Those are some very fluffy and finely-textured designs. I like the kiwi plent.
The otter looks so much like a real mustelid or lanky rodent of some sort that it could be used for a fake-out gag describing Sagan 4's fauna, or a list of increasingly strange fauna such as "Pine tree, but purple", "Otter, but with six eyes and axe tail", leading up to a Sansheh or other un-earthlike fauna. You could make it un-Earthlike by giving it obscure internal traits or hidden traits, such as fluorescent patterns under ultraviolet, pink bones (like fox squirrels), or an unexpectedly flexible snout.

I think I could salvage, or help you salvage, a lot of your scrapped ideas. After all, I am very good at making descriptions. To avoid stretching out the topic, I'll send you the particulars over a private message.

QUOTE

Alright, fair enough about the teeth, but the wings have more things I want to point out. For example, the arms that make up the wings seem to have no real musculature, they just look like cylinders...

A quick check suggests some species of bats, such as the southern bent-wing bat, have similar cylindrical arms supporting the wings without obvious musculature.

At some point, we (as a Sagan 4 community) ought to update the "two genders" thing. It's not as if we have the excuse of stringently avoiding certain terms to be maximally "kid-friendly", since reproduction has been described as "sexual" probably since fauna emerged.

Is it even ecologically practical for this to feed exclusively on fauna of a high trophic level, particularly in packs? Chasing its prey for days also doesn't seem practical.

“Young, however”. The comma should be a period.

“Stratogy”: Strategy.

It might be possible for them to capture food in their mouths, and then rapidly flick their necks upward to slide the food down, as some birds do when drinking water.

I'm back from my (roughly) two-week absence.

What are you proposing? Would you suggest the things that are largely done should go on a different topic, and submissions questions and sketches should remain, or that the submissions questions should go on a different topic?

The neck of the adult in the middle doesn't look like it could support its proboscis's weight. I'm also not sure if the overgrown claw-toes would realistically look like that.

Jarlaxle's Rockshorian and its descendants ought to be put under substantial scrutiny, given the drastic body changes and unconventional descriptions. I will not be available to look over them myself for a while.

I still maintain that "Doctor Pickle" is a bad name. "Pickle" isn't even a kind of plant, but a processed food. It's like calling a fauna submission an Actor Steak.

I may have to adjust the physiology because Chitjorns, surprisingly, have no relation to crystalflora. They therefore don't necessarily have fungus-like physiology. There's also the template to fill in. However, I'll still be busy for a while.

Given the extensive help required for this organism, to the point of picture and conceptual overhauls at multiple points, I figured listing myself as a co-creator was a reasonable compromise.

Is "endoskeleton" the right word for a colonial organism?

This might be helpful:
http://archive.bio.ed.ac.uk/jdeacon/microbes/slime.htm
"Figure A shows a colony of Physarum polycephalum, one of the few slime moulds that can be grown easily on agar media. The colony consists of a multinucleate network of protoplasm, termed the plasmodium. There is no wall, only a plasma membrane and a gelatinous sheath around this. Once the plasmodium has grown to fill the agar plate, it will migrate and start to move out of the dish or ( accumulate all the protoplasm in a localised zone, leaving only the gelatinous sheath over the rest of the agar surface. The sheath is known to contain actin, which might be involved in migration. Under a microscope, the tubes (veins) that make up the plasmodium are seen to have gel-like protoplasm towards the outside, and rapidly streaming sol-like protoplasm in the centre. The rate of protoplasmic streaming can be extremely fast - over 1 mm per second - and it is rhythmic because its direction reverses every few seconds."

Incidentally, I'll still be busy for a while.

QUOTE (Oofle @ Nov 10 2022, 10:20 AM)

Maybe it’s just me, but personally the shade of blue used here makes it really hard to distinguish the line art, especially the limbs (it kind of makes it look like it has limbs with two claws and the other limbs are obscured rather than four with one claw), maybe you could use a color other than black for the lineart? Or make the limbs otherwise more defined?

Adding shading and lighting may also somewhat help the issue.

There are large, dark specks in both images, which are distracting. I still suggest toning down the grain of the paper, such as by increasing image contrast, but despite the fact I've repeatedly pointed this out for other submissions, the organisms in question were still approved. Much to my chagrin, these easy-to-fix issues were ignored.

