#speculative biology

Topics that are guaranteed to start a fight if you ask two or more Pokemon Professors about them;

• How many limbs does Grappeloct have (I personally refuse to accept its Belt as a limb unless it shows it can move. And the four “arms” are on thin ice they might just be two)
• Does a pokemon count as fully mature *before* a stone or item evolution happens or is it a form of Neoteny.
• Is it ethical to revive scrambled pokemon fossils (Everyone outside of Galar goes “No! What is wrong with you?!”)
• Is it ethical to revive fossil pokemon at all
• Is it ethical to breed fossil pokemon and revive the species?
• Are humans related more to humanoid pokemon or ape-like pokemon? Or are humans something entirely different? You can’t put a human in a pokeball but is that by design or do we have a different origin? (Okay this one the pokemon professors I hope have figured out but it WEIGHS ON MY MIND)
• Should wurmple be split into two species that simply co-evolved to be VERY similar, or is this a case of split evolution?
• Should Pokemon be only classified by their mature form/final evolution and in that case see above, any other split evolution lines, and the debate on item evolutions.
• Is it ethical to evolve Paras or the Deino family line? (Deino gains a second conciousness on evolution, and then loses one to the dominant mind when it evolves again, so it might not even be the personality it started with)
• Who created Porygon Z- it ran rampant through everyones Emails and messed up so much data. Nobody has fessed up yet but SOMEONE had the data.
• Is it ethical to delete a porygon when it’s on your computer.
• Is it ethical to introduce Rotom and Porygon.

Not an argument but additionally: NEVER put a magnemite-line pokemon near your Rotom.

Feel free to add more!

Skull of the fanon monster Sicarapax

A commission for discord user GROGLODYTE

This was actually kinda difficult cause I had to use bird skull anatomy, so I’m not even sure if this is accurate. I also used pteranodon for reference when doing the back of the cranium and where the mandibles attach.

The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

World of Darkness: The Daggoths of the Sub-Arcuterran Cavern System

Deep beneath the ground, hidden from the sunlit world above, a strange alien world devoid of light had steadily proceeded to grow.

Over the last twenty million years, tectonics and water ersosion had steadily expanded the sub-Arcuterran cavern system: a strange, closed-off world, connecting it to other subterranean pockets, creating new passageways through the bedrock, and making possible a world unlike anything else: a world that, in its sheer biodiversity, may as well be another continent entirely: one hidden from view as a subterranean maze thirty meters or so under the surface.

This peculiar realm had steadily been spreading under the surface through the actions of geologic functions, and within the span of twenty million years had expanded into a vast network of tunnels and chambers etched out into the rock, with some large pockets having ceilings as high as thirty meters and covering a span of five football fields, and long, straight corridors miles long like a natural subway system connect them all as an underground river flows through the entire system, sometimes collecting in pockets to make small ponds and lakes.

The ecosystems are sustained by mocklichens: strange subterranean fungi that long ago had formed a symbiotic relationship with chemosythetic bacteria, and are now the primary producers in this lightless world where plants could not thrive. Here the mocklichens have diversified into a vast array of forms, such as creamy white spongeballs that cover the ground, walls and ceiling, pink digitreeds that grow in small upright stalks wherever close to water, or branching coralichens with disc-like spore pods to attract pollinators to spread their seeds, among plenty more subterranean flora that have turned this pitch-black cave into a colorful jungle– but their colors are but a byproduct, random traits neither selected or weeded out, for here in the caverns, there is nobody to see their colors anyway.

But there are animals, and a vast plenty of them: hundreds of species of small insects such as beetles, mites and caterpedes both herbivirous and carnivorous scurry over the rocks and walls, and the waters teem with a stunning array of nematodes, pescopods and shrish. All of them are united in their complete lack of pigment and eyes, and instead navigate with smell, sound and touch, as well as electroreception in aquatic species and thermoreception in terrestrial ones, to help find their way in the dark. These senses are acute enough that one insect, the feelerflit(Anopthalmoptera longivibrissa), has since regained its power of flight once the growth of the caverns provided the space to make flying useful again, finding its way through the dark by pressure-sensitive sensory hairs that allow it to locate spore pads of mocklichens, its main food, as well as avoid obstacles and predators, all without the need of sight.

