Miscelaneous

[malymin]

Have been advised to stop browsing Tumblr because it is "transparently bad" for my mental health. Probably good advice. Even little things can send me into a really awful spiral at this point, and its gets worse and worse every year.

Been rotating how to create an original species themed around CMYK color palettes, called the "c'myk" or something similar because it's funny to be that on-the-nose. The problem is that I have a lot of ideas for their basic color distribution, possible mutations of the "palette", etc, but not of what sort of clade the creatures actually are. I want them to have wings, but am torn between sparkle-mammalian, dino-avian, or draconic-reptilian. All four colors would be pigment-based, obviously. This is actually as much a fantasy feature as extra limbs or magic powers, if you'll believe it!

Most tetrapods get blue and green coloration from structural color - Tyndall effect, iridescence, etc. Blue organic pigments do exist in nature, though - Crustacyanin is a fun one. The Turaco family is the only bird clade known to have true green pigment - other birds overlay yellow pigment over a non-iridescent blue structural color (created from black pigment), create green iridescence from structural effects on black-pigmented feathers, etc. Here's a bit from Wikipedia on the turaco's unique pigments:

The plumage of go-away-birds and plantain-eaters is mainly grey and white. The turacos on the other hand are brightly coloured birds, usually blue, green or purple. The green colour in turacos comes from turacoverdin, the only true green pigment in birds known to date. Other "greens" in bird colors result from a yellow pigment such as some carotenoid, combined with the prismatic physical structure of the feather itself which scatters the light in a particular way and giving a blue colour.

Turaco wings contain the red pigment turacin, unlike in other birds where red colour is due to carotenoids. Both pigments are derived from porphyrins and only known from the Musophagidae into the 21st century, but especially the little-researched turacoverdin might have relatives in other birds. The incidence of turacoverdin in relation to habitat is of interest to scientists, being present in forest species but absent in savanna- and acacia-living species.

The reason you never see green or blue mammals is a combination of two factors: one, our clade's pigmentation gamut is limited to melanins. The brightest and most saturated colors in mammal fur - fox and tiger orange, lion tamarin gold, bongo chestnut - all come from phaeomelanin. It's also present in mammalian skin: in humans, outside of its contribution to certain hair color, phaeomelanin is most concentrated in our lips, nipples, and genitalia. (And, in those of us who have them, the freckles.)

Second, mammalian hair is too structurally simple to produce elaborate structural effects. Collagen structures in skin can allow skin to appear blue, and feathers can create both iridescent and non-iridescent color by manipulating their own preexisting complexity. Golden moles have structural oddities in their hairs that produce simple rainbow iridescence - but, as the entire family of animals is blind burrowers, they can't perceive their own appearance, so no sexual-selective pressures will ever make those colors more overt.

Bright blue in mammals is thus limited to skin. Mandrill and Golden snub-nosed monkey faces, for example. Literal blue-balls are amusingly also a feature in primates - the mandrill yet again, the vervet monkey. I think I'm going to copy a paywalled National Geographic article onto here, actually.

Unrelatedly: When you are art a bookstore or a library, and you see a gaggle of teenagers and one of them has a Gir hoodie or a fuzzy cat-ear headband in the year 2026, that is a blessing and you should be grateful.

Comments

[stepnix]

"yeah our species can do rainbow hair but nobody realizes it" is really really funny actually. golden mole sweep i guess

[malymin]

"What if there were creatures with golden hair that sparkled in iridescent colors... and they were all blind" would be a Twilight Zone type beat if you just added sapience to the equation, I think.