I'm soooo hot and sexy and smart I swear aughhhhhh
The Ptero-Ducken
See, the plan was to make Northy a Pterosaur-girl in the sense of a fox-, cat- or dog-girl. I suppose the closest mythological thing would be a harpy, and when it comes to pre-existing lore for other stories I had written up I actually had a pretty fleshed-out concept for how these species exist. That's gonna turn into a link when there's an article on it. Because a lot of specific, diagnostic traits of pterosaurs would end up being blocked out by the human ones, I didn't need to be particularly specific- which is good, because I like a lot of them equally. Hell, of the four major groups I ended up including as example reconstructions, the ones I like least anatomically were the group that included her namesake, the Azhdarchids. So this, in a way only I admittedly seem to care about, let me cast a wide net for characteristics to draw from.
But here's the thing about big ol' dead lizards.
Pterosaurs are long gone. They were the sister clade to the dinosaurs in Ornithodira, but not dinosaurs themselves- and even dinosaurs still have living examples in the form of birds, but pterosaurs don't. More than a lot of other animals, we know pterosaurs from fossils alone. But we still figure they were fairly close to birds. Granted, a degree of separation further from birds than even Triceratops, but between being in the same twelve or so ballparks, and likely converging a little in some aspects as they achieved flight, birds are a key animal we turn to in imagining their life appearances. And wouldn't you know it, most of my favorite animals that would have been included alongside the pterosaur-wings on the chimaera forms are birds, birds prime for being used as a skin for the model pterosaur. Both aesthetically and behaviorally, it wouldn't be a hard sell to make comparisons between my favorite birds and my favorite pterosaurs. So I did. The pterosaur became a vehicle for my favorite birds to still have some say in the design. And here they are.
Giant Petrel
Basically a big seabird that decided to part-time as a vulture and also be an asshole. Look these things up and you'll find a lot of pics of them covered in blood- probably from corpses but still. They're a more brown-toned seabird, and their robust anatomy makes them pop out among the other greyer and daintier ones. As a Procellariiforme, they have a tube nose, basically they expanded the nostrils to use them to gauge speed in flight, used to help them in dynamic soaring. Their eyes are also very striking, and a good way to fill the look of the original static-like iris I had in mind for Northy without being so distracting.
With both Ornithocheirid (seabird-like) and Istiodactylid (vulture-like and Ornithocheirid-related) influences, the murdergull is an treasured member of our cast.
Albatross
While the Wandering Albatross has always been a favorite due to sheer size, the Buller's Albatross was hard to resist with its beautiful coloration- that yellow-on-black, hitting the same aesthetic notes of a jungle carpet python, with an overall darker head and wings than many other albatrosses. Procellariiformes alongside the Petrels, with similar adaptations, but less of a killy streak.
While the petrels have a generalist streak, as far as I know, albatrosses are relatively dedicated piscivores. Ornithocheirids are likely to sit somewhere on a spectrum between the two.
Loon
These fucking birds. So they're related to the previous tube-noses, and also penguins. But unlike penguins, they're pretty good fliers, but they're also good divers, with denser bones- in fact they're called divers in Europe. However, for hydrodynamic purposes, the legs are aaaaaall the way in the back, far behind the balance point. As a result, most loons cannot really walk, they just... flop. They also have beautiful calls and plumage and will fuck you up with that beak. They're great.
It's a little harder to draw a direct comparison between the pterosaurs on display and loons. Some pterosaurs exhibit heavier bodies that would likely help them sink, but as far as I know that's just the likes of Pterodaustro. I sort of quietly snuck this sclerotization into Northy via the Azhdarchids- some Azhdarchids exhibit heavy skeletal reinforcement, which precedents a form of densification among pterodactyloids. With Azhdarchids in, my conscience can let it fly for the girl that's a sum of four different pterosaurs- a beefier skeleton that can take more punishment and sink more easily, at a slight expense to flight performance.
Heron
It took a little bit to find out what they were, but there were these birds I always saw at the zoo. Not in enclosures, native, just wandering around the water exhibits. Black-crowned night herons. I also found out that the Boat-Billed heron has a similar color scheme, unique shoebill-like beak, and wilder "hair," though I do like the single/paired strand of white feathers on the night heron still. It's just such a nice teal and grey, and herons are just really good birds. Very good, quality birds.
This incidentally is also the time for Azhdarchids to shine again. Herons and storks- which we'll also be getting to- are commonly cited as ecological analogues. Big, tall, stalking generalists, not exactly oceanic though.
