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Funny Sketch of Giants (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
This year, I have been carrying a small sketchbook and some colored pencils around with me and doodling in it. Here are three small drawings/sketches that I made when I was doing other things. I sketched the mountains with the giant, the fountain, and the goblin on the subway (although I colored some of it in at my desk afterwards). The picture of lower Manhattan comes from the picture window on the 9th floor of the Brooklyn courthouse from my day of jury duty (don’t worry I wasn’t skiving from my civic duty–but there was a lot of downtime). I sketched the donut baby while I was talking to a friend about stickers and Philistines (Biblical and otherwise) so it may have been influenced by that peculiar conversation.
Sketch of Lower Manhattan from Courthouse (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
Kindly let me know what you think! I’m afraid have been running around trying to figure out my new job, so please forgive me for my tardy responses to comments during the past week. I love comments & I promise I will answer everybody. Just give me a moment to figure out how everything works!
Strange Priests with Donut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
Giant Short-Faced Bear (by Joseph S. Venus)
With the possible exception of the polar bear, the brown bear is the largest land predator on Earth today—which brings up the question of whether there were larger bears alive in prehistory. Amazingly, the answer is a resounding yes! The short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) lived in North America during the Pleistocene. It ranged from Alaska down to the Gulf of Mexico. The huge bears first appeared 800,000 in the past: yet they only died out 12,500 years ago (a time which coincides suspiciously with the proliferation of humans in the Americas). The largest short-faced bears are estimated to have weighed up to 957 kilograms (2,110 pounds) and they stood 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall at the shoulder.
The short-faced bear derived its name from its broad squat muzzle—a feature which gave the bear an incredibly powerful bite. Using these powerful jaws the bears could crack open huge bones and gobble up the marrow. Yet short faced bears also had longer thinner legs and arms than living bears. The combination of graceful runners’ limbs and bulldog-like muzzle has greatly perplexed scientists. Was the bear a predator who ran down Pleistocene megafauna and then bit its prey to death, or was it a huge scavenger which wondered across the continent looking for carrion to crack apart with its ferocious jaws. There is still not scientific consensus about the lifestyle of the immense bear, however what is certain is that the short-faced bear was one of the two largest mammalian land predators known to paleontology (the other contender for the title is the even-more-mysterious Andrewsarchus).
The fossilized skeleton of a short-faced bear at the (amazing-sounding) American Bear Center
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