Thread 4983981

Expanded Future Edition

Previous Thread >>4943797

WHAT IS SPECULATIVE EVOLUTION?
Speculative evolution is the exploration and imagining of how life might evolve in the future or could have evolved in alternate pasts. It's a multimedia sci-fi genre that harnesses scientific principles to create detailed and plausible hypothetical creatures, ecosystems, and evolutionary histories.

RESOURCES:
https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Tutorial
>One-stop shop for relevant background information for starting a project

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.com/
>Fantastic blog covering all sorts of spec evo topics in-depth

https://specevo.jcink.net/
>The Speculative Evolution forums, full of resources and ongoing projects


RECOMMENDED PROJECTS:
https://pastebin.com/zhBbaNTB
>Link to a PDF of Wayne Barlowe’s “Expedition”, a seminal work of speculative evolution full of incredible paintings and illustrations


https://youtu.be/Rbi8Jgx1CNE [Embed] [Embed]
>”The Future is Wild”, a CGI documentary following the evolution of life on Earth in the far future

https://pastebin.com/esdFrSEZ
>Dougal Dixon, arguably the father of speculative evolution. These are links to PDF’s of his books “After Man”, “The New Dinosaurs”, and “Man After Man”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egzZv8tqT_k&list=PL6xPxnYMQpquNuaEffJzjGjMsr6VktCYl&ab_channel=Biblaridion [Embed] [Embed]

https://sites.google.com/site/worldofserina/

https://sunriseonilion.wordpress.com/

http://www.cmkosemen.com/snaiad_web/snduterus.html

https://www.deviantart.com/sanrou/gallery/56844005/nau

http://www.planetfuraha.nl/

https://multituberculateearth.wordpress.com/

https://sites.google.com/view/lokiworldofrats/home

https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?showtopic=4578&st=15

https://www.deviantart.com/bicyclefrog

https://hardeshur.blogspot.com/p/main-page.html

https://rylmadolisland.blogspot.com/p/main-page.html?zx=bba41f9d602b6b9a

RECOMMENDED READING LIST ON EVOLUTION:
> The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
> The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins
> The Revolutionary Phenotype - J.F. Gariepy
> Evolution and the Theory of Games - John Maynard Smith
> Animal Signals - John Maynard Smith
> The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
> Mendel's Principles of Heredity - Bateson & Mendel
> Population Genetics: A Concise Guide - John H. Guillespie
> The Largest Avian Radiation: The Evolution of Perching Birds, or the Order Passeriformes by Jon Fjeldså, Les Christidis, and Per G. P. Ericson
>The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity by Douglas Erwin
>Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World by George McGhee Jr.
>Triassic Life on Land: The Great Transition by Hans-Dieter Sues
>On the Prowl: In Search of Big Cat Origins by Mark Hallett and John Harris

dead thread what should i post to keep it alive hmmm
how would you make a speculative evolution game fun, when everybody wants to play as the predator and nobody wants to be the prey
should the players all be predators hunting npc prey, with the pvp element being competition over territory?

>>4983981 (OP)
We doin' an amphibian thread? BAM! Spec evo caecilian! How would you see caecilians evolving in your seed world?

>>4984910
Predator limit duh

>>4984927
that would just be putting a limit on the number of people who can play the fun characters, sounds lame

>>4984910
>>4984928
i bring this up because herbivore gameplay in the isle is abysmal, you hide in a bush for 90% of the game

>>4984928
>>4984929
The isle sucks for a lot of reasons (that being one of them) but you can make herbivore gameplay fun. Adding things like sophisticated herding mechanics, intraspecific conflict, child rearing, and a sort of points system that allows you to become a predator if you perform well as an herbivore (kinda like becoming a hero or villain in star wars battlefront) would be good options.

>>4984929
Also a huge part of why being an herbivore in the isle sucks is because everyone and their mother plays as the carnivores. Some of the most fun I've ever had in that stupid game was when I linked up with a megaherd and hung out around a watering hole while occasionally going on huge migrations with all the predators on the horizon waiting for an opprotunity to pick off a lingering member.

>>4984938
>>4984939
you bringing up herds is a good idea, i think the game would need to have all herbivores be in herds, just so you always have other players to cooperate/compete with, instead of being a bush simulator

>>4984947
That or give the solitary herbivores faster speed and more stamina than the predators or a lot of armor and weaponry. Yk like in real life. Either way make it so the predators actually have to catch them when they're weak or by surprise to kill them.

>>4984910
mappainter like vicky2 or hoi4 where you're controlling where your species is populating and you evolve different traits over the millions of years. Continental shifts would make the genre fresh on its own, you would have some overlap for species of different niches, and you could look into snapshots of different ecosystems. Also plays into the fact that making big blobs are 99% of what players do in mappainters anyway.

Are your spec critters tasty ?
https://youtu.be/akWzmseCs8Y

>>4985787
hahahaha biblaridion's such a fag lmao

>>4986231
No one asked fag

New spec fag dropped
https://youtu.be/A-ddH3wKwso

>>4984925

My project Lemuria has quite a few caecilians

>>4983981 (OP)
I still ponder/wonder who the drawfag who did this & a squid Ningen is, also wonder how'd they do harpies, bigfoot, or even merfolk.

is there any alien from Darwin 4 that has eyes?

>>4988518
The balloon-like organ at the front of the jumping thing is supposed to be some kind of rudimentary eye.
>t. read the book

Why do so many of Barlowe's demons got such humanoid forms, esp in the faces, even tho they're clearly not simian descendants?

>>4984910
1. you should play the card/board game Evolution, it has solved the predator dynamic pretty well and it's very fun
2. I would add gambling where you bet on the creatures you think are gonna win.

I've been setting up an evolution simulator lately, which is based on graph theory and molecular structures. It lets you bet on the animals.
https://pricklypeargames.itch.io/inochicules
https://youtu.be/qQF5rS5_268

>>4988577
Monopedalism is dumb
Great paintings though

>>4989939

Demons are not biological beings. Barlowe's Inferno is an exercise on creativity rather than speculation

>>4990250
no moreso than bipedalism, imo. If you break a leg = you're dead. You need good balance. You need to have developed strong, columnar limbs. Monopedalism seems perfectly reasonable. Heck, cobras rear up on their body, kangaroos on their tails; not that far off from developing it, if you squint real hard.

>>4990517
Unfortunate, still cool setting & artwork nonetheless ofc. Hell ecology would fr go hard, ngl

>>4990243
made me think, even if roguelites have become a plague and are as a genre more often than not a crutch for lazy devs, i'd play a spec evo pikmin/patapon clone where you'd control a colony of creatures and get to see your population slowly mutate over time while searching for food (plus random mutation/environement events and maybe items cause roguelite)

>>4990672
I also made a pikmin clone incidentally,
https://pricklypeargames.itch.io/warmitzler

>>4983981 (OP)

Here's a bit pf speculative evolution mixed with paleontology.

A depiction of a fuzzy early amniote, in accordance to a paper that amniotes were ancestrally warm-blooded

>>4984910
Tie fun parts of the game to population size.

>>4984929
Herbivore gameplay in the Isle has you killing other people more than carnivore dinosaurs because the two strongest herbivores are borderline unbeatable

>>4992319
>in accordance to a paper that amniotes were ancestrally warm-blooded
sounds interesting, do you still have the link or title ?

>>4984929
>>4992393
From what I understand path of titans is the superior dino sim now
beasts of bermuda for herd events

>>4992552

"On the origins of endothermy in amniotes"

>>4992622
I played both and abandoned both because they're fundamentally shit games and i can assure you that path of titans is even worse, basically a glorified phone game ported to pc that asks more money out of you than The Isle and even has the balls to paywall certain dinosaurs in a tech demo that can be barely classified as a game
As bad as the isle is they still only ask 20 bucks, also the dinosaurs don't handle like cars so the movement is a lot better and feels more natural

I thought about a planet which was populated by Crustaceans, Molluscs and Fish as well as Odontocetes and Mysticetes as a result of a Wormhole event which existed from the Northeast Pacific to an ocean on a young, watery yet terrestrial Super-Earth which orbits two M-Type Stars where life hadn't developed before this event. The one way wormhole lasted roughly from 35-30 million years ago. The Cetacean life originate from a hybrid pod of Simocetus/Aetiocetus.

Would a giant flightless bird still have feathers? How would they regulate their temperature?

>>4993414
all the giant flightless birds we know of still had feathers. Often they'd lose some on their extremities for some reason, though.

>>4993527

Technically we only know that about moas. No feather remains have been found for elephant birds, mihirungs and terror birds.

>>4993677
ostriches? emu? they still count

>>4993677
Featherless terror birds, now there's a subversion of expectations I've not considered before.

>>4993414
I really don't see a scenario in which a bird losing feathers would be advantageous

>>4993927
Vultures have lost their neck feathers

>>4993928
Yeah, but it's just the neck area and for a very specific reason, rest is fully coated
What i mean is a terrestrial bird going entirely bald, doesn't really seem realistic

>>4993929
well the sort of issue I can see is that the method by which ostriches thermoregulate doesn't scale up to higher bodysizes

>>4993807
they are dinosaurs after all

>>4993414
The only way for them to loose their feather is if the get big enough for their own body mass to be enough to maintain their temperature, like how elephants lost their fur, what would most likely only happen in a warm environment

>>4984925
There's a star wars species like this

I have a hypothetical. In a comic there's a planet where all the fauna are carnivorous. Could this even work if we tweaked a bunch of biology into some extremes? I'm guessing shit like geophagia and photosynthesis aren't off the table. Just wondering how nuts you'd have to go with it.

>>4994429
The problem is how is energy being introduced into the food pyramid, you lose most of your energy from heat. So metabolic rate needs to be efficient to handle the vast amounts of time you'd go without food, ergo cold blooded animals, reptiles.

>>4994429
pelagic ecosystems are almost exclusively carnivorous, so mirror their conditions to some extent and you'll be fine.

>>4994451

Pelagic ecosystems still have plankton at the base.

>>4994429
Probably not

>>4994580
I imagine if it were a terrestrial ecosystem with the levels of carnivorous strata the pelagic can sustain it would appear to the outside observer that it were exclusively carnivorous. Otherwise his question would be "Can an ecosystem exist without a producer?" which is just silly, and you know this.
Make the ecosystem focused on any plants being completely impervious to herbivorous predation and the surviving carnivorous animals during the ecosystem collapse entirely dependent on aerial whalefalls that feed on the only remaining available producers, aeroplankton. Then you can have several hundred thousand years to potentially millions of years where dense jungles are uneaten and all the fauna consume the flesh of another, within reason.

