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Pteroseastar

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Description

This diminutive poikilothermic pterosaur clings tightly to coastal rock formations along the tide line, picking opportunistically at limpets, chitons, and snails. The animal's metabolic processes plunge upon immersion in cold water, inducing a state of biological torpor at high tide. With exposure to sun and air at low tide, body temperature quickly rises and the creature "reanimates" to resume its creeping predation on the largely sessile invertebrate inhabitants of its marine environs.

IT'S A LIVING

It's been a while since I've done any painting, so please go easy on me. This is more of a conceptual study, anyway--"close enough for gov't work" to communicate the basic idea, a pterosaurian starfish.

Remember those kids' dino books where the pterodactyls were always red? WHY WERE THEY ALWAYS RED?? I'm a big fan of the Ochre Starfish, myself:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisaster…
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NocturnalSea's avatar

Can't believe I'd missed this creature in your galleries for so long! I love anything to do with echinoderms, and echinoderm-like creatures.


Perhaps this is a feral descendant of a seastar-pterosaur that was biologically engineered for some other purpse. Maybe originally they were designed to remove fouling organisms from the bottoms of exploration ships, but they eventually spread into the wild and naturalized on the planet.