Dolphin Ray

Another future or alternate-timeline dolphin, this one converging on a manta ray, for a change. It’s not exactly what I originally pictured, but close enough for guv’ment work, as we say here in Uh-Mare-Uh-Kuh. The idea sprung from the same little desktop stingray model that inspired the Elasmoray. The toy has an oddly porpoise-like head, with a blunt "beak," dolphin-like "smile," and eyes situated in a more mammalian than piscine position. (Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.) Anyhoo, it strikes me as a chimerical dolphin/ray hybrid every time I look at it, so the concept has been percolating on the back burner for quite a while now.

The image background came from the same Cannon Beach photo I used for the Elasmoray. The toy stingray came from the Mark O. Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s not as flashy and commercial as the Oregon Coast Aquarium just across the street, but is much more educational and has some great exhibits. (Ironically, the guy I worked under during my marketing internship at the Oregon Zoo earned his stripes handling PR for the Oregon Coast Aquarium during the Keiko/"Free Willy" fiasco.)

There was some detail loss in the color version, so I posted the original graphite drawing to my Scraps ([link]).

This is probably my last ray analogue for a while, but perhaps not my last dolphin analogue. With so many in the works, I should start referring to these creatures as "evolphins" for convenience!