What you guys think of the idea of sneak-mimic toads ?

>>4996659
Tsuchinoko if he evolved

>>4996659
dumb but cool, very funny, would probably be tasty
could probably get away with just appearing to be a head of a snake though instead of having some giant growth behing it for no reason

>>4996659
wait what that first one looks like a caterpillar not a toad

>>4984910

>EVO Search For Eden only with enemies/bosses inspired by animals from spec evo projects
>An RPG where you evolve every time you level up (If you used bite attacks a lot, you get stronger teeth)

new kaimere video
https://youtu.be/Tiy4dU9Z7t4

>>4997061
I'm not a big fan of this project and I don't like that there's always someone posting it "coincidentally"
he shoves trannies and fags into it constantly and the actual "spec evo" is just window dressing.
really don't like it. Heck I like serina more because even though sheather's ALSO a big fag enabler, at least his ideas can be creative.
The literal most interesting thing kaimere has had was, what, a flightless pterosaur? Which also just looks like an ape with a pterosaur head...

>>4997234
>Keenan Taylor's based
>Sheather's also based but I like his stuff
Ok and? Keep seething, u woke right SJW bozo.

>>4997565
>>4997234
just scrolling by but this interaction was enough to make me hate this project
>da woke RIGHT

>>4997565
this has got to be trolling at this point

>>4984910
Spore but even more autistic.

>>4984910
This might sound funny, but play on some animal survival games on roblox. They existed before the isle populated the concept, and have almost perfected it.
Prior Extinction is the isle clone but it's become boring shitty gatcha & is no longer fun.
Ecos:La Brea is pay to play but is well made and is based on cenozoic North America.

These games also have the issue of 80% of a server being predators. They get around it by making herbivores more viable. In Ecos:La Brea the bison is actually fun to play because it's the strongest animal in-game so far. You can kill a dire wolf in one hit. 'Points' are easier to get as a herbivore, there's migration mechanics & the map is big enough to avoid preds, even on a full server.

Basically what I'm saying is the animal survival game of your dreams /an is on Roblox.

Drawing this genus of jaguar-sized carnivorous rodents, Sarcosciurus, descended from ground squirrels. I thought it would be cute to have it sitting up and using its forelimbs to manipulate chunks of meat and severed limbs like a typical squirrel, but then I'm not sure if that behavior would carry over.
Squirrels do that shit because they typically eat small portable meals, while a predator like this would most likely kill and eat things as big or bigger than themselves, not something they can just hold in their hands. That stuff would be better pinned to the ground. Also I wonder if the larger more muscular size would make it inflexible.
I mainly want to have it eat something while sitting up like a squirrel to further distinguish it behaviorally and physically from a large cat, which it is evidently based on partially through convergence, but again idk if it makes sense for it to be doing that. Lmk what you guys think. Also, please talk me out of giving it a giant claw on its semi-opposable thumb and ripping off the marsupial lion.

>>4998324
So Spore before EA sank it's claws into it

>>4986499
Like the guy's stuff, but PFFFFF!

>>4988518
Technically they all have ultraviolet sensitive pits in the documentary. Like patches of skin that can sense the day/ night cycle and each other's bioluminescence.

>>4998348
no, because at a certain size, such behaviors are not beneficial to the animal because of prey theyre eating. if theyre eating small things sure, but when sizes increase food intake increases and its just no sustainable unless the environment is littered with prey in abundance. you also have to consider that sitting upright is kinda shitty because square-cube law, you dont want to keep putting all that pressure on your spine and pelvic girdle and if theyre adapted to that, they might as well become chimps essentially, which defeats the whole purpose of this

>>4999194
nature gives zero fucks about what is beneficial and evolution works without purpose

if something is fucking retarded it merely has to be the least retarded thing in the niche and the chances of something being less retarded are astronomically small
>uhm, that behavior may wear on the pelvic girdle
>the animal: *has 50 children by age two*

>>4998348
I don't see why not

Why would they lose that behavior? It basically doesn't matter either way

>>4998348
I like it.

>>4998348
you could have it be specialized to strip as much meat off bones as possible and get to the marrow, in which case manipulating the bones would be ideal, so you could easily have it even take prey up a tree like a jaguar and then sit there perched like any other skull, just in this case it's using its giant rodent teeth to puncture the skull and get the brain, and by the time it's done with the meal the bones are completely clean. Seems very reasonable.

>>4999199
it literally does, as along as its not a detriment to have something, its going to stick around, and it does work with purpose and thats: does it keep the animal alive and more virile/fertile than other animals. so it makes no sense for a large predator that feeds on large prey to waste time grabbing food with its hands to shovel into its mouth to chew, predators dont really do that, they just bite, rip, chew and swallow, theyre not going to waste time fumbling with food, unless the animal doesnt bite things to death and rather claws them, then it would work, or its eating small things, like a raccoon, but that presents the problem of prey availability.

>>4999432
>so it makes no sense for a large predator that feeds on large prey to waste time grabbing food with its hands to shovel into its mouth to chew, predators dont really do that,
>predators dont really do that,

>>4999443
>they might as well become chimps essentially, which defeats the whole purpose of this
>unless the animal doesnt bite things to death and rather claws them, then it would work, or its eating small things, like a raccoon, but that presents the problem of prey availability.
learn to read

>>4999451
you're a retard

>>4999432
>it makes no sense for a large predator that feeds on large prey to waste time grabbing food with its hands to shovel into its mouth to chew
It does. Mostly because it literally doesn't matter, it's not exactly killing them, and the number of mutations needed to eliminate a behavior that is highly conserved in all rodents makes it unlikely. Even with altered limb structure and reduced dexterity, a predatory rodent lineage would likely still attempt some form of "sitting up and manipulating food as its eaten using the forelegs". Just on principle.

Or to be a faggy adaptationist, because it lets them strip meat from bones faster so they have fewer problems with thieves and are less likely to be prey while eating. But that's not how it works, it's just the more satisfying sounding explanation.

>>4986499
Never seen a single video from this guy and now i know i shouldn't change that

>>4998331
For me its Mesozoico

New Isla Project episode today, rejoice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gICd2gbB6aA

>>5001342
love this guy's stuff

while I can appreciate kaimere animals( he does have a dinosaur bias which kinda sucks) he is absolutely horrible when it comes to humans.

>>5001517
issue with Kaimere is that it's a spec-evo project that is goal-oriented rather than evolutionary
the author has a clear vision of how the "modern day" should look, and then writes how it happened, and as such you get the dinosaur bias

In 2010, Martin A Nowak, Corina E Tarnita and the late Edward O Wilson published a landmark paper on the evolution of eusociality.
In it, they point out that every known instance of eusociality occurred in the context of defending a relatively high-investment nesting- and occasionally feeding site.
Amongst mammals, this is known to have happened twice, with Heterocephalus glaber and Fukomys damarensis.
Both species tend to feed on roots and tubers, and are specialised for digging, creating huge underground networks in which to dig, feed and breed. They also possess peculiar adaptations to deal with low oxygen- and high carbon dioxide concentrations underground.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that either species is made to last since inbreeding rates are sky-high. Something all eusocial species without flight capability tend to suffer from.
But all of this brings up an interesting speculation.
Lystrosaurus lived in the late Permian and early Triassic. Lived through an era of low oxygen concentrations. Had adaptations for burrowing/digging. Some possessed tusks that could've easily fulfilled the same role as Heterocephalus glaber's enormous front teeth.
None of this HAS to result in the evolution of eusociality, but the conditions to enable it were assuredly there.
There is a timeline out there where one, or perhaps even several, species of Lystrosaurus became eusocial, explaining their staggering abundance in the early Triassic, only for inbreeding to render them extinct again after a few million years.
Maybe it is our timeline.

>>5001674

interesting hypothesis

>>5001674
thats very interesting

>>4983981 (OP)
I used to be so excited for stuff like that but since depression struck me I feel only sad looking at things I once liked.

>>4997234
>there's always someone posting it "coincidentally"
People are going to bring up stuff you're uncomfortable with, that's just life, you don't control how people think.

>>4999432
My apologies friend, I redid my carnivorous squirrel concept, is this any better?

>>5002646
no as in it gets posted within a couple hours of every new upload seemingly every single time, it's someone intentionally doing it despite the regulars of the thread always complaining
frankly you sound like you've already argued with several people about it with the way you're presenting your stance

>>5002842
youre stupid, spec evo content in video format is slim pickings and you and like 3 other schizos sperg out because he made some rainbow day special and wrote shitty books. Your complaints do not pertain to at least 80% of his videos and thats an underestimate

>>5003070
not him but Kaimere isn't even real spec evo, there's nothing really speculative about it, it's a fantasy setting with justifications

new Kaimere video
https://youtu.be/CTDOhfIzT6Y

>>5003140
like fucking clockwork. Did you sage the thread trying to make it harder to notice that you posted this right when you - I mean HE uploaded the video? Dumb fag. Take this glorified tranny dnd campaign and never post here again. Literally nobody ever talks about this except for us complaining about it.

>>5003140
i dony know what this is but
This shit is SO FUCKING GAY it punched a one way anus ticket to aidsville with its dick

>>5003707
>"Man's natural predator?"
Big cats, it was always big cats
Saved you 30 minutes

>>5003140
keyed af make them seethe bro

>>5003712
stfu dumb strag, no one cares, keep seething & malding.

Will subnautica 2 be good?

>>5004262
Faggots trying to make their own slurs is always so cute cause it just looks like they made a typo instead

>MOOOOOM I WANT A TORATON!!!
>we have a toraton at home
>toraton at home:
https://youtu.be/8I-gQugvlB0?si=ljiDrNPOUVEEMC6D

>>5004361
what's the horn for

>>5004304
i refuse to believe that anyone can say "cissie" or "strag" with a straight face

>>5004387
It's like... slurs in general are some good sign of infantile mentality, very cute & fascinating form of retardation

>>5004380
Guy in the video says it's like a snorkel and also doubles as a resonating chamber.

>>5004262
so why have these obvious troll posts not been deleted yet?

>>4996566
Such a system would collapse quickly. Atleast as our understanding of carnivorous animals go, this would lead to entropy really quickly. Earth's food chain consists of a pyramid in which for each carnivore you need many more herbivores to sustain them.
People don't realize but the amount of biomass by trophic class is stupidly distorted. I asked an AI and it told me plants have a biomass of 450 GTs while animals have just 2 GTs.
It's just not possible to sustain an exclusively carnivore fauna. At some point of the trophic chain you need organisms that transform inert matter like carbon and oxigen into living organisms so animals can extract energy from them. Your carnivorous fauna would fall to entropy otherwise.