But truly the most remarkable of the cavern system’s fauna are the daggoths: twenty million years ago but a single rat-sized insectivorous species but today has diversified into various–and bigger– forms given enough space and resources to exploit, creating a unique set of niches: the troglofauna.

These creatures vary in shape and size, but retain the basic anatomy of the ancestral daggoth: seven muscular facial tentacles modified from the nose and upper lip, sixteen long digits extending from stubby limbs that act almost like legs in their own right, pale wrinkled hairless skin with highly-sensitive sensory whiskers and a complete absence of eyes. At this point, they are barely even recognizable as vertebrates at all, yet their four gnawing incisors, ever growing and wearing down, serves as their only reminder of their rodent history.

In these vast caves, daggoths fill various niches closely mimicking those of the surface fauna, with climbers, runners and swimmers, and herbivores (or rather fungivores), omnivores and carnivores. The opening of several channels to the surface and the biological processes of the local flora have increased oxygen levels in the caves and allowed the creatures to get larger, and grow larger they did as they competed with and hunted one another, creating more rungs of the food chain that the ancestral daggoth once ruled at the top of.

Largest of the daggoths is the three-foot tall, 150-pound biblarodon(Troglotherium abysselephas), a browser that uses its elevated head and grasping facial tentacles to grasp and pluck coralichens growing high up on walls and ledges out of the reach of other fungivores, walking on ten middle fingers while a modified digit on both front and back act as feelers that allow it to navigate at ground level. Another large fungivore is the molepede(Hexadecapus longicorpus), a slow-moving, long-bodied grazer that eats mocklichens closer to the ground.

Not all daggoths have become giants (at least relatively speaking), with many others remaining small. Fungivorous cavehoppers(Vibrissocatylopus caudadactylus) graze in large numbers on the mocklichens growing on ground level, moving slowly but able to make sudden long jumps with the help of two modified powerful rear digits that catapult it away from danger. Gothtles(Troglocricetus primigenus) are virtually unchanged from the ancestral daggoth, except for digging burrows to hide as they now are no longer the very top of the food chain. And as this subterranean world has something the surface world lacks– a ceiling– some climbing species have become specialized roof-dwellers, such as the roof stalacs(Stalactomys arachnopus) which clamber about the mocklichen-filled stalactites with the help of long spindly digits, and using their long sticky facial tentacles to capture feelerflits attracted to the spore blooms of the roof-growing mocklichens.

Among these new species predators have emerged to prey on their distant grazing relatives, creating a new trophic level to a biosphere that once had only a small insectivore at its top. The cat-sized blindmutt(Abyssovenatomys megalonyx) is a specialist ambush predator of bigger, slower prey like molepedes and biblarodons, sporting shorter tentacles and longer teeth to better bite into their prey. A smaller predator is the agile vulpemouser(Nanotroglovenator polypus) which pursues and hunts a wide range of smaller prey, including gothtles, cavehoppers, and the small larval-like young of virtually all other daggoth species, even those of its own.

The underground rivers and streams of the system have too become home to aquatic daggoths with peculiar adaptations: their sixteen digits have flattened into a row of eight pairs of mini-flippers that they undulate to swim, and their nostrils have evolved into two long tubes that act as snorkels to allow them to breathe while submerged. Some, such as the tubesnouts(Longinarariumys aquaticus), are filter-feeders, sifting out the floating mats of chemosynthetic bacteria, while others, like the trogodiles(Troglosuchus submarinus) are active predators, catching shrish and pescopods with the help of their long prehensile facial tentacles.

