Even though we discontinued this comic, there are a few concepts from the series that I’m still fond of. Here’s a realization of one of my favorite jokes that we came up with, modified from an episode that will probably never be released.
—A
The human in the last panel is Cameron McCormick, who in real life created the (unfortunately defunct) Tetrapod Zoology Wiki, and in the comic was going to be the recordkeeper of the Tetrapod Kingdom.
As longtime followers might know, I used to host a science-themed radio show/podcast (@incidentsandreflections). It was co-created by my friend Alex Jacob while we were geology undergraduates at the University of Maryland, and continued by myself and Joan Turmelle (@killdeercheer) after Alex transferred.
After several years of hiatus, Joan and I have decided to start a new podcast series on YouTube, called Through Time and Clades. We have just uploaded our first episode, and you can also follow us on Twitter to stay up to date!
Fans of TetZoo Time might be interested in this new collaboration between Joan and Albert—a podcast focused on natural history, including subjects relevant to the TetZooniverse!
In honor of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, here is some never-before-seen TetZoo Time artwork!
Riding off the coat-tails of TetZoo Con 2015 and the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes this affectionate parody that would have been fleshed out into a special episode. Here, natural history artist Katrina van Grouw and David Lindo the ‘Urban Birder’ were to face off against a young Tyrannosaurus named Kylotyrannus, leading an army of juvenile-morph dinosaurs against our heroes. Darren, John, Alice, and Dawn were to pose for the original trilogy’s cast.
I’ll say right now if you would like to color this in, please be our guest!
Greetings to our loyal fans,
You have been waiting a long time, looking forward to new TetZoo Time comics, particularly in light of the newest iteration of the Tetrapod Zoology blog. So have we. Unfortunately, it is with heavy hearts that we (Joan and Albert) hereby announce that new TetZoo Time comics will not be forthcoming.
This was not by any means an easy decision for us to make. However, the long hiatus has given us a good amount of time to reflect on this little world that we have created, and in the end this outcome came down to two main factors.
Firstly, TetZoo Time began its life as a tribute to scientists, artists, and naturalists who we looked up to. As such, one of its most distinctive features has been its casting of real life researchers as major characters. Many of the individuals we featured have responded positively to their portrayals. However, we have also received indications that others are less appreciative, and we completely understand how being cast as a fictional character might be an awkward prospect to some. Combine this with the fact that we had grandiose plans for character development and fictional backstories for several members of our cast, and such awkwardness would have no doubt grown as the series progressed. Causing discomfort to the people we admire runs entirely counter to the spirit of TetZoo Time.
Secondly, another major component forming the identity of our comic rested on its status as a parody of Adventure Time. Though TetZoo Time was never meant to be an exact play-by-play parallel of Adventure Time, our art style, characters, setting, and narrative were nonetheless strongly based on the TV series. We are fans of Adventure Time, but we feel that our approach constrained the directions in which we could take our own storytelling, as well as what we could do with the comic itself. (Long-time readers might remember the very short-lived TetZoo Time online shop that we quickly closed down for fear of running afoul of copyright.*) On top of that, the fact that many of our characters were likenesses of real people placed further constraints, as alluded to previously.
*We are aware that parodies are not considered copyright violations in several legal systems, but we figured that it was better to be safe than sorry.
In the midst of this sad news, we do have a more positive announcement to make: we will be starting a new comic, Chile & Yi: Paleontologists! This comic will no longer feature real, living people as characters (at least, not directly), nor will it use the Adventure Time art style, but it will nonetheless contain many other aspects that we personally loved about TetZoo Time, including a cast of obscure tetrapods, references to the paleontological community, and Knuckles the Chalicothere. That’s right: we will be adapting many of the original characters and storylines that we’d planned for TetZoo Time into our new comic.
And who knows? Maybe we’ll still churn out the occasional TetZoo Time doodle in our spare time, and we always welcome fan art. After all, we invested a lot of time and effort into this project and, despite our aforementioned misgivings, we do consider it to have been very much a positive force in our lives. Should we produce anything related to TetZoo Time or come across any new fan work, we will be sure to post it here. We will also be leaving the askbox open to questions and comments.