>>5005073
>I asked an AI
dumbass. Also we literally have ecosystems like this in the ocean, where it works fine, and during creataceous north africa. Also, it would last for hundreds of thousands of years, which I said, so it would still clearly be an environment that fits the bill and is apparently in stasis to any non-deity observers, so you're retarded, kill yourself.

>>5005581
Phytoplankton, algae and sea grasses still exist and form the baseline of marine biomes
the majority of multicellular biomass in cretaceous north africa was still plants

>>5005638
>and the surviving carnivorous animals during the ecosystem collapse entirely dependent on aerial whalefalls that feed on the only remaining available producers, aeroplankton. Then you can have several hundred thousand years to potentially millions of years where dense jungles are uneaten and all the fauna consume the flesh of another, within reason.
valid method of recreating it. You seem to have trouble reading.

>>4983981 (OP)
Evolution you say?

>>5005765
Yeah, this gets posted occasionally. Some people dislike it because it's intentionally a little edgy (based on something bordering cosmic horror after all) but it's also honestly fairly realistic, as a source of constant food with a lot of safety is irresistible to most animals. Only real issue I have with the project is the crab things (or whatever they are) that have, like, human hands or whatever. But again it's a "cosmic horror" setting so it's fine, just not my taste.

>>5005793
Would have thought the line would have been Compound Surface Fauna where random animals and people could just fuse with each other to make a chimera horror that lives for a few days before dying because its organs give out.

There's also the cases where the company in charge of the pit recover the body and cut out of the brains and keep them alive in jars.

>>5005793
spec cosmic horror goes hard sometimes, ngl

>>5005793
Who wouldn't want to go hiking in the lung of a giant cosmic horror that's closed during the summer because it's exhaling carbon dioxide.

New Kaimere video
https://youtu.be/-Zyo18dX9OU

>>5008716
This shit is so gay my penis cut itself off

>>5008716
>Today we'll be learning about the Weocheutu'ka'kacockawowotutufafalala, my armless abelisaurs who are well-known across the bugilikama, totofafa, supilikhikhi, and taguaramilala'ke'keki'ke'kikiki'ki clans for engaging exclusively in gay sex. Thanks for watching, make sure to subscribe to my patreon and buy my faggy fanfictio- I mean my book ALL ABOUT... spec evo haha yeah

>>5004361
Yup, another kappa kino video.

he's returned, he lives!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytlmHL7efRU

New Parias video
https://youtu.be/6p1Wzv_2YMc

>>5009584
that looks like koseman art based on the thumbnail, explains why it's so nasty. No idea why that turk is such a fiend.

>>5009673
I like this guy's stuff, only real complaint is that his thumbnails always look like clickbait so I rarely watch lmao

>>5009720
looks kinda furry-coded...

>>5009889
>No idea why that turk is such a fiend.
jew

>>5008721
>>5008837
he should stick with animals and stay away from humans all tho he does have a dino boner

>>5012019
is he really? lmao

>>5012099
yeh, jews that were forced to convert to islam under the turks. Similar shit as the Spanish. Funny how he is still a turkish dick ridder.

>>5009889
>>5012019
>>5012359
Wow finally someone who says the same thing. I always found Kosemen kind of weird and creepy. I get the feeling he's a sexpest with how much cocks he draws in his art.

>>5006262
I love the lore of the permian basin superorganism (mystery flesh pit)
, though unfortunately the original author seems to have stopped making updates, so most new stuff is by fans

>>5012363
he admitted to fantasizing about animals raping people to death in elementary school. It's what inspired his snaiad series. Where some predators raped their prey to death (with a spike that's not actually their penis)... cus their penis is in their mouths.

>>5012363
If you've ever watched his podcast you'll know he is. Just waiting for him to get metoo'd
Also kinda funny but he went through an EDS phase on twitter for a while, made me regret following him.

>>5012648
>he admitted to fantasizing about animals raping people to death in elementary school.

>>5012682
>he went through an EDS phase on twitter for a while,
EDS? explain

>>5012682
>EDS phase
what?

>>5013065
>>5013066
Elon derangement syndrome
There was a period around when elon bought twitter that kosemen posted nothing retweets of musk with shallow dunks. Made it a pain to look through his twitter for the art he posts. Y'know, typical artist stuff. Not as bad as the birrin guy since at least kosemen mostly got over it.

New Kaimere video
https://youtu.be/OefDFBPWTpU

>>5014241
Whats the difference with earth calendar besides the months have 56 days?

>>5014241
Tranny sharks!

/tg/ crossposter here, I have a question for you. I am working on a very soft-scifi post-singularity-collapse type setting and I am wondering, what would a creature that dwells in magma look like? Yes I am aware no biological creature on earth can survive in magma but if you had to design one what sort of traits would it have? Metal scales like that one abyssal sea snail? Leathery skin of a particular color? Glassy chitinous exteriors? Would it just be like a big crystal? I'm less looking for a detailed rundown and more to hit whatever notes would make a speculative biologist "feel like" it would conceivably fit into a magmatic environment, even if it is an absurd premise if you really think about it. Like for example if you wanted to design a deep sea creature the "notes to hit" would be bioluminescence, unhinging jaw, lures, either very small or very big, something something volcanic vents, you know. What would be the theoretical aesthetic key points of a magma-dwelling creature?

>>5016949
Easiest solution would be something silicon-based, as in with rocky exterior and divorced from normal life. Can still look organic as it'd be a smooth continuous shape in order to be able to move and undulate through lava, effectively tunneling. Can take inspiration from any burrowing animal for body plan - worms, hognose snakes, moles, etc. If you want a bona fide animals, I would suggest either:
>oversized tardigrades (for recognition purposes primarily; most normies would not care that it doesn't make sense)
>some type of snail or slug with carbon in its skin and scales, yeah
>something with artificial plates, so anything from tortoises and armadillos to searobins or sea urchins
>it HAS to be black, trust me, it will make everyone believe it more
you can more or less go wild though; nothing really could do it, so you can get away with anything by saying its [thing] is for [problem] and it solves it. Good luck, let us know what you end up cooking up.

>>5016993
these are good, thanks. I was thinking a kind of tardigrade or amoeba-like creature as a base for sure, now I am just going to add metal quills/scales/segments and probably have it be some shimmering black substance aesthetically. Probably some kind of airtight beak mouth and spiracle airlocks that only open when it is safe or to emit superheated jets of air for propulsion and waste extraction.

>>5017012
a velvet worm could also work

>>5017012
I like it. Have fun anon.

>>4983981 (OP)

Hey ultituberculate Earth guy here, I promise I'll cook up new stuff but in the meanwhile enjoy this: https://multituberculateearth.wordpress.com/2025/07/16/the-dawn-of-the-multituberculates/

>>4983981 (OP)
Ancestral sabertoothed Abelisaurid.

>>5018883
lmao what is this from? How could one justify this design?

>>5018883
This subgenre of spec evo obsessed deviantart autist who still can't draw anything that isn't cartoony is honestly fascinating to me with how surprisingly widespread it is

Asked ChatGPT what a capybara would look like 1 billion years in the future. Got this:
Hydrotherimys abyssoratus - “abyss-burrowing water rat”
Earth’s surface is mostly uninhabitable: a hyperarid supercontinent under a brighter sun, with low oxygen and high CO2. Mammals are nearly extinct, but this massive capybara descendant survives underground.
It lives in deep aquifer systems beneath the continent’s interior. About 2.4 meters long and 300 kg, it’s built like a cross between a capybara, a tank, and a mole rat. It has a flattened, armored skull for digging and keratinized scutes covering its back and tail. Eyes are vestigial - it relies on electroreception and subsonic vibrations to navigate.
Colonies are eusocial: one breeding queen, dozens of sterile workers. Communication happens through chemical trails and low-frequency pulses. They construct complex tunnel systems, complete with heat-exchange vents and mud siphons to manage water during dry centuries.
Their metabolism is adapted to low oxygen, using sulfur-based anaerobic respiration. A modified colon functions as a buoyancy organ in flooded tunnels. Diet consists of root starches, chemosynthetic algae, and decaying fungal mats.
The tunnels host a full biome: glowing fungi, parasitic arthropods, eel-like predators. They're hunted by blind, python-sized worm-lizards that track body heat.
Hydrotherimys isn’t intelligent, but its hive-level coordination and ecological influence make it one of the last successful mammalian lineages - a relic from Earth’s warm-blooded past, surviving in darkness beneath a dying sky.

>>5019094
this almost sounds too good for ChatGPT
kinda eerie

>>4984910
Give prey more Evolution points and faster evolution speed

>>5006023
Love this!

>>5018959
For my original universe.

>>5019103
Asked it for a turtle in 1 billion years:
Glacioscutum siphonax - “ice-plated siphon turtle”
By this time, Earth’s climate is swinging violently between extremes. As the sun brightens, the planet’s orbital and axial changes trigger frequent hyper-glacial periods. Most surface life clings to equatorial refuges or sub-ice ecosystems. But turtles - absurdly resilient survivors - have taken an unexpected path.
Glacioscutum is a descendant of softshell turtles that colonized geothermal fissure lakes under ancient polar ice. It's now a deep-subglacial aquatic specialist. Around 1.8 meters long, it has a broad, semi-transparent carapace with embedded antifreeze glands and bio-optic cells to absorb faint geothermal light.
The skull is elongated with a retractable siphon snout - used to inhale warm, mineral-rich microbe plumes from hydrothermal vents. Jaws are adapted to filter mats of extremophilic bacteria and sulfuric biofilms. The limbs have become paddle-like and end in cartilaginous hooks for anchoring against currents.
It breathes both through lungs and highly vascularized throat tissue - a holdover from earlier aquatic turtles - and can enter torpor for months during energy shortages.
Behaviorally, it’s solitary, slow-breeding, and shows minimal learning capacity - but its biological efficiency is unmatched. Eggs are laid in silica-crust domes near warm fissures and left to incubate in geothermal heat.
Glacioscutum has no eyes. Instead, it detects pressure, temperature, and faint bioelectric fields. Its only real predator is a blind, eel-like scavenger that tears open weakened shells during nutrient crashes.
Despite a billion years of change, this turtle remains what it always was: a quiet, cold-blooded survivor. Shelled, slow, and eternal.