While daggoths have no eyes, their bare skins do possess light-sensitive patches able to detect the presence of light but not to percieve images. All daggoths possess an instinctive aversion to light, especially smaller species living closer to the surface next to tunnels that connect the cavern system to the sunlit outside. They quickly retreat back to darkness should they detect even faint amounts of light, an adaptation vital as there are creatures, potentially predators, out there that they can’t see: but they can see them.

And while organisms from the outside generally are unable to tolerate the cavern’s highly humid, lower-oxygen and higher CO2 environment for long, and thus generally avoid it as well, one enterprising organism has snuck its way into the caverns and found a place among its peculiar and one-of-a-kind ecosystems: the shroomor.

Descended from a free-living transmissible podothere tumor, the shroomor is technically still a hamster: yet has reverted to the undifferentiated unicellularity akin to a slime mold or fungus. Requiring moisture and nutrients, it could only grow on carrion and rely on scavengers to carry it around: which was why, when some spores were carried by pterodents from Mesoterra to Arcuterra and some managed to find their way into the caves, they found a very specific set of requirements that allowed them to flourish.

Most significantly, some shroomors developed a symbiotic relationship with the chemosynthetic bacteria, providing them a means to truly be independent of animal parasitism dead or living and truly become a fully self-sufficient producer known as meatmoss: with the bacteria providing the shroomor with nutrients and energy and the shroomor in return providing the bacteria with an anchored place to live. It didn’t take long for meatmoss to proliferate in the caverns, growing side-by-side with mocklichens: and with this new producer, came a brand new niche to exploit.

Many small daggoths would specialize to consume the abundant meatmoss, keeping it in check and preventing it from totally outcompeting thr mocklichens. Some fed on it directly, such as the rockscraper(Sarcophytophagus herbicarnivorous), using modified incisors like spatulas to scrape meatmoss off the rocks: occupying a novel niche as a carnivorous grazer now that there was meat that grew like a plant.

Others instead saw meatmoss as an ideal nursery for their young: carrying over from the ancestral daggoth, most of the modern daggoths give birth to multiple underdeveloped but independent young that attach to the parent to nurse on sweat-like milk for a few days but after which drop off and immediately are self-sufficient in a simple larva-like form that gradually matures into an adult. One daggoth, the mossmulch(Vermipaedis parasiticus), takes this to an extreme, bearing small leech-like young that are so simplified as to lack even any appendages or a skeleton and absorbing oxygen through a thin permeable skin, anatomically being practically just embryos but ones able to survive independently of the parent. Deposited by the mother into meatmoss, they burrow right in with undulating muscular contractions and with their teeth –about the only developed part of their body– and begin to feed, growing quickly and soon developing limb buds and cartilaginous proto-skeletons which slowly ossify, at which point they can leave their nurseries and begin hunting small insects. With their massive simplicity mother mossmulches can deliver litters as big as fifty, which, after remaining latched onto her for the briefest time to acquire her passive immunity, are left on their own to fend for themselves once a suitable clump of meatmoss is located.

Such a lifestyle is so advantageous, easy and favorable that a related species to the mossmulch, the maggoth(V. neotenis) no longer even metamorphoses out of this life stage, remaining as a “larva” constantly surrounded with food that doubles as shelter. It merely grows bigger, up to three inches long, but it mates and reproduces in this state: a wormlike, transluscent organism lacking any eyes, internal skeleton, complex internal organs or even lungs, instead passively absorbing oxygen through its permeable skin that are equipped with chemoreceptors analogous to taste buds. The maggoth, little more than a digestive system and reproductive system with the barest minimum of anything else, lives and breeds within the tissues of meatmoss, munching its way with the help of four tiny incisors: incisors that are all that remain of an unsightly, unrecognizable being that was, long, long ago, a rodent, a mammal and a vertebrate, spending its entire existence gorging on the flesh of another hamster even less hamster-like than itself.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Just Deserts: The Arid Center of Arcuterra

As the climate of the Temperocene warms, regions once covered in ice give way to savannahs and grasslands and forests with the increase of the global temperatures. But with some areas close to the equator, especially the center of continents not reached much by rainfall, they not only become warm– they become very hot.

