20 metres of death, a male Basilosaurus prowls off the African coast of the western end of ancient Tethys. The huge carnivore is actually hunting a 2-metre shark, which has only just become aware of its danger. Fortunately for the shark, the whale is distracted by the arrival of another of his own kind, a female. The male immediately breaks off his hunt, and begins a courtship dance. Hugging the bottom, the lucky shark speeds away...
In spite of its name, Basilosaurus was a mammal, largest of the ancient whales. Its name (which means 'King Reptile') was given on discovery of its first fossil, a single vertebra, which was misidentified as belonging to an ancient marine reptile. Indeed, when more complete skeletons were unearthed, bits of several of them were mischievously strung together, and toured the 19th century US as a 40-metre sea-serpent skeleton! Even though later examination of its teeth revealed that the fossils were mammalian, and the new name Zeuglodon ('Saw-tooth') was proposed, the unfortunate rule of scientific names is that the first name published in scientific journals always takes precedence, even when it is based on erroneous or misleading information. So, against all common sense, Basilosaurus it remains. This monster swam through the shrinking ocean of Tethys about 35-40 million years ago - 15-20 million years after the giant marine reptiles of the Mesozoic were wiped out, along with their dinosaurian cousins. Basilosaurus also represents my latest entirely home-made Poser model! The basic shape was roughed out in trueSpace, and the resultant subdivided mesh was brought into Carrara for fine-tuning of mesh detail, and addition of things such as teeth and eyelids. The model was then 'boned' in the Poser Pro Pack, and textured in UVMapper and PhotoPaint. (A nod is definitely due to the creators of Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, both for the inspiration, and the colour pattern which I used as the base for my texture! - even though, at the time of creation, the show had not yet aired in Canada) For this render, I once again used Vue d'Esprit as my composition and rendering application. As I had hoped, my models imported from Poser into Vue without problems, with all textures intact.Updated 2002.01.27 Over the past couple of weeks, I've been refining the Basilosaurus mesh, to make it more morphologically accurate. Based on additional research, I realize that I originally had the neck too long, and the tail too short; also, I've somewhat modifed the head shape. I'm confident that this version is much more accurate than my earlier version.
For the sake of comparison, the original version appears below... Updated 2003.01.06 I'm proud to announce that this image (the final version, at the top of the page) was selected for publication as the cover of Matrix, the Newsletter of the British SF Association (Issue 158, Nov/Dec 2002), and used to illustrate an article by SF author Stephen Baxter on the relationship between fossils and myths (see my original comments above).
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