Harvest Mouse On A Dandelion By Dean Mason.

Put your soul at ease late night bagel cream cheese

Currently crying about Yoso-Tama-No-Kakehashi, a Japanese guidebook from the 1700s about raising rats. It's the first known rat guidebook in the world :)

They were raised as pets and for show animals, and it's mentioned in the guidebook that "one can call out and rats will come to hand". They were referred to as "nezumi" and it was considered important that they have large cages to live in. There was also a variety of rat that had a fox-like coat!

Rats were domesticated in Japan from the 1600s to the 1800s - it's unknown if any of those domesticated strains are ancestral to the current domestic rats today. They were domesticated again in Europe in the 1800s (initially for much crueler reasons than just for being pets) and I think it's just so sweet that we as humans fell in love with rats so much that we had to domesticate them at least TWICE...

You can download an article about the guidebook here. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/expanim/60/1/60_1_1/_pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwioidaLs5z6AhUojIkEHRI1BvEQFnoECAkQAg&usg=AOvVaw3aarTW0iy1HybCcrxtp4ww

I'm being very brave today

Hey you like Aguefort? I gotchu an Aguefort so you can Aguefort while you Aguefort

This one was a WILD ride XD Such a good time to work on, but EACH AGUEFORT IS AN INDIVIDUAL LAYER. Shout out to Derek and Ruby for animating all of these very silly principals ♥

dungeon foodies

Incamys bolivianus was a caviomorph rodent representing an early member of the chinchillid family, with its closest modern relatives being chinchillas and viscachas.

Living in what is now Bolivia and Argentina during the late Oligocene about 27 million years ago, it inhabited an arid open grassland at a time when the area's climate had drastically cooled due to the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

It's estimated to have been similar in size to a large modern chinchilla – weighing around 700g (~1lb 8oz) and measuring about 25-30cm long not including the tail (~10-12").

An endocast of the shape of its brain from a near-complete fossil skull shows that it had a well-developed sense of hearing, particularly in vocalization processing, suggesting it may have been a social animal living in groups communicating with complex calls similar to modern chinchillids. It was probably a ground-dweller less agile than its modern relatives, but still capable of fast movements.

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References:

Bertrand, Ornella C., et al. "The virtual brain endocast of Incamys bolivianus: insight from the neurosensory system into the adaptive radiation of South American rodents." Papers in Palaeontology 10.3 (2024): e1562. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1562

Rasia, Luciano L., Adriana M. Candela, and Carola Cañón. "Comprehensive total evidence phylogeny of chinchillids (Rodentia, Caviomorpha): Cheek teeth anatomy and evolution." Journal of Anatomy 239.2 (2021): 405-423. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.13430

Wikipedia contributors. “Agua de la Piedra Formation” Wikipedia, 06 Jan. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_de_la_Piedra_Formation

Wikipedia contributors. “Incamys” Wikipedia, 19 Jan. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incamys

Ugh… headache. Head splitting migraine, even.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would have reblogged this

if you hired a galapagos finch as a linecook it would perfectly evolve a beak to optimally smoke cigarettes behind the dumpsters

Let’s get RATICAL 🐀🛹 Prints + stickers available on my patreon this month! ✨