Cryarachne spirafons - “spiral-furnace ice spider”
Earth’s climate has entered erratic thermal pulses - the planet sees alternating deep freeze and greenhouse chaos. In the twilight zone of a mega-glacier spanning half the globe, a new kind of spider has evolved, thriving in sub-ice volcanic caves where warmth and minerals bleed upward.
Cryarachne spirafons is a distant descendant of trapdoor spiders. It's now 1.2 meters across, adapted to live inside silica-walled lava tubes beneath the ice. The exoskeleton is ultra-dense, infused with volcanic glass proteins and reflective scale-patches for radiation shielding.
It doesn’t spin silk - instead, it builds crystalline spiral lures, grown from dissolved minerals in geothermal runoff. These spirals pulse with thermal gradients that attract chemo-sensitive prey. The spider hides behind them in fissures, striking through with needle-like forelimbs lined with barbs that inject neurogel.
Cryarachne’s brain is heavily lobed for spatial and thermal mapping. Its eight eyes are reduced to bio-photonic nodes tuned to infrared and pressure gradients. It doesn’t “see” in light - it perceives heat, airflow, and seismic hum. Mating is rare and highly ritualized: pairs construct counter-spirals and sync pulse patterns before merging burrows.
Its prey includes geothermal crustaceans, fungal crawlers, and planktonic glow-worms that drift in subglacial currents. Its only predator is a blind, serpentine pseudoscorpion with snapping heat-sense claws.
Cryarachne spirafons is not venomous in the traditional sense - its neurogel rewires prey nervous systems in seconds, causing paralysis, shutdown, or disorientation. It feeds for days on a single organism.
It is not sentient. But it is methodical. Cold. Patient. And completely adapted to a world we would no longer recognize.

Lmao
Aerodyptes vespertilio - “bat-wing dusk penguin”
Earth’s surface is fragmented and unstable. Ocean levels have risen and fallen hundreds of times. The sun is brighter, but the atmosphere is thinner, and the magnetic field has weakened - exposing life to extreme radiation and ion storms. True birds are mostly extinct, but a few descendants endure in alien niches. Among them: the dusk penguins.
Aerodyptes vespertilio is a flying, cave-dwelling penguin species that re-evolved powered flight in the perpetual twilight of Earth’s shadow hemisphere. Once exclusively aquatic, these penguins adapted to survive in deep atmospheric canyons where heat, shelter, and prey converge.
Wings are now leathery and bat-like - derived from fused feather filaments hardened into flexible membranes. Their flight is silent, gliding through sulfurous thermals in bio-luminescent rift valleys. Unlike any modern bird, Aerodyptes echolocates with pulsed trills from its syrinx, navigating pitch-black canopies of fungal towers and gas vents.
Their bodies are coated in reflective down to shield against cosmic rays. The beak has evolved into a hooked, infrared-sensitive organ, used to pluck thermal plankton from geothermal bloom clouds. Eyes are reduced, but their lateral line system - once primitive - is now hyper-sensitive to air currents and electromagnetic shifts.
They nest upside-down in insulated vaults carved into canyon walls. Eggs are gelatinous, semi-buoyant, and incubated in hanging mucus sacs. Colonies operate like loosely coordinated bat rookeries - vocal, mobile, and territorially aggressive.
Aerodyptes is not warm-blooded in the traditional sense. It “ram charges” internal heat through sustained wingbeats, and shuts down nonessential systems during cold cycles - a flying ember in a dying sky.

Kek
Ferrosoma virentis - “iron-bodied forest giant”
Pandas, once symbols of fragile ecosystems, are long gone - but their genetic legacy persists in a descendant that has adapted to Earth’s radically changed conditions. The climate has cycled through extremes. Forests now grow in dense, biomechanical symbioses with metal-absorbing plants and fungal intelligence networks. In one such biome, an herbivorous colossus roams: the descendant of the panda.
Ferrosoma stands nearly 4 meters tall at the shoulder and weighs over 4 tons. It has retained a digitigrade posture and general ursine form but is armored in a flexible lattice of bioaccumulated metallic tissues - iron, manganese, even rare earths absorbed via diet and stored in keratinized skin nodes. This gives the creature a dull, living sheen like oxidized bronze.
Its jaws have lost their carnivorous lineage entirely. The skull is wide, flat, with molars evolved into slow-grinding plates used to process silicate-rich mosses and metallic cellulose analogues. A secondary throat chamber filters and excretes biohazardous trace metals.
The iconic panda coloration remains, though distorted - swirls of high-reflectivity nanocrystals embedded in the skin confuse heat-sensitive predators and airborne parasites.
Ferrosoma doesn’t use vision much. It relies on magnetosensory mapping and low-frequency vibrations. It communicates in rhythmic thumps and deep growls that pulse through the fungal-rooted earth.
Behaviorally, it's solitary, contemplative, slow. Each individual maps and cultivates its territory, tending to certain plant species in an ancient, co-evolved exchange of nutrients and protection.
In a world of synthetic predators, hyperfungi, and rogue gene clouds, this panda-descendant survives not by speed or intelligence, but by becoming part of the landscape itself - a walking piece of living geology.

>>5019094
>>5019198
>>5019204
>>5019209
>>5019211
>1 billion years of evolution = same animal but bigger with sci fi elements

>>5019508
I told it this.
Aelonautilus pelagisoma - "air-sailing deep-sea body"
The penguin is extinct. But one of its distant lineages survives - not as a bird, but as a filter-feeding sky-organism adrift in Earth’s thickened upper atmosphere.
Over the last billion years, evolution decoupled form from origin. Aelonautilus is no longer a vertebrate in any meaningful sense - bones are gone, replaced by hydrocarbon microfoam structures. Feathers are long abandoned; its outer surface is a taut, semi-transparent dermis filled with lift-gas symbionts and myco-luminescent lichen.
It drifts in the aeropelagic layer, 30–50 km above sea level, suspended like a jellyfish in oceanic sky currents. No eyes. No wings. Aelonautilus "swims" using undulating radial lobes that contract in slow pulses to steer through thermals. Once a penguin; now a heliotropic blimp-organism, 12 meters long.
Feeding structures dangle downward - kilometer-long cilia trails that sift microplankton and photosynthetic spore-clouds rising from equatorial jungles. It doesn't hunt. It doesn't land. It harvests sky-nutrients.
Reproduction is asexual and slow: one individual grows an internal clone over decades, which buds off during solar flux events and drifts away. Colonies may span the whole sky above continents, but no two ever meet intentionally.
Behavior is distributed across neural ganglia suspended in magnetic fluid chambers. It senses ultraviolet gradients, magnetic fields, and atmospheric vibration. There's no sociality, no memory, no panic. It simply floats.
Aelonautilus is not the penguin's future - it is its echo, inflated and rewritten by time, unrecognizable but still, somehow, born from wings that once forgot how to fly.

Cryosutura fractalith - “Fractal-threaded cryospawn"
It’s not a spider. Not anymore. But its genome carries echoes of Araneae - an ancient, extinct group that once spun silk in trees. One billion years later, their descendants have dissolved into Earth's post-animal biota. From those remnants emerged Cryosutura fractalith, a quasi-living, self-replicating structure that mimics organismal behavior but is no longer an "animal" in any traditional sense.
Cryosutura is a modular crystal-colony, composed of silicon-lattice chitin nodes arranged in branching, recursive geometry. Each “limb” is a repeating chain of subunits that grow, detach, and recombine depending on local chemical gradients. It doesn’t walk. It assembles, disassembles, and reconfigures.
It exists in the deep shadow regions of Earth’s polar crystal forests - places shielded from direct stellar radiation but rich in geothermal flux and atmospheric ions. There’s no digestion: Cryosutura dissolves minerals, atmospheric organics, and fungal dusts through catalytic fractal surfaces. Energy is stored in ferroelectric folds that open and snap shut like clockwork petals.
There is no mouth. No eyes. No web. But it builds: vast branching fractal matrices, like webs made of ice-glass, threading entire canyons. These are not for catching prey - they’re for gathering data. Cryosutura senses fluctuations in gravity, electric fields, and magnetic shear, reacting by shifting its shape like a kaleidoscope under stress.
It is not conscious. But across its miles-long scaffolds, patterns emerge - pulse rhythms, information blooms, recursive logic knots. Communication may be occurring... through form, not sound.
Predators? None. Parasites? Countless. Life has stopped caring about mouths and eyes. It has learned to think in shapes.

A billion years in the future, life on Earth has retreated underground. The surface is sterile - bombarded by UV, stripped of nutrients, and scorched by a sun 10% brighter than today. Deep within geothermal tunnel networks, a strange entity exists: Fluvimorphus lacrimosus, or “the weeping river-form.” It’s not an animal in any modern sense. Possibly descended from cnidarians, synthetic life, or even fungi, it exists as a self-replicating liquid colony - a glowing, viscous “river” that winds through rock in search of chemical gradients. Its body is made of ion-conductive gel filled with modular microbeads that act like organs, nerves, and sensors all at once. There is no head, no limbs, no brain - just waves of synchronized pulses and phosphorescent ripples across kilometers of soft-flowing matter. It feeds on sulfur, mineral ions, and fungal detritus, sometimes engulfing and digesting other lifeforms at the molecular level. It doesn’t reproduce traditionally; segments shear off and form new colonies over millennia, slowly mutating into separate identities. Sometimes, two colonies merge and exchange complex bioelectrical patterns in a kind of silent “conversation.” The creature appears to “weep” constantly - droplets condensing along its body, dripping into the stone. These may serve a metabolic purpose or be remnants of a behavior loop long lost to memory. It is not intelligent in the human sense, but its body reacts with precision and adaptability, adjusting tunnel flow, cultivating microbial gardens, and regulating heat. Entire ecosystems depend on it - parasitic scavengers, symbiotic worms, and dust-borne fungi live in its wake. Seen in the dark, it resembles a slow-moving river of cold blue light, humming with unseen charge. Fluvimorphus is not a creature - it's a process, a behavior, a rhythm etched into the rock, still flowing long after animals have vanished.

>>5019517
This one's not bad

New speculative wildlife research center video
https://youtu.be/eCqTQAHkFnI

>>4983981 (OP)

A commission for my project Lemuria, done by no other than the Kaimere guy himself.
Learn more about this critter here: https://lemuriaspeculative.wordpress.com/2024/08/17/monotremes-of-lemuria/

>>5019517
puffy blowhog lookin ass

>>4983981 (OP)
Didn't put this here.

>>5020912
Toby Fox 60000000 years into the future

New Kaimere Video
https://youtu.be/iKzMyJYDJus

>>5021037
>new tranny OC video everyone :)

>>5021214

Dude the video was in homage of a dead child. Show some respect

>>5021286
Children die every day
Show some respect, never smile or laugh again

I really miss the tidal wave of Serina knockoffs cause they were funny as fuck and you could get the idea that the author genuinely believed that if you released caecilians alongside cordyceps mushrooms on a random planet and skipped a few bajillion years it would somehow lead to hyper intelligent flying dragons with 6 eyes that can read minds and breathe mustard gas as opposed to a total ecological collapse and both species going extinct

>>5021362
Serina was alright until the Fish became frogs and then rapidly became mammals.
I feel like the author just became really interested in the idea of Ray finned fish going onto land and forming three limbs, so much so that it became an unrealistic distraction.

