The Speculative Dinosaur Project

 

Those of you with long memories might remember that I was involved in the Speculative Dinosaur Project back when I was in high school. The project is moribund now, but it’s still getting attention. Nikolay Kilyachkov is one such attention-giver, and kindly asked me some questions about Specworld.

1. When did the Specworld project begin?

The Speculative Dinosaur Project began in 2001 with this thread on the Dinosaur Mailing List.

2. What idea lay in the beginning of Specworld project?

“What if the KT extinction didn’t happen?”

How Spec team gathered together? Did you look for them or did they come up themselves?

The original Spec collaborators were contributors to that DML thread, but after we started our own web page, other people found us. The primary collaborators to the original Speculative Dinosaur Project were me (Daniel Bensen doing webhosting and editing), David Marjanovic (science), Brian Choo (writing), and Tiina Aumala (art and web design), with a few other people contributing bits and pieces.

How was the work over the project organized?

We all contributed pictures and descriptions of species. I was the editor and had final veto power. David had the best grasp of science, so he also had a lot of veto power. Tiina ended up with final say over creature designs because she was the best artist of us. Brian gave the world a lot of its humor.

Where did you get the ideas for Spec?

Sometimes we tried to illustrate concepts in biology using fictional creatures (baleen-squids, for example). Other species were extensions of Mesozoic clades (like the draks). Some were jokes, like Brian’s “dire rhea.”

What Spec creature / idea / text did you like most?

My favorite organism is the paintree. I like how it tied together several species into a believable ecosystem.  (a close second is the rectal probe)

7. What Spec idea you really liked, did not finally appear on Spec site?

I was the editor. Everything I liked ended up on the site