The vertebral drawbridge is a one-way passage into the Rainy Basin, Dinotopia's dangerous realm of the carnosaurs. The weight of a sauropod caravan flexes the structure downward, allowing armored convoys to cross over, before the bridge springs back up again.
The fun of biomorphic or zoomorphic engineering is that you arrive at natural forms not because they're beautiful in some detached aesthetic sense, but because they're purely efficient and functional, as are all forms in nature.
My dad, grandfather, great-grandfather, and my great uncles were all mechanical engineers, and they always rhapsodized about how skeletons are fascinating structures from a design perspective, combining strength, flexibility, lightness, and adaptability.
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6 comments:
Extremely interesting. You give so much info a out all the little things that most people just ignored.
Your heritage explains your extremely creative talent and ingenuity in constructing your vivid imagination. You educate me daily. Thank you.
Great! Funny thing...Last weekend there was a sketch-innat Wet Paint, our local art supply store, and among the objects sprinkled around to draw was a vertebra from some animal. It was a real puzzle to comprehend...but nothing like drawimg something to better understand it!
A little less functionally nifty, but the Madison Children's Museum has a vertbral bridge too.
https://madisonchildrensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/gen/7043056299_2c5930d5b4_b_760_508_s_c1_center_center_0_0_1.jpg
It looks like youths leaving this way have really "cracked the shell!"
Great post
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