If there were going to be mammal substitutes they too would have emerged from the canary lineage. It simply would be easier that way especially since we have evidence of this taking place IRL such as with Kiwi birds.

There is also the fact that the bird lineages would have highly suppressed the frog-fish, so it's total fucking bullshit that as soon as the frog fish developed climbing limbs they suddenly exploded into mammal-like niches.

>>5021371
to be entirely fair, weren't they largely restricted to amphibian-like niches until an extinction event happened that made the P-T event look modest?

while I do think that threepod locomotion wouldn't give rise to large grazers and such and it's reaching, at the same time at least it was somewhat built around evolutionary concepts

for me at least the worst part of Serina was when the author didn't have the balls to have the ice age be the end of things because he got too attached to his sapients, and then invoked deus ex machina

>>5021389
>Weren't they restricted until a P-T event
I can't recall but even if that's true the canary relatives still dominated past that to the point where I feel it wasn't justified.

I feel by that at least that point, even greater genetic variation on the canary lineages should have occurred than just the more basal bird-like lineages (I.E the jays, Archangels) the ones with the larval stages used to justify more "Fish like forms" and the soft beaks.

In fact the soft beaks not becoming even more radical and becoming something as different from birds as mammals are to reptiles was also disappointing. Despite having such a groundbreaking change they still ultimately felt too bird-like.

Meanwhile the fish-frogs make an evolutionary leap of the entire history of vertebrates in just a few evolutionary eras? Pretty bullshit if you ask me. I was fine with the eventually advancement of their amphibious stage to something more terrestrial but becoming foxes and deer was stupid.

>Deus ex machina event where the Gravediggers and canary dolphins get saved by ayys but not before green-housing the planet out of its snow-ball death
Yeah that was pretty cringe.

>>5021469
nearly all canary lineages went extinct I think the only one that survived were aquatic and there was super low oxygen concentrations or so
basically nearly everything got flat out reset, and even on earth, early-Triassic shit got weird, and despite the synapsids not only having drastically larger diversity during the Permian but also the most successful disaster taxon in the lystrosaurus, archosaurs ended up dominating the planet afterwards

there are some pretty radical placental fish-birds around, even ones that became planktonic

also I think there were some radical soft-bill developments happening that would have eventually seen something more mammal-ish evolve from the birds, but they all got wiped out in that extinction event

and while the fish-mammals can get silly at times, I do like that the project didn't just hyperfocus on birds, Serina having a lot of detail about plant life and it's on-off symbiotic relation with ants always was something I greatly enjoyed

And while it's content can be a bit rarer, I do also enjoy the weird stuff the molluscs got up to in the water

I do think that given just how radically things evolved during the early triassic on earth, and the fact that the extinction even on Serina was even worse (to put into context how narratively impactful it was, it's the even that finally wiped out all basal canaries, up to that point in the project some form of canary living fossil passerine had always been around) makes while improbably, the leap also not implausible

I still do think that tripod movement was a mistake though, but at least the author DID stick to hard size constraints and megafaunal niches were always dominated by birds, and course they did get pretty dinosaur-ish in the post deus-ex-machina world, which I genuinely do like even if how we got there was bullshit (do not enjoy the part that comes after it though Serina's enjoyability is almost directly inverse to how many sapients are around)

>>5021489
>Nearly all the lineages went extinct I think
By the time the most important fishfrog lineage showed up, the "wood builders", the extinction level event you described already long sense happened.

The Wood builders were already mammalian tri-legged creatures now evolved secondary "arms" formed from their ears which were also independently evolved from earlier fish-frog mammal derivatives.
The closest relatives of the Woodbuilders would also go on to become more rudiment-like after the deus ex saving of the planet.

Yes a powerful extinction event wiped out most of the bird lineages, but a representative of basically every group still survived and recovered and niche filled to an extent that I simply do not buy the leap the fishfrogs went into.

The squid birds became kind of boring mammoth equivalents but still very bird like by the time of the Dolphin/Badger alliance had formed, they hardly had made the level of sophisticated adaptations the fishfrogs had.

By that point the fishfrogs had an anatomy you could hardly relate to any living creature on earth save for their heads all being somewhat similar in structure to their mudskipper like ancestors. I just felt that it was way too radical.

This is best symbolized by how the Gravediggers were basically penguins with digging claws and sapience while their Woodbuilder allies were completely alien.
Creatures with 3 fully developed, powerful, advanced legs, skin unlike anything we know today, unique "ear limbs" unlike anything we know today. Practically none of the bird relatives by this point had made much of a change.
My problem is they basically come across as making evolutionary leaps from fish to humanity in like 5x the speed.

Yeah strange shit has happened in evolution, maybe a fish can become a mammal in a short amount of time given extreme circumstance, but in comparison to earth it just seems hamfisted.

>>5021510
Like I was going to say, do you really expect me to believe that after such a long time that the bird relatives only had a single instance of regaining 4 functional limbs while a fish who never had any to begin with managed to form 3 mammal-like ones in such a short time?

>>5021514
well for that part at least, it's relatively hard to go back on an evolved trait
the fish already had their fins with we know can evolve into limbs since that's well, what happened
there's a reason that quadruped birds required them to undergo that weird atavistic larval stage

and I believe the fast adaptation at least initially was helped by rather fast reproductive rates compared to the at that time extant birds

aka, part of the reasons why mammals managed to go from their cretaceous diminutive forms to fast domination of terrestrial life

It might be a bit too radical in how fast everything went but there's still like 50 million years between them coming to land and achieving large enough sizes to compete with birds, before that they occupied largely rodent-like niches which the birds of Serina never quite managed

>>5005765
Partly believable because things like geoducks exist, and there are plenty more passive feeders. But one thing bugs me about this: losing all mobility would seriously hamper the ability to reproduce in this case. It works for things in the ocean/beach because the ocean is both food AND a method of getting eggs/sperm to a mate. These shames are getting food from nutrient sacs sure, but how are they spreading sperm/eggs while immobile and not underwater?

I can believe the 11.2 M.Y.A. and maybe 4 M.Y.A. in the case that it has a perfectly safe environment with perfect easy unending access to food. But a perfect source of food and safety still doesn't tick all the boxes for what animals have to do, for them to devolve into a sack of organs.

>>5021526
>It's hard to go back on an evolved trait
You can, just not truly in the sense of "going back".

take the panda bears bone spur finger that's not really a finger at all.

>>5021371
>author just became really interested in the idea of Ray finned fish going onto land and forming three limbs, so much so that it became an unrealistic distraction.
Yeah, so unrealistic. Could you imagine ray finned fish crawling up on land, breathing out air and walking with 3 legs? What a nightmare scenario.

>>5021719
are you illiterate? He specified that they proliferated and became the main focus and quickly turned into mammals and such despite it making no sense.

How do I get properly started? I fucked up as I'm messing up the chemistry of a planet, kinda different from anything earthlike...I'm lost

>>5021286
>nerd played youtube autism to a dying baby instead of real natural history
wow that’s sad. parenting is shit these days.

>>5022579
animals adapt to the environment

>>5022587
>>5022587
I just dont know what to make the first animals and things, I still feel too Earth like and my chemistry knowledge is really not enough Ive found out

>>5022579
Random changes occur. Most are shit. Some stick not even because they are useful but because they aren’t shit enough not to. Most rarely, one makes sense.

Just remember adaptationism is a lie

>>5022493
wasn't it like 150 million years, including a mass extinction that wiped out all direct competitors, before they achieved a size larger than a cat?

that's not particularly fast honestly nor did they ever become the main focus, they just managed to squeeze into certain niches mostly because they had a far better jaw structure for herbivorous niches than birds ever could get

>>5022588
99% of life is going to start in a fluid, and when you get multicellular life it gets strange before pressures of living in a fluid start to shift the shape of animals to be hydrodynamic

>>5022588
Your best bet is to start with earth-based spec evo and get a feel for it. That's one of the reasons seed worlds are so popular now.

This is something I've thought about for a while but I've never found any discussion about it.

What is the next "improvement" in the animal kingdom going to be?
For example, jawed fish. Ray finned fish. Placental mammals. Flowering plants.

I think about it often but it's hard to come up with something that would upend our entire world again.

>>5022988
well I mean you're literally looking at it: sapience
and to go a step further genetic manipulation

we're at the cusp of making the entire concept of sexual selection obsolete and we did fully upend the world in the process and only will continue to do so

if you want something that is just now only happening, there's always placental reptiles, there's at least one known skink who's developed a full nutrient interchange placenta so that might give rise to an entirely new clade of animals

>>5022996
>>5022988

>>5022996
>>5023005
yeah this.
personally I'm also curious if any animals could hypothetically produce supercells, in the sense that the same self-contained organisms can form colonial organisms more complex. Kind of like some of the colony organisms out at sea, but not stupid and useless. I was really annoyed when sheather baited them with the shoggoth and then backed out.

>>5023044
did he actually say the shoggoths went extinct?

>>5022988
Fresh water flying fish. These would revolutionize fresh water ecosystems but for obvious reasons would be unlikely to evolve. Just need the perfect set of circumstances.

>>5023285
actual flight might be revolutionary but flying fish are not doing flying in any way that would be helpful migrating across freshwater ecosystems, they'd just end up jumping out of the water and onto land

>>5023140
I don't think they're extinct, but we were supposed to have them adapting to be more like multicellular (multiantular? multiformicular? multimyrmecular?) animals over a year ago.

>>5023285
>>5023524
which, to be fair, we have plenty of fish like the walking catfish that move hundreds of miles over land, or the mudskipper which climb trees. A gliding freshwater mudskipper or equivalent would be a pretty big deal.

>>5023557
maybe he's keeping it as a sort of milestone reveal on an important date?
I mean, ants have been a pretty big part of Serina over the years so if they truly make a next step in evolution, makes sense to put up some spectacle with it

>>5023631
xe's just trying to figure out how to make them jump straight to being a sophont and gay/trans before xe feels comfortable releasing it

>>5023524
>actual flight might be revolutionary but flying fish are not doing flying in any way that would be helpful migrating across freshwater ecosystems
It's slightly helpful, they can glide short distances which mean they can get to further away ponds than fish that can only jump. That provides and evolutionary incentive to get better at it.
>>5023558
Yeah, if a freshwater flying fish actually evolves then theres no body of fresh water they couldn't get to. You'd have flocks of flying fish moving from pond to pond, picking each clean and moving to the next. A lot of species would go extinct but how others would cope is interesting to think about.