Special thanks go to Gareth Monger and Rebecca Groom, who volunteered their precious time to help us complete the last few pages of the comic and greatly increased its artistic quality, to Darren Naish and John Conway for humoring our little endeavor and consistently being some of our biggest supporters (including advertising us at TetZoo Con, wow!), and to all of you readers for reading and commenting over the years. We would also like to apologize to those who we had announced as characters but never got the chance to release the episodes in which they properly feature, including (but not limited to) Memo Kosemen, Thomas Holtz (who was even gracious enough to indulge us once by reading his lines from one of our scripts), David Marjanović, and Alice Roberts.
Make no mistake, we have not lost interest in Tetrapod Zoology (the blog) or tetrapod zoology (the subject) in the slightest. We look forward to continuing to serve as Envoy and Ambassador of the Tet Zoo Empire in other ways. As long as there is more to learn about tetrapods, the fun will indeed never end.
Best regards, Joan and Albert
P.S.: Seeing as we never got to finish presenting the “Sink or Swim?” storyline in a fully-colored comic, we have decided to share the complete (and partially illustrated) script for that episode here for those who are dying to know how it ends.
And that’s it! This is the end of TetZoo Time! We had this ending planned, of course, but we hadn’t fully drawn it up for release. So please enjoy this “illustrated script”! Don’t feel too sad, we thank you for joining us on this journey!
See here for our explanation as to the comic’s ending and our future.
For a larger image of this script, please go here.
Mostly! There are princesses who rule other kingdoms on TZT-Earth and they regularly meet to agree on universal guidelines to follow, as well as to address global issues. But by and large Princess Tetrapod has the final say in how the Tetrapod Kingdom is run, yes.
Mammals, mammals, mammals. Sometimes it seems like everything’s about mammals. Go ahead, think of five different animals off the top of your head. We’re willing to bet that at least one of them is probably a mammal. Maybe even all of them are mammals. What animals are most commonly kept as pets? By household, it’s dogs and cats, which are mammals. The most commonly used backboned species in scientific research? Well… it’s hard to get accurate figures for that one, but somewhere high up there are mice and rats, which are mammals. What are you? In all likelihood, a mammal.
Many of us are understandably weary about all the attention that mammals get. The attention almost seems disproportionate, given that there are “only” around 5,500 species of living mammals. In comparison, there are over 7,000 species of amphibians, over 20,000 species of reptiles (and yes, we’re including birds), and over 30,000 species of ray-finned fish. So why does the world need another website about mammals?
We agree that mammals as a whole unfairly overshadow other organisms in popularity. However, we don’t believe that all mammals do. When was the last time you saw an otter shrew, an angwantibo, or an anomalure in fiction, or even in a documentary? Possibly never.
It is even worse if one considers fossil mammals, which we do because we are paleontology enthusiasts here. Here it is the mammals that are frequently overshadowed by other extinct beasts, such as the ever-iconic Mesozoic dinosaurs. Mammoths and saber-toothed cats may get some press, but what about mylagaulids, palaeanodonts, and protoceratids? Nah.
And what of other members of the larger group of animals that mammals belong to, the synapsids? Not only are non-mammalian synapsids all extinct, they rarely make appearances in popular culture, with the exception of Dimetrodon (which usually ends up misidentified as a dinosaur). That’s a damn shame, because non-mammalian synapsids (stem-mammals) did some really strange and wonderful things.
Furthermore, stem-mammals inform us about our own evolutionary history, and it is when we understand our own history that we realize how strange we really are. In a normal vertebrate, two of the bones in our ear belong in the jaw. But not for us, because we mammals are not normal vertebrates. Breathing with a diaphragm? Chewing your food thoroughly? Only having one set of replacement teeth? None of these things are normal. They’re all mammal things. Stem-mammals tell us how those mammal things came to be.
So here we are. We are here to speak for the underappreciated mammals and stem-mammals. Think poisonous rats, seagoing sloths, and our forebears who almost witnessed the end of the world.
As a brand new project getting its feet, we’re looking to spread the word and get the gospel out there that synapsids are amazing creatures. Check out the meat of our project at our blog here, and watch and share our progress at the social media links below. We look forward to creating an ever-growing compendium of fascinating synapsids in the years to come, and we hope you’ll look forward to it, too!
A new project that Joan and Albert are involved in!
(And for anyone wondering how this will impact TetZoo Time: probably not by much. Writing brief blog posts generally takes less time than making a comic, and the work for Synapsid Notebook is shared between many more authors.)
Disclaimer: This was inspired by a real conversation on Mark Witton’s Facebook wall, but has been embellished for comedic purposes and is not meant to accurately reflect the interactions between the parties involved.