Such is the case of the Mid-Arcuterran Desert, a region of Arcuterra that, shaded from cool air currents and rainfall from the sea, is as dry and hot as imaginable, its landscape seemingly an unending ocean of dunes. Here water and food is scarce, and life is very inhospitable– a world where few species can survive. But where there is an empty niche, something evolves to fill it, and this barren wasteland has seen the rise of some truly innovative ecosystems yet.

About the only vegetation here are saggros(Macrocactinogramen spp.), a descendant of the clackti of earlier eons that has evolved into a segmented, armored shoot with woody stems and its vulnerable joints lined with defensive spines. Despite resembling some kind of succulent crossed with bamboo, the saggros are in fact grasses: a trait that can be traced by their underground rhizomes that grow sideways, allowing new shoots to easily take root and colonize wherever there are accessible traces of water far beneath the sandy soil.

Few animals can breach this precious source of water, save for one: the cathedral mites(Polygynotermes spp.), descendants of the bombermites that once evolved their extreme defenses and highly-specialized colonies to combat the now-extinct armored giraard. They since have dominated the desert ecosystem by a novel adaptation" the formation of supercolonies with hundreds of individual queens each pumping dozens of eggs daily, in colony networks spanning many miles and housing trillions of individuals. Tunneling up through the stems of saggros, the cathedral mites partake of the nutritious pulp and the concealed moisture, recycling even the waste they excrete as substrate for underground fungus farms which they feed to the many queens and their larvae. King castes still exist but are fewer than queens, and, more mobile than their bloated mates, regularly switch queens currently fertilizing to maximize genetic diversity.

The saggros and the cathedral mites form nearly all of the food chain in the desert, with a wide array of insectivores and herbivores capitalizing on the rich abundance of termites where little other food is available. Most specialized of them is the black-tongued moundator(Myrmecosaurus melanolingus): a large rattile specialized for tearing open the numerous mounds that dot the landscapes with its powerful claws and use its narrow snout and long tongue to feed on the termites that come swarming out. It is a tried-and-true niche that has evolved countless times on Earth, and here is no exception. The moundator, in turn, is often accompanied by a small podothere known as the sandy moustrich(Struthiomys gymnocauda), which, lacking the moundator’s digging claws, waits for its partner to open up the mound before joining the feast. There is enough for everyone and thus the two don’t compete: they tolerate each other’s presence and may even have a mutualistic benefit with the keen-eyed moustrich in turn serving as a lookout and giving alarm calls in case of danger.

Predators are small and far between in the desert: the big-eared bugwug(Aridovulpecyon megalotis) is a tiny zingo with large ears and a bare snout adapted for heat loss, and is primarily an insectivore and scavenger, though in groups may be bolder enough to attempt to hunt bigger game, moundators included. And in the skies is the white-striped desert ratavult(Aquilopteryx albanura): predominantly a scavenger, it nests on the vast mounds the cathedral mites make, and while eating mostly carrion, also eagerly indulges in the winged termite alates when they swarm in the breeding season.

But the biggest, and strangest-looking of the desert’s inhabitants are the rumphumps: members of a group of basal hamtelopes called llamsters that have specialized to the desert environment with various unique adaptations. Most conspicuously, their brightly-colored, hairless hindquarters serve both as a means of losing heat and as a storage for fat, with their unique coloration also serving as display and an indication of health to members of the same species. Their faces and large ears are similarly bald to act as heat sinks to cool off, their strong teeth and thick lips allow them to bite into saggros to access their succulent inner flesh, and their feet, rather than being hoofed as with most hamtelopes, instead have long splayed toes, with an oddly birdlike appearance, to spread their weight evenly and avoid sinking into soft sand. They can also go without food and water for days: by excreting dry droppings and very concentrated urine, they avoid wasting water, and the fat stores in their rumps provide energy even when food is few and far betweeen.

