I was listening to a podcast on phorusracids and it just made me want to draw the kelenken from a novel I've been working on. They are literally the species Kelenken; I just lifted them wholesale from the fossil record and plunked them into my fantasy world. (Okay, I also made them slightly larger and more robust so they'd be rideable.)

On the vast steppe of the Sogen, the Plainsmen have learned to ride kelenken and use them as their main mode of transport (making them analogous to horses). By the time the novel takes place, the kelenken have become an integral part of Plainsman culture, especially because they are also extremely effective combat animals.

Plainsmen breed kelenken and give chicks to their children, with the animal reaching maturity as the child learns to ride. Kelenken have a lifespan of seventy years on average, so a kelenken and its rider develop a close, lifelong bond.

Kelenken are extremely intelligent and able to be trained to understand commands. However, in the novel, Arun explains that kelenken are not tame nor domesticated--they choose to live and work with the Plainsmen because the Plainsmen offer them safety, food security, and mental stimulation. When not being ridden, kelenken roam the plains outside of camps, doing their own hunting, but each rider and kelenken develop a unique whistle that they can use to call for one another across the steppes.

Over the course of the novel, Arun's kelenken Vy develops a close bond with Liu, and although as a Plainswoman by marriage, Liu is entitled to her own kelenken, she prefers riding Vy (and I think he prefers that too).

Also, if you're thinking Vy looks way too tall for Liu, you're right. Liu's people are rather petite and the Plainsmen are much taller and easily capable of mounting kelenken. Vy just sits down when Liu needs to mount him. He's adjusted quite well to having a non-Plainsman in the family.

 When someone tells me "you never know what you could catch" I interpret that as more of a warning than an opportunity.

 To be honest, there's not much of a joke in this one; I drew it because I was taking a short hiatus from the comic and it seemed appropriate to the situation.

But I put a lot of effort into those backgrounds, so I wanted to share it here.

 I don't understand how Sabrina can claim to dislike fighting, and yet she's a Gym Leader. And also the one who kicked the Fighting Dojo from official Gym status.

I kinda take most things NPCs say with a grain of salt.

 Throwback to Gen I, where due to some questionable battle mechanics, the Psychic type was essentially nearly invincible. Psychic types were supposed to be weak to Ghost and Bug Pokémon, but due to a programming error, the only damage-dealing Ghost-type move in the game (Lick) actually did no damage against Psychic-types. The three damage-dealing Bug-type moves in existence - Leech Life*, Twin Needle and Pin Missile - did extremely low base damage and were basically useless by the time you reached Saffron City. To top it all off, the only Ghost-type Pokémon in Gen I (the Gastly evolutionary line) and most of the Bug-types who actually learned Bug-type moves were also part Poison-type, making them extremely vulnerable to Psychic-types.

I have to give props to Game Freak for taking strides to address this imbalance in Gen II, where they introduced two new types that were both advantageous against Psychic, expanded the move pool for Ghost and Bug moves, and introduced Ghost and Bug Pokémon who weren't part Poison.

That said, considering the astounding complexity of the Pokémon Red/Blue battling system for its time, it's inevitable that the developers would make a few slip-ups, so I'm not really complaining about it. It's certainly not something that breaks the game. You just kinda have to go into it acknowledging that you should probably include a Psychic-type on your team.

*For the longest time, for some reason I thought the name of this move referred to actual leeches, like "yeah man, I'm livin' the leech life stealin' HP from my opponents". It took years before I realized that the "leech" part is supposed to be a verb--the Pokémon is literally leeching life from its opponent. I chalk that one up to being a weird kid who knew way too much about stuff like leeches and hagfish and early Cambrian stem arthropods.

 

I'm so excited to hear that (according to Zanno and Napoli 2025) Nanotyrannus is now a valid genus! I actually got to hear James Napoli talk about this seminal paper on a really awesome edition of Virtual Fossil Fridays where he broke down his and Lindsay Zanno's findings (and very generously let us ask tons of questions afterward); it was like reading the paper without the Nature subscription!

To celebrate, I made this graphic because there really need to be more things with NanoT on them. You can get this design on shirts, stickers, and more in my store!

 POV: You just singlehandedly saved a billion-dollar corporation from a criminal organization, and the CEO offers you literally anything in the world as a reward... and then proceeds to give you a totally unnecessary item that has no money value.

That's Pokémon Trainer life for you, friends.

(Also, considering that was the sole working prototype of the Master Ball, Silph's R&D division is not going to be happy it was just handed over to a 10-year-old who is 100% going to accidentally use it on a Caterpie.)