ratcreature | (no subject)

So I haven't been updating the last couple of days, because as it is I could only barely refrain from oversharing at length various gross details of the cough I had. Actually the cough still lingers but now it's just a plain one, also it doesn't hurt as much.

Anyway, I was looking at the Marvel solicitations for May and it occurred to me that sometimes I find inaccuracies in drawings annoying, even if it is just little details, like my annoyance is disproportionate to the inaccuracy. For example this Ultimate X-Men cover: You can't see it as well in the online version as in the paper catalog, because there's a Marvel logo bar covering a part of it, but the rats are drawn really bizarrely. It's not just that the rats' legs don't look like rat legs in some weird way, but that the rat in the foreground is actually drawn with pointy canine teeth (!), and far too many of them too. Like most rodents (or possibly all of them, I'm not sure), rats don't have canines, they have the long front teeth and then a large gap, and the front teeth look like rodent teeth, i.e. while they are sharp they are not pointy. Think "Bugs Bunny." It's rats, not Jaws. I'd let the red, glowing eyes in black rats pass as dramatic license (though I don't think rats can have red eyes unless their coat is lightly colored either as a full albino white, a light cream color or mostly white patterns like Himalayan) if the rest of the rats didn't look so odd in the first place.

Does that happen to other people that they are completely distracted by a minor detail in a drawing that is just wrong?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That is totally true, by the way. I do animal bones: all rodents have one incisor, no canines, and some mixed number of premolars and molars. Lagomorphs (rabbits) have more or less the same pattern, but very different incisors.

Rats in particular are usually I1/1, C0/0, PM0/0, M3/3 (that is, one upper and one lower incisor, no canines, no premolars, three upper and three lower molars, for a total of sixteen teeth), though as you know there's variation in how many molars show up. Also, their teeth are really hard to ID archaeologically.

Heh, I didn't know that rabbits had different teeth, but I'm very familiar with how rats look, seeing how one is trying to climb over my laptop keyboard just now, because he wants me to play with him rather than to type on the computer. *g* And also you have to check them regularly in older rats, who don't like to eat and chew hard stuff as much anymore. To see them drawn with canines and all teeth pointy is just very odd. I get that the artist wanted to make them look scary, but it's not as if their incisors weren't plenty sharp and of a quite decent size as they are.

Yes, rabbits look like they have only those big front incisors, but actually they have another set of tiny little incisors behind the front ones.

But, yes. People do that to rats a lot, because apparently rats are Scary or whatever.

I've been bitten once for real by a rat (rather than a play bite), when I had not yet tame female rats who had already been pregnant from the pet store, and they thought I was about to hurt their babies or something. Rats really don't need pointy teeth for their bites to hurt a lot. That rat wasn't even fully grown herself, yet the bite was deep and she hung on like a pitbull.