>>5023558
>>5023738
issue is that an uncontrolled launch would more than likely result in the fish being eaten in a freshwater environment
not to mention the same sort of pressures that created the flying fish in the ocean simply do not exist in fresh water where escaping predators does not involve outlasting them in long pursuit, but rather fresh water prey tends to escape predators by hiding (due to limited available water)

then there's the factor that a slow gliding fish would be the easiest prey imaginable, and a fast gliding fish would more than likely just slap into a tree, walking catfish can hide while walking after all

if anything a flying freshwater fish wouldn't evolve in fresh water at all, but rather if oceanic flying fish evolved true powered flight, some might grow tolerant of fresh water and move inland

>>5023758
>issue is that an uncontrolled launch would more than likely result in the fish being eaten
Don't do that then?
>not to mention the same sort of pressures that created the flying fish in the ocean simply do not exist in fresh water
Yeah I mentioned this already, flying fish have evolved multiple times in earths history but they never get better than gliding cause on the open ocean there's no incentive to get better. The only way I see it happening is flying fish for whatever reason moving to a brackish, then freshwater environment and then evolution does it's thing from there.

>>5023664
honestly? sapience as eventual end-state of the shoggoths wouldn't be the worst thing as long as it's handled properly
no quirky cultures or anything like that, just have the shoggoth-descendants combine into ever bigger and smarter super organisms until during the end stage of the world, all surviving shoggoth ants have been forced by the worsening environment into a single mega-organism that is both trillions of ants, and one single mind which is utterly alien in how it operates, slower in thought but at the same time vastly more intelligent than any other individual on the planet, functionally immortal despite it's component ants dying all the time, tending to an immense garden of it's own design which it harvests regularly

it's interactions with the other sophonts of the era wouldn't be some great understanding, it would be them finding the garden, and due to it's enormous scale and the alien nature of the single intelligence tending it, which hides out of sight, not even realize they have stepped into the domain of the last and greatest shoggoth, who watches them, learns from them, plans for them and then invariably after decades of planning, over the course of a single night devours the entire colony, then carefully removes all evidence it ever existed, to the tiniest bone or tool

only for this process to repeat when another group finds this eden a century later

>>5023762
part of the issue with them moving to brackish water is that I really don't see them continuing to be flying, it's just too much a risk that won't pay off, and that flying fish need to be able to reach significant speed before getting airborne
Person thought is still that if powered flight evolves it will do so in the ocean and then move to fresh water, not the other way around

the current method of gliding among fish is just not controllable to a degree that would make it anything short of suicide for freshwater fish

>>5023765
>it's just too much a risk that won't pay off
You do know that flying fish evolved their flight as a way to escape predators right? It's literally (not figuratively) the opposite of risky.
>need to be able to reach significant speed before getting airborne
Yeah but watching any video of them shows they don't need much space to do this.
>Person thought is still that if powered flight evolves it will do so in the ocean
Why? As I said before this has happened multiple times in the past and yet flying fish never actually flew. What would be different this time? Thats why I suggested moving into a freshwater environment.
>the current method of gliding among fish is just not controllable
Why do you say this? From videos it seems like they have pretty good control over it.

>>5023767
the control they have is nowhere near suitable for long distance flight over varied terrain
a school of flying fish is just incapable of avoiding a ship, slamming into them in the thousands

>>5023767
>You do know that flying fish evolved their flight as a way to escape predators right?
I am well aware, I am also well aware of the fact that freshwater environments would more than likely see them end up on land which would in turn see them picked up immediately by terrestrial carnivores
since every instance of a gliding fish has been due to the pectoral fins being adapted as gliding surfaces, that just leaves them with no limbs that could help with terrestrial movement

additional factor is that they can't reach anything resembling a great height which is a serious problem in freshwater environments since the land surrounding it tends to slope a lot more than you know, the ocean

and course, freshwater environments tend to be drastically more crowded than the open ocean, and fresh water tends to be a lot more opaque and filled with aquatic vegetation, so the freshwater flying fish would deal with a drastically increased chance of escaping one predator only to end up in the mouth of another

there's also more birds around than in the open ocean, and predation by birds while flying already is an issue for them

>>5023768
>a school of flying fish is just incapable of avoiding a ship, slamming into them in the thousands
I have never heard of this, do you have a source for it?
>I am also well aware of the fact that freshwater environments would more than likely see them end up on land
Why are you so stuck on flying fish just being incapable of improving their capabilities, even if they are as bad as you say?

>>5023772
the issue with improving capabilities is that even if possible, by the very basic principles of evolution every step along the way needs to have increased fitness, and that's part where I'm wary of flying fish, in their current state, in freshwater environments, that for flying fish to migrate into freshwater would be a decrease in fitness, even if the end result of true powered flight would be a massive increase in fitness

>>5023773
I think the thing you're not considering is that being the first flying fish to get into a new lake is a huge increase in fitness even if the chances of any individual making it is pretty low. thus those than can make the trip better and more safely and farther away would reproduce more and pass down more of their genes, thus making the species as a whole better at flying over time.

>>5023780
except no that's not necessarily how it works
when migrating to a new area you can't just migrate by yourself, you need a sizeable population to make it or else you turn into a population bottleneck so badly extinction is all but guaranteed

not to mention that flying fish can't even dream of reaching new lakes, the absolute longest flight any flying fish has made was 500m distance 6m height, over the perfectly flat ocean, that's just not conductive to reaching any new area

and no becoming better at flight so that you can reach a new lake is not how evolution goes, there need to be other pressures selecting for increased flight distance and willingness to fly overland and those just aren't really there

as you said yourself gliding has evolved several times in oceanic species, and as you also pointed out they never evolved beyond that, but if you question if it's even possible for oceanic flying fish to evolve further there is another drastically more pressing question: why has no freshwater fish evolved gliding despite several ocean unrelated species evolving it?

>>5023790
>except no that's not necessarily how it works
But it can work, all you need is two individuals of the opposite sex to make it to a nearby lake or river at around the same time. Some of these bodies of water can be very close to each other. This is not a big ask.
>you need a sizeable population to make it or else you turn into a population bottleneck so badly extinction is all but guaranteed
This is bullshit. Theres dozens of examples of invasive species destroying ecosystems that were founded by 2 individuals.
>the absolute longest flight any flying fish has made was 500m distance
and somehow you expect keeping to the ocean will make them fly better? I really don't understand why you keep bringing up the limitations of the ocean going species as a reason that they need to evolve flight while still in the ocean.
>and no becoming better at flight so that you can reach a new lake is not how evolution goes
Now you're just being reductive. Obviously being able to colonize new environments is a massive evolutionary advantage, hence the success of every flying animal that has ever evolved, thus getting better at it if you can do it at all is a pretty big advantage.
>why has no freshwater fish evolved gliding despite several ocean unrelated species evolving it?
Funny you ask, I thought I should search up if there actually are any flying fish in freshwater and turns out there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_butterflyfish
They suck at it compared to flying fish but they do have plus of being air breathing, which actually makes these guys a much better candidate than flying fish all together.

>>5023806
>thus getting better at it if you can do it at all is a pretty big advantage.
it's the "if you can do it at all" part that's the biggest IF
because none of the current methods of flight among ray finned fish are even remotely useful for colonizing new water sources

for the freshwater butterfly fish improved flight would have to come from an entirely different source of evolutionary pressure, the only even remotely plausible path to flight I could even see among them is if they started hunting airborne insects and even that is a massive, massive IF that's even going to be possible for them

Because it's not just about becoming better at flying here, they need to become better at flying without it worsening their ability to survive in the water to the point improved flight provides negative fitness

I also don't really get why you're dismissing the idea of oceanic fish becoming better at flying than fresh water fish, despite having admitted in your own post that ocean fish are far superior at it

as for the invasive species comment, remember that this would require the flying fish to not just have flight capable of reaching other bodies of water by accident but at the same time also being able to outcompete the local fish to such an extend a single pair can overtake the entire body of water, which considering flight would come at the cost of reduction in efficiency in the water (the massively enlarged and muscular pectoral fins required to fly would inherently be less effective at swimming) seems unlikely

invasive species tend to already be hyper-adapted to spread rapidly

>>5023812
>current methods of flight among ray finned fish are even remotely useful for colonizing new water sources
This isn't true, flying fish can glide up to 200 meters, far enough to get to an oxbow lake next to a river.

>>5023823
but provides them no substantial advantage what so ever given that colonizing oxbow lakes is something non-flying fish do easily enough
also if the shore is too high, flying fish won't be able to reach enough height to do so, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage compared to catfish in colonizing lakes like that

>>5013222
Elon is a retard though and Trump is a pedo

this argument about freshwater flying fish is dumb. Fish actively traverse land to get to other freshwater sources already. If a fish has the combination of traits that it can move on land (like the aforementioned mudskippers) and ALSO can glide (which would probably be more like the gliding lizards or snakes than existing flying fish) then of course they'd adapt to be better at gliding from interest point to interest point. Anyone saying something like "oh but they would glide too slow on land" has clearly never seen the gliding lizards, snakes, frogs, squirrels, etc that all do the exact same thing.

We have fish that moved from saltwater to freshwater. We have fish that climb trees. We have fish that go from one freshwater source to another. We have fish that can glide. It's silly to say those characteristics can't be adopted by a single species.

>>5024069
aren't all of those evolved from arboreal specialists?
while some fish might opportunistically climb trees I don't see any fish become dedicated arboreal, they don't really have anything that would let them compete with amphibians in this aspect

>>5024082
An extreme tidal flooding geography might give an environment where a suitable arboreal specialist fish could develop out of a more normal climbing or gliding species.

>>5024466
it would still face heavy competition with amphibians who naturally thrive in variable environments like that
doubly so given that this would put them in direct competition with the frogs, by far the most successful amphibians and which have a rather enormous advantage when it comes to arboreal movement in 4 limbs used for locomotion rather than the 2-ish used in fish capable of moving on land (generally speaking they tend to use powerful pectoral fins)

it kinda feels like a true flying colonizer of small pools of water would not be a fish but rather an amphibian of sorts, which then in absence of fish in those smaller ponds might develop increasingly stronger and more fish-like larval forms

honestly the more I think about it, neotenous amphibians with heavily developed larval stages that are capable of reproduction in the larval stage and only become walking/flying "adults" when they need to migrate to another pond seems like it might be more plausible than true flight in fish for the same purpose

gliding frogs in particular could be well suited for powered flight

>>5024470
>it would still face heavy competition
this is dumb, animals can arise in situations with high competition because the fact of the matter is that they're not going to be fighting frogs or lizards for rooms on the trees, they just have to eat. And the fish are going to be able to eat things in the water. A fish can develop the ability to climb trees in a mangrove, then fling itself off branches, then develop large fins to glide and control its descent, then develop the ability to live in freshwater for a time, then for much longer, then some populations start living in fresh water near full time, then some begin dispersing via instinct. Very easy chain of events. Only reason it didn't happen is because we didn't get lucky.