Rumphumps thus are a very successful clade that since has diverged into many different species that are active at different times of day to reduce competition. The most common of them, the scarlet caboose(Cricetocamelus erythroposterius) is active in the middle of the day, where its light coat helps deflect the heat of the main sun Alpha at high noon, the twotone tush(Gymnoposterius bicolor), with its brilliant colors on its hairless regions, being active at earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon, and the smallest species, the black booty(Microcricetocamelus nigraposterius) being active during Beta-twilight or at night, in order to avoid diurnal packs of bugwugs which it is small enough to fall prey to.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Leap Frag: The Fragmian Isles and the Fragmus Subcontinent

Among the pre-existing continents of the Glaciocene, some fused into larger landmasses, one new subcontinent has arisen from the flooding of Gestaltia and the rise of sea levels: the subcontinent of Fragmus. Bordering the mouth of the Fragmian Sea, a low-level basin that in the rising tides has flooded into a seagrass-rich “seavannah”, the continent of Fragmus was a land mostly devoid of large life, until only recently in a few million years’ time.

Most immigrants to new lands are often small creatures, either flyers or small rafters that came ashore on floating mats of vegetation. Yet Fragmus is home to large megafauna that made the journey across despite the marine separation, through truly unusual means that in convenient coincidence neatly demonstrate the forces of evolution that shaped all life on this world. These are the mudmallows: a clade of semi-aquatic, sparsely-furred cavybaras of distant relation to hammoths and piggalo. Residents of the Gestaltian swamps, the rising floods worked well to their favor, and being remarkable swimmers, they did not need frozen seas or land bridges to colonize new land: they simply swam there on their own power.

But even to this amphibious swamp-dwelling herbivores, crossing a whole sea seems a bit of a stretch, save for a convenient path for it to follow: the Fragmian Isles. Acting as rest stops filled with abundant food, the mudmallows island-hopped across the sea in search of new territory, able to cross gaps of up to several kilometers of shallow sea that other land animals could not, settling on one island, to another, until they finally reached the new continent and thus spread and diversified.

However, even today a remarkable relic of their incredible journey remains, in the form of a genus of mudmallows (Fragmuchoerus spp.). Eight extant species are found on the Fragmian Isles between Gestaltia and Fragmus, each having settled on one island while others moved on, and as one observes the species from each island, a trend becomes evident: as the species progresses closer to Fragmus, a trend of increasing size, bonier noses and more divergent color patterns become clear, ranging from coastal Gestaltia’s hog-sized Fragmuchoerus proteus to mainland Fragmus’s ox-sized Fragmuchoerus continentem. They thus form a unique chain of transitional species on the island, all simultaneously extant, and while species on neighboring islands are similar enough and on rare occasion actually do cross over to other islands and interbreed, the further away they originate the less compatible they become, until the point that mudmallows from opposite ends of the chain can no longer even physically interbreed due to massive accumulated physiological differences, and thus must be regarded as entirely separate species as opposed to dubious definitions of subspecies.

Mainland Fragmus, however, is where the mudmallows truly have the chance to shine, as, with little other competition, they came to dominate large herbivore niches on the subcontinent, now spanning over thirty or more species in seven genera. But they did not come alone.

Gestaltia’s dominant carnivores, the badgebears, followed suit: surprisingly good swimmers as well, due to their facultative preference for aquatic prey at certain times of the year, some of the larger carnivorous species made their way across the Fragmian Isles all the way to Fragmus, and indeed may be partly responsible for the increasing size and defenses of the mudmallows as they co-evolved in an arms race with their predators. The badgebears now thus fill a wide array of nondescript generalist carnivore niches on Fragmus, with the biggest species, with the largest, the shaggy wolbear(Ursoidetherium arctoimitus) being over two meters on its hind legs and weighing up to 250 kilograms. Curiously for an apex predator, however, wolbears are secondarily omnivorous: while they do hunt the large herbivores of the subcontinent, a significant amount of their diet also includes plants, fruit and invertebrates, allowing them to be more behaviorally flexible when large game is hard to come by.

