Wars in a Lost World Character Designs! (Part 1: Pachysapien)

33 5 4
                                    

There are two main characters in my book Wars in a Lost World (which you can read as a "beta" version on my profile), one is named Ceratus and is an 18 year old Pachysapien, and the other is a slightly younger female character named Avi who is an Ornithosapien.

There are two main characters in my book Wars in a Lost World (which you can read as a "beta" version on my profile), one is named Ceratus and is an 18 year old Pachysapien, and the other is a slightly younger female character named Avi who is an ...

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

What you see above 👆 is my concept design for the Pachysapiens. My original concept art for the Pachysapiens depicted them as being more muscular and based off
Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis (and yes, they Pachysapiens were canonically pachycephalosaurids). This is also visible in the earlier chapters of my beta version for Wars in a Lost World (which you can read here) wherein I described the Pachysapiens as pachycephalosaurids.

However, I realized that basing it off of Pachycephalosaurus limited variety in character design and didn't really fit well. So I decided to change the base to Pachyrhinosaurus lakusti, a centrosaurine ceratopsian (and yes this does mean that they are now canonically centrosaurines). This would allow for a more fitting design and more variety among the characters (example: sexual dimorphism between males and females). Basing it on Pachyrhinosaurus also let me cut a small corner in that I was able to keep the species name "Pachysapien".

And as a nod to common paleoart depicting Pachyrhinosaurus (specifically Mark P.
Witton's work and Prehistoric Planet) | decided to add quills to the base of the tail.

Choosing a burly design yet keeping an herbivorous base allowed the Pachysapiens to be a "half way mark" between wildness and civility, one of the core "ying yang" concepts of Wars in a Lost World. The other two factions that we see act as the extremes for representing wildness and civility.

Sketch BookWhere stories live. Discover now