Penguins, Leatherbacks, and Nightmare Mouths
Penguins, which along with loons, Herons, Storks, Pelicans, Petrels, Albatrosses, and others, form the "core water birds" of the Aequornithes, a which is in turn a grab bag of most of my favorite animals, have a kinda fucky trait. Leatherback sea turtles, in fact, share it- indeed a lot of the news articles you'll find on the topic seem to go back and forth between pictures of both, not noticing that that's clearly not a penguin's beak. After checking around, it seems that most seabirds have it, albeit to a lesser extent than penguins. This makes a good case that Ornithocheirids may also have it as a convergent trait, as this gives us a pretty wide extant phylogenetic bracket for it considering how distant turtles are (even if there's still controversy for where they place).
The feature I'm referring to are these pharyngeal papillae covering the roof of the mouth, the tongue, and the throat. These appear spike-like but are only semi-rigid, and they're intended to, as I understand, help hold fish while swallowing, and prevent un-swallowing when seawater has to be regurgitated- probably more the latter on leatherbacks, which of course don't really eat prey that fights back. But despite this not-exactly-terrifying usage, they still look scary.
You know what else is scary?
A zombie held together by rusty machinery.
It's easy to see them on Ornithocheirids, which may regularly swallow water alongside prey, and could use a second line of holding it still beyond the teeth. Plus, maybe Ornithocheirids did that thing petrels do, or their Istiodactylid relatives did that thing vultures also do, you know, barfing extremely corrosive stomach acid as a weapon if you threaten them- would be convenient if foodstuffs didn't come out when you did that? And it seems quite reasonable to put them on a water-affiliated diapsid considering how widespread they are on modern water-affiliated diapsids. And, by extension, they're going in ya girl. This applies to a lot of the strange configurations of modern bird, croc, and even other reptile oral tissues we see, and I've opted to go for that in regards to the tongue and so on.
Mouthfeel blowjob 69 funny laugh laugh.
Gators and Beyond
Turning it into a person, one where the arms wouldn't be the wings as I was going for an almost centaur-like configuration to accentuate the ungulate-like nature of pterodactyloid limbs, I felt like I mostly had two options. One was to just do normal hands. Ehhhhh. Other was to try and give her what pterosaur hands would look like. Problem being pterosaur hands are wings and pterosaur feet aren't very hand-like. So, I turned to one of my favorite not-birds, the crocodilians.
The five-fingered hands of crocodilians are pretty interesting, it turns out. The forefeet aren't really webbed, have one more digit than the four-toed rear feet for five total, and they don't have claws on digits IV and V. IV and V are also sort of opposed to II and III, and I isn't fully opposed, obviously, but also sticks out a bit. This, when made a bit more anthropomorphic and given daintier scalation, looks like a reasonable, recognizably reptilian hand with human-like manipulation capabilities.
Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't say that crocs, especially Alligator Mississippiensis, didn't sneak in a little bit, those sly, loveable bastards. I have a little bit of an obsession with bite force, as can be seen with Istiodactylids and Dsungaripterids making the mark. And Northy can bite through a skull, after all.
Crocodilian skin is somewhat unique among reptiles, and it's reasonable to say its exact configuration would not be seen on many of the animals we like to consider close to them- but the basic idea of it seems to be present on other scaly creatures that went feet-wet. Skin imprints of sauropterygians- also cool- and mosasaurs- yeah- show that slick helps underwater, with smooth, non-overlapping, small scales. If indeed pterosaurs had scales, this is probably how they'd have looked on the piscivorous species, and maybe even just all of them to help reduce aerodynamic drag. The roles integument could play in aerodynamics are quite intriguing- maybe they had filaments configured in ways that reduced noise or something, akin to owls? But the prospect of a relatively scaly pterosaur is useful here to help differentiate Northy from an avian Harpy, even if I'm not sure that's precedented.
Finally, through istiodactylids and azhdarchids, a lot of storks and vultures get a little bit of a shoutout. Shoebills, Hammerkops, Marabou, Lammergeiers, Condors, the list goes on.
And with Northy able to carry the spirit of my long list of favorite animals, I'm pretty content.
...
Oh, but maybe we could have a little more owl, especially those claws that the old design had- highest crush force of all raptors alive...
...Which of course were originally more dromaeosaur-like, but then I doubled up on the big claws balaur-style. We know Balaur is a bird now, incidentally, so I guess that's still technically just bird features...
Snakes could also maybe show up, just a little... Ah, and so many cool fish too, especially sharks. And what about invertebrates, I'm sort of excluding most animals on Earthy with that. Or...
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