More Animals!

I've been working away on my large quilt, but have gotten behind on posting.  I finished all the animal pictures and have started quilting the first panel.  Last time  I finished with the emergence of land life and the Trigonotarbida.

Today I'll start with the pieces that go up the "middle", that is, the right border of the left panel, and the left border of the right panel.  These borders are the narrowest of all, only about 3.5", so each of these pictures is about 2" wide.  This is my dinosaur section, with a Pteranodon (from the late Cretaceous) flying through the top panels, my friend the Coelophysis (from the Triassic) in the middle section, and a Helicoprion (very long-surviving, from the Permian through the late Triassic) swimming in the sea in the bottom.  Helicoprions are actually a type of shark, and are super awesome.  I learned about them this summer on our Alaska trip, and you should definitely check them out.  Sorry the pictures are so dark!  The helicoprion is especially hard to see, but his background is multilayered blues.

Then moving into the Cenozoic era, starting along the bottom edge of the left panel. First up is a a Gastornis (from the Paleocene/Eocene epoch).  It's a giant flightless bird, one of many that arose during the early Cenozoic when mammals and birds really started to dominate.

Next comes a wooly mammoth from the Pleistocene epoch (the last before our current epoch).

Finally we get to people and our current epoch (the Holocene).  The people are sitting at the bottom left corner of the left panel.  The tree panels go up the left side, and to cap out our track through evolution, sitting in the tree are a bunch of "Darwin's finches".  Of course, in real life, they wouldn't all be in the same tree, but Darwin's study of the collection of different finch species found in the Galapagos Islands helped him develop the theory of natural selection.  Mine aren't 100% correct, but I did try to represent a variety of different beak shapes, one of the most obvious distinguishing features of the finch species.  It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the tree trunk lines up in all four panels to provide continuity up the left border.

As with all the other pictures, each one will have much more detail added in the quilting, but so far they're coming along ok.  Next time I'll share the ones that go across the top border, and then I think I'll be up-to-date.  

I'm linking up with the ever-fabulous Nina-Marie today.  Hope everyone is having some time to be creative!