Cone Parrot Portrait

I pictured this creature as a Wild Planets ([link]) avian analog that paralyzes its prey using a venomous cone shell -style dart fired from its tongue ([link]). Those long horns are some sort of exotic chemosensors (perhaps alerting it to quarry with intractable chemical defenses?), and I was thinking that positioning the eyes on those fleshy, mobile bulbs or lobes would allow for a chameleon-like stereoscopic precision in targeting prey.

Inspiration here was the head of a leopard cone (marine snail) in the same book that inspired the Cuttlecat ([link]). The snail's soft-body markings reminded me of the stripes on a macaw's head ([link]), and it was pretty easy to imagine a beak on the front of the body. (I probably had beaks on the brain after ~fractalxavier posited a beak for the Cuttlecat.) I've noticed that some bird tongues have an almost radula-like look to them, so that was easy to integrate, and I added the "harpoon" almost as an afterthought to reinforce the predatory snail associations.

It was kind of hard to reconcile the dry, parchment-like texture of a parrot's bare head skin with the squishy, mucousy goodness of mollusk flesh. I guess I settled for something like caterpillar skin.

Not much to this one, obviously, but I do like the concept. I'd like to do a colored version at some point. Actually if somebody wants to color this that would be awesome.