The local mudmallows, in response, have evolved many defenses to their large predators in response: most conspicuously, a pair of true bony-cored horns from bony knobs on their snouts as effective ramming weapons. Smaller species such as the curl-horned poirot(Nasoceratochoerus hercule) have forward-pointing horns that can inflict serious injury when headbutting smaller enemies, while small species with big predators to worry about rely on multiple defenses: the smallest species of Fragmus mudmallow, the quilled spinehorn(Spinochoerus minimus) is only about 15 kilograms but overlaps its territorial range with the shaggy wolbear: against which it defends itself not only with horns on its front, but also spines on its rear: quills formed from the mudmallows’ coarse bristly hairs that have been modified into barbed-tipped quills that are difficult to remove once embedded. Well-defended fore and aft the spinehorn is far more trouble than it is worth, and many wolbears learn from painful experience that they are better off finding a meal elsewhere.

While smaller mudmallows develop defenses to ward off enemies, others rely on passive protection simply by becoming very big. The largest mudmallow species is the golden aurotaur(Aurotaurochoerus maximus), unmistakable by both its tawny yellow hue most pronounced in adult males and by its size, with the largest growing up to four or five tons and measuring six or more feet at the shoulder. Traveling in herds aurotaurs are protected by their size and numbers, while large solitary species, such as the bighorn potodon(Macroceratochoerus bicornis) possess impressive weaponry for both intimidation and actual combat, which, in the highly territorial species, often is against rivals of their own species as well as against predators.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Wingscraft and Lizardry: The Midland Archipelago

Situated in the middle of the Midland Sea, right between Mesoterra and Arcuterra, is a small volcanic archipelago formed by undersea volcanoes and tectonic activity. This series of small landmasses first emerged at the end of the Glaciocene, and while few of its volcanoes are active anymore, it was only in more recent times that life had come to colonize it.

Formed from several hundred small islands, the largest of them roughly 30,000 square kilometers, these volcanic islands were first devoid of life, being only barren igneous rock and sandy beaches on its shores. But soon sea-going ratbats and pterodents began using the islands as a rest stop, in the process dropping off seeds of grasses and spores of fungi and a myriad of invertebrate hitchhikers, and more recently, in the span of at least 15 million years, coast kudzu has acted as rafts that allowed small animals to cross over to the landmasses, establish themselves there, and become entirely new species of their own.

Many of its inhabitants are transient species such as ratbats and pterodents that only use them as stations for resting or breeding but spend most of the year elsewhere. Some species of wandergander, however, such as the teal-toed tiddies(Anseropteromys cyanopus), nest here all year round, making their homes on rocky outcrops and steep cliff faces and getting the vast majority of their food from the sea.

But the Midland Archipelago is, otherwise, a land dominated by rattiles: with higher tolerance for hunger and thirst, they were the only ones that survived the long journey across the sea adrift on rafts, and thus have filled a vast diversity of niches across the islands: hundreds of species now thrive throughout the archipelago, many isolated to just a single island, as a founding member of the genus spread through the islands and became a separate species on each one.

Shingles, in particular, are the most diverse and varied among all of them on the archipelago. Small, flying wingles, blown across the sea to the islands, have since diversified into endemic species such as the ten-spotted emerald wingle(Tetrapterasauromys midlandi), an agile airborne insectivore able to cross from island to island and is found on almost all of them. On land, some have become large herbivores feeding on the abundant succulents of the islands, while others have shed most of their armor to become faster runners: giving rise to the islands’ dominant carnivores, the varats.

Ambush predators with disproportionately large heads, the varats primarily prey on smaller rattiles as well as pterodents and ratbats. The largest species, the leopard varat(Varanosauromys pardus) can reach weights of 300 pounds and grow up to ten feet in length, and is an indiscriminate eater, preying upon anything small enough to be swallowed whole or easily bitten into small pieces. Primarily solitary, their social interaction is generally limited to when they gather around a carcass, which is when territorial posturing, courtship and mating all takes place before they disperse. They, unusually among rattiles, practice parental care, defending their young from predators which primarily consist of other varats seeking to dispose of potential competitors.