I often get asked "what happens to camels in your scenario" as if camels are supposed to be eternal just because they thrive well in desert environments, as if that makes them immune to extinction events. People everywhere still seem incapable despite their best efforts to see species as something that's fluid and constantly changing no single animal is permanent. Camels seem to me just as vulnerable to habitat loss as any other animal, and theyre certainly not immune to desert heat.

>>5024519
the issue with that chain is that a fish who's fins are specialized both for climbing and floating will likely see severe reduction in their ability to swim properly, which in turn comes at the expense of their ability to feed in the water
They also have another issue namely that their job isn't just to eat, it's to eat and avoid being eaten, and there the q

powered flight is also a rather rare adaptation, despite so many land animals developing gliding

also overall fish already do a pretty good job at spreading to ponds, there's few bodies of water that are wholly devoid of fish, and usually those are devoid not due to remoteness but rather due to a lack of nutrients or simply by being so transient only invertebrates develop fast enough to exploit them
Including dispersal methods that require no terrestrial adaptations such as the tried and true method of simply sticking their eggs to the feet of birds

>>5024608

Who the hell is giving you trouble over camels?

>>4983981 (OP)

Paleontological but a good guide for designing swimming birds: https://ichthyoconodon.wordpress.com/2025/07/31/flightless-seabirds-hint-at-highly-flying-ancestor/

>>5024619
You learn quickly that every animal has fans and haters and they will give you shit for having an animal survive or not.

>>5024470
>neotenous amphibians with heavily developed larval stages that are capable of reproduction in the larval stage and only become walking/flying "adults" when they need to migrate to another pond
Already did that lol except they cant reproduce as tadpoles

Fuck I should get back to my project it's been over a year now

>>5024822
>Already did that lol except they cant reproduce as tadpoles
if they spend increasingly more time as tadpoles that might be an eventual step they could make?
looks good anon

>>5024890
Thx
Here are actual neotenic tadpoles that can reproduce but only the females stay as tadpoles. these are just the first steps into neoteny

I have a better explanation written on the deviantart. Frog Planet. I barely even remember what I had planned for the project lol.

One thought that's come to mind a few times is photoluminescent compounds with excitation spectra peaking in troughs of a photosynthesis mechanism that the respective emission spectra aligns with an absorption peak of, such that the photosynthesis efficiency is improved by shifting a relatively wide range of incoming light to efficient wavelengths

For maximum efficiency, I believe you'd need to either further constrain the materials to a stack where each layer is transparent to the excitation spectra of those below it for a near-conventional biochemical analogue of multi-junction solar cells or a diffraction structure to direct each excitation peak waveband to the appropriate compound, then directing the emission peaks to photosynthetic tissue

Though I do not know how to define such a thing precisely, a prisming band directing the light to bands of photoluminescent microbes receiving resources through partially-closed circulatory channels connecting to bands of photosynthetic tissue could correlate the resource access to the local bacteria's efficiency in offsetting light for photosynthesis. Limited motility of the microbes and horizontal gene transfer could allow for a single reservoir in the initial reproductive unit to organize as the organism's life goes on, thus providing a somewhat generalized solution to accommodate a gradual expansion of these "offsets"

I could also imagine an organism developing an electron transport chain who's circulated element happens to be phosphorescent, evolving translucent tissue to use the charge gain of the phosphorescence as very limited photosynthesis and metabolic pathways adding charge otherwise as chemiluminescence. Then a microbe with a far more efficient photosynthesis process that matches the circulated compound could become a symbiote improving light utilization, compensating for a major source of charge loss, and perhaps connecting metabolic pathways more efficiently through the chemiluminescence

>>5024621
Thanks for the link. It mirrors many of my own thoughts about the evolution of aquatic birds. Shame circumstances conspired to prevent a foot propelled bird from becoming as adapted to the water as the wing propelled penguins.

New Speculative Wildlife Research Center video
https://youtu.be/qfDVpL2RpbQ

>>5026406

Technically loons and grebes are, since they can't even walk on land

>>5025818
you mean like deepsea jellyfish

>>5027022
They can in fact walk on land

>>5022988
Idk, maybe some animal species will be able to travel outside of our atmosphere without the need of a space suit.

>>5027365
Nta, but not loons

>>5022988
Whatever survives the next great extinction event

>>5028410
Which is?

>>5028413
well the weird thing is that this time an apex predator might survive
humans are capable of weathering most mass extinctions after all

if the end cretaceous meteor hit in the same spot today, what percentage of humanity would survive?

>>5028496
Depends of how long we spot the impact in advance
If we have enough time to stock food and build enough infrastructure for indor cultivation and calculate what crops and other plants we would still be able to grow considering the reductions on temperature and sun light hitting surface(likely we would still be able to grow temperate crops in the tropic) and maybe genetic engineer strains of low light and cold tolerant crops we could get away with 50% to 70% human survival
higher latitude species might get a chance if we introduce them into lower latitudes, but tropical species are mostly fucked

>>5028558
i'm asking what happens if it hits right now with no prep, would humanity recover

>>5028560
humanity is extremely adaptable both to changing environments and as ecosystem engineers
we have enough sturdy underground locations far enough away from coasts that a significant portion of humanity would survive, not nearly the majority but entire communities would, even if by sheer happenstance

which communities would depend on where it hits, but humanity is more than cosmopolitan enough that regardless of where the impact is, there would be survivors, even accounting for a global heating event from the ejecta reentering (buildings with thick walls and especially basements make for more than good enough substitutes for burrowing lifestyle)

now we need to deal with the fallout, massive forest fires, and course most of our cities on fire if not all of them, our agriculture destroyed etc

so a lot of humans who survive the initial hit would be immediately fucked, though humanity as a whole has been stockpiling food in massive quantities which results in a bit of a perverse hope in that in areas with fewer survivors those survivors will be better suited for long term survival since we tend to store our non-perishable food in places that are fairly well guarded, if they're far enough land inwards to avoid the megatsunamis

though most of our modern world is irreparably destroyed, not everything will meet this fate
large hydroelectric dams not directly in the impact vicinity or within range of the tsunami (such as for example Hoover dam, Three Gorges dam or Aswan/GER dam depending on impact location) would more than likely survive and continue to be capable of producing electricity, depending on weather patterns
coal mines far enough away from the impact/tsunami again would likely remain available for extraction, possibly some more inland oil extraction but that's harder to exploit than coal

>>5028571
longer term food supplies would course be an issue, a major issue, but this power supply could provide in part an answer, possibly depending on the level of sunlight that was blotted out greenhouses could maintain food supplies
and humans thankfully are omnivores with an extremely high tolerance for different food sources and with domestication of fire to further expand that so in theory we could also take advantage of brown ecosystems by driving off any other animal feeding on the insects and fungi

a lot of our survival would come due to happenstance, but humanity is ridiculously numerous, cosmopolitan and adaptable so I see it more likely than not a healthy breeding population would make it through

now for recovery, early recovery once conditions get better would probably happen at an acceptable rate, we are pretty damn good at transmitting information so all our agricultural knowledge, even if not immediately applicable, would not be lost, and with that humanity would establish itself as a pioneer species and a massive ecosystem engineer, so stone-age civilizations would be fairly widespread

the issue is going beyond that, we've used up nearly all easily accessible copper and tin so a bronze age would be right out, and even iron has been extracted from the surface in massive quantities, and after the hundreds of thousands of years it would be hard to extract used iron and steel from our former cities

so we might never reach industrial capabilities again, or arrive there through a much longer different course

>>5028579
the vast majority of industry and heavy equipment, plus the knowledge to maintain, use, and even create it, would survive unless this space rock only wiped out asians and whites

>>5028594
supply lines would collapse, including fuel supply lines so while they might survive, they won't be operational too long

>>5028599
>Humans can't repair infrastructure! Its clearly too advanced!
dont mistake the sheer incompetence that occurs when we give africans/indians infrastructure tech for the human standard

the "average human" is grossly misrepresented by... misclassification. a lot of people easily considered dumbfucks in civilized nations are more than smart enough to learn basic civil engineering and apply it well enough. like chinese peasants and trailer hicks may not figure out the best safety practices in a timely manner without their 125+ IQ overlords but they can keep the trains going.

you seem to have a fantasy about humanity being deindustrialized but this is something you want not something that is likely unless europe, asia, and north america were simultaneously wiped out. even then the european blood left in south america would suddenly gain a huge selective advantage and take over the planet in due time.

>>5028601
anon, you're severely underestimating just how big supply lines are in the modern day
anything with computer chips in it is fucked which by now is 90% of everything

if you don't have access to rubber you can't repair things made out of rubber, if you don't have access to oil every engine you have will run out of fuel and even if you manage to jury rig some other fuel source, will tear itself apart due to lack of lubrication

if you don't have titanium you can't replace something made out of titanium

>>5028599
>>5028606
What makes you so confident that Central America getting glassed by space rock would collapse accessibility of the materials? They're not hard-locked to single specific sources, and losing the Panama Canal would only be inefficiency.

Are you expecting to have a large chunk of the United States to be buried by ejecta disconnecting things? Even then, while horrible for the global economy, such a collapse takes long enough to stop-loss to what technology remains producible.

>>5028608
I'm expecting the return ejecta to increase global temperatures to several hundred degree Celsius for a period of like and hour cooking everyone not currently protected by thick enough walls and setting most of humanity's cities and infrastructure on fire

as well as most coastal cities to be wiped out from the worst case scenario of the meteor hitting deep ocean, which still covers the majority of earth's surface, and in turn wiping out virtually all naval infrastructure

>>4988577
I fucking love this

>>5028579
>the issue is going beyond that, we've used up nearly all easily accessible copper and tin so a bronze age would be right out
Where did all this copper and tin end up? Did it disappear into the ether? No it's still in the stuff we used it as a material in. Even better, in already refined forms. People would get it from scrapping.

>>5028669
>as well as most coastal cities to be wiped out from the worst case scenario of the meteor hitting deep ocean
If we're going by the yucatan then it'd only effect the atlantic.

