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56 flat plates in two olive tones, one of them rust, divided by pale seams on a pale paper ground.

The Meeting of Territories

110 × 145 cmComputed from published scienceArt by Addie ConnerCROCODILE 04

How it was made

Anatomy board: The Meeting of Territories. The data on the left, the painting on the right.
The data on the left, the painting on the right. Open full size

Where a crocodile's skin splits as it grows, computed from the science of how its face takes shape.

A crocodile's face is built by cracking: as the embryo's jaws grow fast, its hard skin splits into random plates. Here 56 plates meet at a jaw tip: olive, with one rust plate, the largest scale of the whole head, parted by pale seams where the cracks ran. Its cousin, the American crocodile, lives in the lagoons and mangroves of Mexico's Pacific coast, the coast La Saladita stands on.

Computed from the published science of how crocodile skin cracks, drawn with mathematics, its colors chosen with AI.

Sources & verification