Cannot believe I forgot to cross post this last month, oops!
My first finished art of 2015. Nimravids are extinct catlike creatures, not believed to be the ancestors of cats, but ancient "cousins" you might say.

Instead of the usual Art Nouveau-style picture with a pretty damsel framed by pleasing shapes and swirly / profuse foliage, I've got a pretty kitty(ish) critter centerstage. Every natural detail in this picture was researched except for the stars (the skies would have looked different back then without any of our modern constellations due to the rotation of the visible stars around the center of our galaxy) plus the coat coloration is a guess, of course.

I have a fossil nimravid tooth from South Dakota. While I was doodling away at this piece I imagined I was making a portrait of the tooth's original owner!
This nimravid is based on ones that lived in the White River Badlands (mostly North & South Dakotas and Nebraska) of what is now the United States in the Oligocene epoch. (Think roughly halfway between the last dinosaurs and modern day... but it was an immense time period!) The reason the chin looks strange compared to modern, true cats is because most of the nimravids had bone flanges on their lower jaw which probably helped protect the sharp but delicate saber teeth from getting broken.

All of the flowers are of the Swietenia genus, which existed at around very approximately the same time and place as those nimravids. They are colored based on modern relatives of these fossil plants.

I spent a long time mulling over what to put on the ground. I tried researching additional flowering plants of the Oligocene but what I finally hit on was GRASS. As far as geologic strata go, the Oligocene is the lowest/earliest one where there is grass! No grasses with the dinosaurs.
Grass was extremely important in the Oligocene; it dominated the landscape. It took over the landscape and changed it forever. Many of the creatures that nimravids fed on (some familiar, like little three-toed horses, and some quite unfamiliar) probably ate grass. Thus, grass gets celebrated along with our toothy friend the nimravid.

I put stars in the circular/crescent frame because I think it's just magnificent and mysterious that these ancient, beautiful creatures roamed this same earth under the same (or roughly similar, minus the constellations) skies that we do. In the vastness of the universe, our planet seems so small, yet so much has happened here. Incomprehensible numbers of creatures, most of which are extinct, have called this place home. Time washes over our planet leaving nothing unchanged. I feel so lucky to be alive and able to appreciate the known wonders and ancient mysteries of the cosmos.