>>5029621
most modern day uses of tin aren't in a form that's readily accessible for a low tech society though, we don't exactly make a lot of bronze anymore, and removing tin plating or returning solder to usable forms for such a lower tech society would be pretty hard

>>4983981 (OP)

Tenrecs of Lemuria: https://lemuriaspeculative.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/tenrecs-of-lemuria/

>>5029642
You can extract tin from solder via basic electrolysis

>>5029646
pre-bronze age civilizations don't readily have access to electrolysis
if we manage to maintain a level of active technology where we have access to electrolysis, we don't really need to make bronze in the first place

the issue is that if infrastructure on a global level collapses to the point we'd need to start scraping tin to get bronze, there's a lot of tricks like that we can't do

>>5029647
>pre-bronze age civilizations don't readily have access to electrolysis
We're talking about a post apocalyptical society, not a pre-bronze age one.

>>5029649
meteor hit post apocalyptic is a fair bit different from nuclear war post apocalyptic
we're talking hundreds of thousands of years before widespread agriculture will even be possible anymore, humanity most likely being reduced throughout this period to less than a million individuals, all spread out into small communities

the chances of being reduced to functional stone-age levels over the course of the his period are fairly high

>>5029657
>meteor hit post apocalyptic is a fair bit different from nuclear war post apocalyptic
Not really
>we're talking hundreds of thousands of years before widespread agriculture will even be possible anymore
no we're not

>>5029663
anon, nuclear warfare even if we unleashed every weapon on earth, wouldn't result in the extinction of every land animal above 10kg and the near complete destruction of plantlife

you're severely underestimating the sheer scope of destruction that would follow, if plants could have easily survived to the point widespread agriculture was possible, non-avian dinosaurs wouldn't have gone extinct

>>5029668
>anon, nuclear warfare even if we unleashed every weapon on earth
Thats a problem with the number and size of nuclear weapons on earth, not nuclear war.
>if plants could have easily survived to the point widespread agriculture was possible, non-avian dinosaurs wouldn't have gone extinct
This is just nonsense, obviously plant growth was possible soon after or else we wouldn't have plants at all today. Even were it not, vertical farming is an expensive option.

>>5029669
>vertical farming
anon, you're still completely underestimating the aftermath of the impact event
every single city on the planet is consumed by an out of control fire, the majority of people are dead, nearly all agricultural land is similarly on fire, as are the forests

civilization has just broken down on a completely fundamental level and we've had 0 preparation for the event

you also can't really rely on the few extremely hardy survivalist plants and buried seeds to maintain widespread agriculture, by definition domesticated plants are the opposite of hardy, they're designed to suck up nutrients out of the soil and turn it into easily digestible organic material for humans

>>5029673
You have no idea how many bunkers governments around the world have set up for events like this.

>>5029674
bunkers still need to be filled with enough people, the scenario here was that we didn't get any preparation so the only people in those bunkers would be the ones who happened to be inside them when the meteor struck

there's also no full rebuild civilization kits in there, most of these types of bunkers assume nuclear warfare which is several orders of magnitude smaller, 5 orders to be more precise, than a repeat of the K-PG event

I keep running over a massive issue in my spec evo that has made me restart my planet a lot, I keep researching a lot of papers and such over the habitability of distinct types of planets and my autism for hard sci fi won't let me just move on, what can I do? Whatever I want is simply too cold for life unless I really tweak stuff and I am not getting into non carbon based life

>>5029689

Commit to your project and write. If new scientific discoveries render some things obsolete, simply rewrite those sections and if you can link to the studies

>>5029689
Just put the planet closer to the star, whats so hard about that?

>>5029737
Too earthlike, my problem was that chemistry gets odd that far away from a normal star, from normal habitable zone, I might go binary now.
>>5029733
Got it, yeah, this has wasted a lot of time and my current version is actually way more complex, even if it finally works on temp. This is hard....I need to have the planet sound and consistent before anything else

>>5029754
Why not try an elliptical orbit?

>>5029757
I'd have to do more reading on that, so far my only two things I can compare that exist are either Earth or Titan. I've tried red dwarfs, which were a complete failure, tidal locking is lethal, radiation, you know it. I must keep trying to make my planet, I wanna get to the animals and plants already.

>>5029759
tried an orange dwarf?
tidally locked planets don't have to necessarily be an obstruction, and if need be a sufficiently large moon can keep a planet from being tidally locked even if close to the host star

and if that seems too convenient, remember, the only reason earth has a moon to begin with is because we collided with another planet in just the right way to create ours, don't be afraid to have super rare circumstances in your planet's origin or conditions, there's a septillion stars in the observable universe, at least one of them will have the weird conditions that are just right

another interesting factor with a tidally locked planet can be a binary star, with the planet orbiting only the primary, and the secondary being a smaller star just far away enough it periodically lights up the dark side without disturbing the orbit

>>5029790
Yes, K type stars have become my favorite, now I get why they might be the ideal ones for life, less UV, longer lived. No downsides at all.

Yeah you're right I might have been gimping myself not wanting to be too rare in things here, hell, life alone justifies anything. Theia, oxygen, Jupiter's place. There can be a good spot for mere luck.

I think I'm being quite seduced by the idea of a circumbinary planet so yes, good idea about a binary star, both types or orbit can be quite unique, single planet as you mentioned, it's just a matter of star type, iirc there's theory that a binary star in a single orbit planet might stabilize the planet enough for life.

>>5029689
why not try a planet whose planetary rotation is aligned with its solar obit, one side is always facing the star

>>5029796
it's not even luck, it's just statistics and observer bias
the reason you're writing about the one planet that had just the right conditions for complex life is because the billion other planets that fell short of it don't have complex life to write about

you see that in everything, people write newspaper articles about the one person who won the lottery and not about the millions who didn't win it
and even if the chance of winning the lottery is on in 10 million, someone still wins it

Would an ecosystem in which every single animal was a full omnivore work? What kind of biome would it need?

>>5030102
I'd imagine it as an incredibly unstable environment, one that sees periodic die-offs of it's plant and animal life, most likely in the midst of a prolonged extinction event

and all animals in it need to be able to survive these die-offs by relying on brown foodchains while plants rebuild, but at the same time the sheer instability has wiped out most apex predators and left only mesocarnivores or their overgrown relatives in place which still retain a significant portion of plant life in their diet when the environment allows

plants themselves tend to be fast growing to recover quickly when conditions grow better, which in turn means they're relatively easy to digest

>>5023152
>Corvids are the Jeets of the bird world

Not sure if this fits in this thread but I just drew this thing in the last few days.

>>5030102
It'd be unstable the sense that the animals would have a strong incentive to specialize and become either omnivores or herbivores thus defeating the point of the concept.

how do carnivores evolve to become herbivores, like how does plant eating begin

>>5031127
with being a retarded carnivore and eating plants out of desperation, consistently across generations, due to heritable retardation

How would higher atmospheric pressure affect any sort of "earth" like planet?

>>5031127
Slowly, then all at once.

>>5031127
>>5031159
>>5031283

The key is that there are very few hypercarnivores and hyperherbivores; most animal exist within a spectrum.

So for instance our "amphibian" ancestors probably also fed on leaves occasionally before becoming dedicated for that

>>5013222
Oh cool. Anyways, were are those Epstein Files?

I wanna design a squid that actively hunts large animals, like tuna and even bottlenose dolphins. Think orca niche. Cooperative hunting etc.
At first I wanted to have their arms reduced with their beaks hypertrophied and have them swimming forward exclusively like some kinda half-baked dunkleosteus, adopting a whale-like mantle undulation and losing the jet propulsion.
However I think making this a lot more conservative would probably make more sense, squid body plans don't really need a big overhaul to be fast, effective and active predators. Just look at humboldts for example.
I do think they need a more efficient way of cruising at higher speeds though, and while jet propulsion is great for short bursts of speed in ambushing, it does leave them facing prey ass-first.
Would a possible answer be a jet that can be aimed both backwards and forwards? Also instead of a hypertrophied beak I think having very robust, relatively short, muscular arms lined with large claws would be a better mandible-like analogue. Open to any and all thoughts on this.

>>5032515

Not sure about the jets but arms with serrated hooks already exist in some cephalopods

>>5032515
>>5033166
would there be a pathway to poison on the serrated hooks?

>>5033195
I don't think venom has a big role to play in macropredatory behavior.

>>5033196
I was wondering if with cephalopods it might actually have a use
if at the end of arms, venomous hooks that maybe a sufficiently intelligent cephalopod can actively jab into a large vein to cause paralysis even in the largest of prey could work?

>>5032515
>Would a possible answer be a jet that can be aimed both backwards and forwards? Also instead of a hypertrophied beak I think having very robust, relatively short, muscular arms lined with large claws would be a better mandible-like analogue. Open to any and all thoughts on this.

Claw-tipped tentacles made of chitin (the same stuff as the beak) would definitely help them latch on and the their beaks could evolve into something resembling a jawless design similar to a lamprey. The idea being that it latches on to larger prey, burrows its head and goes to chow-town on the prey while it's still alive until it's sated.

Depending on the season they could either tear their prey apart during a nantuket sleighride (which also helps isolate it as they consume it), or they could be more parasitic and follow the migratory patterns of their prey by hitching a ride. For this I dub them the Rodeo Squid.

Against a lone prey they would be deadly, being that you can't shake them, but something more intelligent like a pod of dolphins be able to use pack tactics to defend themselves. The squid attempt to swarm an isolated dolphin and latch on and make a as many bites as possible then dart away before another dolphin can knock them off. And if they are knocked off those claws are going to leave deep gouges in their victim. Eventually the victim is going to succumb to damage and fatigue.

>>5032515
>swimming forward exclusively
you would have to lose the mantle, because im pretty sure the mantle is shaped like a mushroom to be a bag which would catch water if its swimming forward
>Would a possible answer be a jet that can be aimed both backwards and forwards?
no because of physics, you dont want a bend in your piping else you just lose force, or have an exceedingly robust pipe, unless you have the entire thing from where you pump water from, rotate around like a turret, but where does that go then
>relatively short, muscular arms
which way are the arms going as to not create drag, because when its swimming backwards it doesnt have to do anything and it can just relax its arms, if its swimming forward it has to put its arms into tension as to not come apart and create drag

>>4983981 (OP)

Primates of Lemuria: https://lemuriaspeculative.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/primates-of-lemuria/

What makes a spec creature design good in your opinion

>>5034974
it follows the basic body plan of the planet, even if highly derived
mechanically it's form of locomotion makes sense
it has a niche on it's planet to which it is adapted