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Prehistoric Life v1.0 — 164 extinct animals

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@dmellok dmellok released this 13 Aug 11:26
· 1 commit to main since this release

164 natural-history plates, one per extinct animal, at each Xteink panel's native geometry.

Asset Panel Files
prehistoric-x4.zip Xteink X4 — 480×800, 4-level grey 164 × 4-bit BMP
prehistoric-x3.zip Xteink X3 — 528×792, 4-level grey 164 × 4-bit BMP

Both are pre-dithered to the four native grey levels (#000/#555/#AAA/#FFF), so CrossInk maps them
1:1 to panel states — no re-quantization on the way in. Unzip and copy the folder to the device.

Coverage runs Cambrian to Pleistocene: Anomalocaris and Hallucigenia through Dimetrodon, the
dinosaurs, mosasaurs and pterosaurs, on to Megalodon, the woolly mammoth and a Neanderthal.

Almost everything on a plate is fetched, not written. Age range, stage, taxonomy, diet, ecology
and every fossil-locality dot come from the Paleobiology Database;
silhouettes come from PhyloPic; coastlines are Natural Earth drawn on an
Equal Earth projection. Only body size is hand-compiled — PBDB does not carry it — so those figures
are typical adult literature estimates and the plate labels them as such.

Two things worth knowing:

  • The human is at true scale. The grey figure is 1.75 m drawn at the animal's own px-per-metre.
    Where a to-scale human would not fit, it is dropped and the scale bar says human omitted — it is
    never silently rescaled.
  • The quoted dimension matches the pose. Side view scaled to body length, wings-out scaled to
    wingspan, upright scaled to standing height with the dimension bar turned vertical. The silhouette
    is chosen per taxon to suit.

Map dots are modern coordinates — where the fossils were found, not where the animal lived on
the continents of its day.

Per-plate artist, licence and PhyloPic id are in
Prehistoric/ATTRIBUTION.md,
which also marks the eight plates that fall back to a higher-taxon silhouette. Licences are mostly
CC0 and CC BY; five plates carry a NonCommercial silhouette, the only one available for that taxon.