I love Gorgonopsids with floofy and (the rare innacurate ears) they're such good shapes! You drew this very well ^^

Wow! Well, thank you! I appreciate that. It means a lot coming from you. I'm a self-taught artist just trying to figure things out on my own, progressing slowly. A lot of my work still looks stiff to me, maybe one day that will improve.

We have been trying to figure out if any Gorgonopsids had outer ears, but it’s tricky, cartilage doesn’t typically fossilize. Researchers think they might have had something like an outer ear because of their evolutionary background and how they hunted. Gorgonopsids were proto-mammals, not proto-reptiles, which is important because it means they most likely relied on hearing, vision, and smell to hunt; like modern-day carnivores. This makes it reasonable to think they had some kind of pinna structure to help them locate sounds better. But since soft tissues decompose way before fossilization occurs, we’re left guessing based on the shape of their skulls and ear canals. Even though we compare them to mammals today, bones alone can’t confirm whether or not they had outer ears. The most studied information on them is about harder stuff like teeth and bones, so there’s this big gap in what we know about softer features; this is true for most all early prehistoric animals. Even with new techniques to study soft tissues in fossils, ear structures are just too fragile to leave behind evidence. We can’t say for sure if Gorgonopsids had outer ears; but based on the principles of scientific theory, we also can’t say they didn’t.
- ( I know I’m a nerd leave me be XD zoology is like a hobby to me)

Oh that’s cool to know! I’m no paleo nerd but I have seen them decrying the presence of ears on them before x3 I guess it’s nice people can get speculative with the oldest species