I’ve always been super fascinated with the tree of life–just the whole idea that all living things on this Earth are related, and imagining what it must be like to go back in time and find the connections between all of us and our common ancestor. For a while, I was super obsessed with the fact that all people of European descent share a common ancestor who was alive in the 14th century–or, to put it more accurately, all European people who were alive in the 14th century and who have currently living descendants are the common ancestors of all of those descendants. Genes are complicated.

So a few years back, I came across this website, and I got the idea: what if I tried to draw a picture of every single living species on Earth? And then I thought about how many species of bacteria there are, and then I thought: what if I tried to draw a picture of every single vertebrate species on Earth? And then I realized how many animals that was, and then I thought: how about just the mammals? And then: maybe just the monotremes? Ok. That’s a nice manageable number. Two main ones. Plus all the long-nosed echidnas that are super rare.

It turns out that it’s really, really hard to draw the hind legs of an echidna. In fact, there are very few pictures online where you can even get a good look at them. I’m still not happy with how the hind legs look on this specimen, but part of creativity (I think) is just accepting that a piece is done and you can’t go back and change it. Maybe someday I’ll try to draw another echidna.

Anyway, I’m going to continue the drawing of mammals as I go, moving on next to the marsupial species. There’s a bandicoot drawing coming soon. Perhaps that will be my next week’s post? But I want to get back to some music soon.