Sasquatch Confirmed? I think so, but let’s talk about why. Or for the impatient, TL;DR at the end.
Onward…
With the most recent Janoan Armor renderings, we can see this sexy sexy helmet. A few people in the thread started talking about how it looks like a gorilla skull, and I wanted to type something up, because I’m the kind of nerd who’s been thinking about this since I first saw the concept art a few months ago. I’d like to say that in the concept at it definitely looks like a gorilla skull, but in the rendered image it’s significantly different, and I wanted to talk about why.
Here’s the helmet I’m discussing.
Here’s the picture with a few details highlighted.
You can see I’ve highlighted 4 parts. I’ll break them down individually, but in short, this is 100% an ape skull, but not a gorilla skull. Pic for reference, with explanation below.
1) Nuchal Crest. This feature is where neck muscles attach. Humans have a very small nuchal area, in part because we are bipedal. Our heads don’t require much to keep them from tipping forward. A quadrupedal animal like a gorilla requires more bone area for muscles to attach to stabilize the head. This feature is significantly smaller than the nuchal crest seen in a gorilla skull, but does fit with an animal that has a forward leaning posture, or extremely robust neck muscles.
2) Sagittal Crest. If you put your fingers over your temple and clench your jaws, you can feel these muscles work. The more bone surface available for muscle to attach to, the more chewing strength you have. Now imagine you have a ridge of bone on the top of your head for those muscles to attach to. That’s a sagittal crest in a nutshell. It allows more bite strength on the same size skull. It’s perfect for a diet consisting of tough, fibrous vegetation, just like we expect a gorilla to eat. Humans don’t have one, nor do any of the varieties of Mann that we know of so far, which (Sadly) excludes this skull from belonging to a Yoru based on their heads seeming to be rather flat. Pic below.
3) Brow Ridge and binocular vision. Humans have under developed brow ridges, as do most of the races of Mann. The To’Resk look like they may have a small one, and the Yoru look like they may have a rather large one. Unfortunately for the above stated reason, I don’t think this skull belong to a Yoru. You know what does have a lovely brow ridge like that though? Apes. Binocular vision gives us depth perception, which is useful for hunting in predatory animals, or accurately grasping branches. Again, more ape features.
4) A muzzle and fangs?? The fangs don’t necessarily mean it’s a predator (See the gorilla skull picture, which clearly shows large fangs dispite gorillas being herbivores). It also seems to have a muzzle, which once again excludes Yoru (I’m still kinda sad this doesn’t show Janoans preying on the Yoru), but it puts it directly in the realm of ape again.
5) I didn’t highlight this, but can we just appreciate just how large this animals brain cavity is? An entire Janoan head fits inside it, and Janoans are large to begin with. Gorillas have small brains (You can see the narrow space it’s brain would fit above), where as humans have very bulbous skulls. The animal pictured here also has a round skull like a human, which means it either has an abnormally thick skull, or it’s got a large brain.
TL;DR
Any of these traits individually means nothing, but all 5 combined means that we are looking at an animal who’s morphology strongly resembles an extremely large, powerful, ape like animal with the capacity for intelligence. I used sasquatch as a joke in the title, but we have every reason to expect a 10-12 foot tall, either fully or semi bipedal ape like animal to be roaming the Janoan forests. Given that the rest of the Janoan Heavy armor’s upper portion seems to be made out of multiples of this same animal’s skull, they may even roam in packs. Let’s hope the teeth really do point to a Gorilla-like diet, otherwise we’re all gonna get eaten the second we leave town!