I've been busy lately, so I'll have to get back to this later. I can, however, note that you need to capitalize the names of prey it eats in the template, and separate the description into paragraphs.

If it consumes a lot of salt in its diet, why, then, would it need to scrape salt from mudflats and beaches? Did it initially develop a salt gland to regulate salt from its own diet, and then later adapted it into some kind of breath weapon? If so, does the consumption of extra salt only serve to recharge its "breath weapon" when it can't get enough salt otherwise?

Other than the salt issue, all other errors seem to be only in grammar. I will list a few below.

"except for one key difference," The comma should be a colon.
"Living on the coast[...]" The punctuation needs improvment. Try reading the description out loud to determine when to add commas and colons.
"target. Thus temporarily" The period should be a comma.

The topographic map and artist's depiction do not match. Hrethr's little island in the way of the channel into its bay isn't depicted, and Hrothr's bay should be visible if looking at it from the seaward side (roughly east). The topographic arrangements also don't match: there are elevated parts were there shouldn't be, The peak of Hrethr should be on the left for the artist's depiction.

For the landmark, just put one picture on top, the landmark template, the description, and then supplemental pictures. I am extrapolating from organism submission conventions because there are so few landmark submissions, and they normally have only 1-2 pictures.

QUOTE (HethrJarrod @ Nov 3 2022, 08:43 AM)

Will draw a more detailed topographic map of the two features later today. Converting that drawing to an artistic representation is not my forte and if possible, just the topo maps if acceptable, would be great.

If you mean a "topographic map", a stylized bird's-eye map marking out altitude and broad-scale features, that should be acceptable. It would be unusual, but it should work. It would need to be more detailed than the global-level map view already shown, of course. For future landmarks, you should know landscape or background portrayals are much more important for landmarks than for organism submissions.

"congo-tingos" Is the name supposed to be hyphenated or not?
"secrets" Secretes.
Why is there an asterisk for "external shell"?
If it's a small ectotherm living in an environment with harsh winters, cold weather adaptations are worth mentioning.

If you're trying to bring up the Nauceans, the alien race that seeded Sagan 4 with life and study the planet's lifeforms, you should know the Nauceans are almost never mentioned "canonically". Only 5 Sagan 4 species pages and one meta page directly mention them, although they are implied in the official description of the religion of the Tripodician, and the fact real-life organisms are occasionally referred to as "Terran" (Terran penguin, Terran axolotl, etc.) rather than solely their plain names.

When the Nauceans are canonically mentioned, individuals are not characterized by name. I recommend you ask Hydromancerx about this, but the easiest solution is just to skip including the reasoning for the names.

The picture of Hrethr and Hrothr is surely not to scale. If the islands were close together, the "camera" would be relatively close, and it could detect subtler details, like cliffs, hills, and boulders. They would look so smooth and vaguely-shaped only from a distance, but that would surely make them seem farther apart. Try looking at similar photographs and portraying distance. Alternatively, you can just make a note it's a diagram and not to scale. The island of Santorini is the most straightforward reference for what caldera island(s) can look like.

It appears Hrethr is open to the ocean from the ocean side. That doesn't seem to be the case from the map-derived picture, unless the narrowest point facing the ocean is a low-lying channel that is tidally flooded. If so, that should be specified.

Specifiying the height of each (at least height above sea level) would help in determining what sort of organisms could live there. They're probably fairly low-lying, though. The walls of the calderas seem fairly steep. If they're actually not that steep, it wouldn't require particular specializations to climb them.

If Hrothr's lake is enclosed from the sea, it could be an interesting freshwater feature. Darwin Temperate Desert has no major (e.g., like the Amazon, Nile and Mississippi rivers, and no "great lakes" (e.g., like those of the U.S. or Africa), and it's sandy so the water drains fast. If Hrothr has a freshwater lake, it could be ecologically important for flying organisms, or even aquatic animals that can still move on land and get thirsty if they drink only seawater. (e.g., like sea snakes)

I noticed I've had to give you a lot of guidance with your Moleroot submission, to the point it's more of a collaborative submission. While I'm okay with helping you edit and refine your concepts, if the wording and concept is largely mine, it would exceed the boundaries of what I would accept for a single-person submission. If you have a really bare-bones work-in-progress submission with various problems that you require multiple reminders to fix, it's best to put it on the dedicated work-in-progress thread first, rather than put it on the forum to occupy a submission slot.