Predatory pressure from the varats would encourage other native shingles to develop their own slew of defenses to protect against their powerful jaws. The pricklewicks(Echinosauromys spp.) would lengthen their protective scales into long spines, with barbed tips that break off easily, leaving painful injuries on varats foolish enough to tackle them, and at times leading to starvation if said spines embed into their mouth and leave them unable to close their jaws. Well-armed and dangerous, the pricklewicks are generally fearless creatures, wandering about in the open daylight to forage for insects and small coastal invertebrates.

Another means of defense was to simply grow much larger: a strategy served well by the midland terraise(Midlandochelys grandis) getting as big as 500 pounds and covered in thick plates of armor on its back, as well as spikes alongside its face, legs and tail to deter predator attacks. A herbivore specialized on the abundance of cactus-like succulents abundant on the islands, the terraise lives a slow-paced life, doing little else than constantly feeding, and reproducing once every two to three years with a litter of up to forty young at a time, which are independent right away though still stick close by to the mother’s burrow for passive protection for the first few weeks. While young are vulnerable to predators, including aerial ones like ratbats and pterodents, adults are virtually impenetrable by any native species on the archipelago.

One of the more remarkable of the shingles, hovever, are the littoral igwigs(Littorasauromys macrocephalus), which have adapted, convergently to the seagoing shingles known as sterapins, to find most of their meals in the sea and consume practically all sorts of food, such as beached carrion, algae, seagrass and hard-shelled mollusks and crustaceans. As an adaptation to their salt-rich diet, which would be harmful for their kidneys, they evolved specialized skin glands that excrete the excess salt, and when basking in the sun for long periods of time may eventually form white crusty patches of salt on their bodies as the “sweat” evaporates, which their periodically shake off of themselves from time to time.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Shallow Wallows: The Seavannahs of the Fragmian Sea

The melting of the polar ice caps at the end of the Glaciocene has raised sea levels to cover over 80% of the planet’s surface and caused immense levels of flooding on the continental landmasses: and the most extreme example of this is the transformation of the northern Gestaltian basin into the shallow Fragmian Sea: a massive bay, bordered at its mouth by the subcontinent of Fragmus, that is shallow enough as to never exceed more than 5 to 6 meters in depth.

This vast shallow sunlit region thus is an ideal habitat for seagrass to grow, particularly floating coast kudzu: a highly prolific seagrass that, rather than being rooted to the bottom, floats at the surface to absorb maximum sunlight and thus is able to proliferate quickly, with a single stalk able to grow at rates of a foot a day and thus can quickly form thick mats at the surface: floating rafts that, at times, can almost be considered miniature islands in their own right, hosting a wide array of symbiotic flora and fauna. Known as seavannahs, this unique biome is in many ways akin to grasslands on dry land: but intermingled with the ocean that results in very unusual life to proliferate.

The Fragmian Sea, due to its shallow depth and thick tangled forests of seagrass, thus have few large animals, save for the occasional transient hamatees such as walmuses that feed at the bottom seagrass and the far bigger whaleruses that eat floating coast kudzu. But living permanently in this zone, in huge abundance, is a hamatee that has taken the opposite route in size, and filled an unconventional niche unlike any animal back on Earth.

Known as the searrels(Phocasciurus spp.), these hamatees are very small creatures, about the size of a large guinea pig, and are equipped with a single long claw on each foreflipper to grasp coast kudzu stems, with their two hind flippers, merged into a permanent backwards posture, now act as a prehensile pincer-like fluke that can grip onto plants. The thick floating mats of coast kudzu provide them with food and shelter, nesting on the surface where they bear their litters of two or three pups hidden among the dense knots of rhizones, and their favored food, aside from leaves and stems, are the large, buoyant seeds of one coast kudzu type known as seanuts(Duramaresemen spp.) which are buoyant and enclosed in a hard shell, and are often hoarded by searrels in their floating dens to eat later. The searrel thus fills a peculiar niche: one akin to a traditional rodent, except in a marine environment.