Please look at previous landmark submissions to get an idea of what they're like: the naming conventions (e.g., Hrethr & Hrothr Calderas/Hrethr & Hrothr Islands instead), and ecological implications, and interesting geological features. I strongly urge you to pay close attention to the formatting of the template of submissions, too, with a picture on top. I would actually only recommend landmarks to very experienced members, or those with a particular knowledge of geology and/or geographical oddities.

The "research assistants" angle doesn't work out. You can assume long-established, absolute knowledge from submissions.
You'll need to provide pictures of each, and notes on how they are remarkable as landmarks. That should be fairly easy, from the premise they're two caldera islands that are very close to each other. Hrethr appears to be a peninsula, unless that slight bluish part to the left of it is, in fact, a narrow sea channel.
You could talk about Hrethr and Hrothr's living conditions, such as the rough size of each, the climate, or perhaps how Hrethr works as a sort of barrier island for part of Darwin Temperate Desert.

Alternatively, you could say Hrethr is connected to Darwin Temperate Desert by a sandbar, and any organism that travels between the two must be good at swimming or fast enough to travel between each before the sandbar is covered by the ocean with the tides. (If that bluish spot is a sandbar, it's probably only a few miles, so a human jogging speed of 4-6 miles per hour is surely enough, or even more than enough. This would likely only exclude species which are slow or don't move much, like turtle-like or snail-like species. Arid Plyents are one Darwin Temperate Desert species that almost certainly couldn't make it across. I'm not sure how fast Gulperskuniks are, but they might also be excluded.

"a series denticles". A series of denticles.

Horses, famously, have lost toes over the course of evolution. Quillyns having one fewer toe can be inspired by that, or perhaps other, lesser-known examples.

Do not approve this yet.
It has organizational issues, formatting issues, and minor art issues, and I don't recall going over its description, even briefly.

QUOTE (colddigger @ Oct 28 2022, 02:54 PM)

The description seems to suggest basking as a form of thermoregulation, given the heat is then stored in the trunk, if a different form were desired.

Many reptiles which bask are classified as ectotherms. In any case, it cannot make heat, but only hold onto environmental heat for a while.. This is probably too small to be a giganototherm, and its habitat surely doesn't have stable enough temperatures for it to function almost the same as a endothermic animal.

In the event insect-style respiration won't work, you might be able to make them connected to the gut or air sacs instead, or perhaps work similarly to the spiracles of vertebrates, like sharks.

Since the antifreeze proteins have the added effect of making it toxic, it would help to say exactly what proteins they are.
"Terran Holly": just "holly" will do. Hollies are fairly common plants, and the name "holly" would surely not be mistaken for any Sagan 4 organism names, making it needless to call it "Terran" to subtly note it's a real organism.

"mid fall":
Mid-fall.
"slow growing": Slow-growing; "long lived" should also be "long-lived".

The majority of real-world plants are apparently ectotherms, and this doesn't seem to be an exception. You can therefore mark its thermoregulation as "ectotherm".

The art would look better if the stray lines on the top were cleaned up, and the paper texture diminished by increasing contrast. However, this is a more minor issue. Overall, this organism has only minor issues.

QUOTE (colddigger @ Oct 26 2022, 09:09 PM)

this has a very large colony. "Notably, hydrogen gas is an asphyxiant at very high concentrations. If it kept Cloudbubble Cryoutines/a specifically-adapted descendant in its roots, it could just flood pore spaces in soil a few centimeters around it, which woud displace oxygen somewhat, and stunt or redirect any root growth of would-be rivals. " I question how applicable that is, given that hydrogen when placed in solid steel can and does penetrate into the metal. If the hydrogen actually stuck around long enough to choke out other flora, I guess maybe just doing what water plants do with snorkels might work. I wonder if the hydrogen shouldn't be used to create an acid or something that will stick around longer.

There's a species of millipedewhich releases hydrogen cyanide gas a defense mechanism. Would you consider that more plausible?