Searrels, in turn, are prey to an unconventional predator that follows the Temperocene trend of numerous land clades such as shingles and lemunkies taking to the ocean to exploit new resources. A member of the burrowurm family, which includes both basal burrowers and arboreal tree-climbers, this slender hunter, the sterpent(Thalassophidomys spp.) has taken to the water in search of new territory with ample prey: and in doing so, evaded a constraint that had kept land burrowurms in markedly less serpentine shapes. Here, streamlining was key, and becoming an aquatic swimmer had eliminated the need for grasping claws. As such, its hind limbs and tail claw have been lost entirely, while its front limbs have become, in essence, a set of extra jaws, emerging almost directly behind the head and possessing the allergenic pseudovenom glands used in dispatching its prey. The aquatic sterpent, now markedly more snakelike than its terrestrial kin, thus is able to swim more efficiently and squeeze into the dense stems of coast kudzu to attack the abundant searrels in their dens: where they are otherwise inaccessible to most other predators.

But marine hamsters are not the only unique fauna to emerge in these leafy seas, as shrish, skwoids and pescopods also make their homes in this food-rich, inacessessible zones. And among the most unique and specialized of these is the mermite(Myrmecocaris spp.) which has specialized to make their homes in coast kudzu– and has adopted a marine version of a colonial insect and has become eusocial. Males, which act as drones exchanged between colonies, retain a typical shrish build, with abdominal swimmerets and a tail fin for swimming and dispersal. Females, however, lack the fin, and instead have their abdominal limbs modified into grasping legs: adaptations that make them poor swimmers, but efficient at scurrying around on seagrass stems and cutting leaves to haul back home as food. Females come in three castes: a worker caste, which are generally younger females, and can further specialize into two other castes: a sterile soldier caste with large pincers for defense, or a fertile queen caste with thoracic limbs for clinging and abdominal limbs for carrying eggs. Male drones surround her, grooming her and fertilizing her eggs, while she releases pheromones that halt the reproductive development of other females and ensure she rules as sole breeder. A single colony can have as many as a thousand members but only one queen, and are herbivores, feeding on cut-up seagrass leaves, algae and seagrass nuts and seeds as well.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Souther Space: The Merged Continent of Austro-Easaterra

Shifting tectonics, warming climes and rising seas have greatly altered the map of HP-02017 in the Temperocene Era: fusing some landmasses together and separating others, and creating barriers that allow organisms to evolve in isolation or bringing them together and causing separate ecosystems to collide, leading to niche partitioning for the adaptable– and outcompetition to extinction for those not.

Peninsulaustra, a frozen continent on the south devoid of much life throughout the Glaciocene, had slowly warmed in the Early Temperocene: allowing for the first time in millions of years for plants to thrive on its surface. The opening of new niches of grassland and scrubland on the once-barren ice saw a massive adaptive radiation of the local dominant fauna: the blubbats. Descended from flying ratbats, the blubbats would colonize Peninsulaustra as semi-aquatic flightless swimmers, but as the climate warmed and the center of the continent became greener, they headed inland and became fully-terrestrial and occupy niches such as burrowing omnivores, scurrying insectivores, foraging herbivores and large apex predators in the form of their dominant carnivores, the blubbears.

But the formation of the merged continent of Austro-Easaterra would bring new creatures onto their land: the natives of South Easaterra. Isolated since the Glaciocene and spared the wrath of the harmsters, South Easaterra had since evolved its own unique flora and fauna. Oddly-shaped conifers, short and stocky, dot the landscape, relics of an age when cold taiga dominated much of the land, and strange beasts roam its steppes and forests: herds of colorful tetracorns adorned with elaborate horns, bounding oingos akin to an ancient kind mostly replaced now by their cursorial kin the walkabies, towering treechers with long trunks, necks and legs for browsing, and a truly unconventional apex carnivore: the carnivorous rhinocheirid known as the lipgrip, whose short trunk has instead made a multi-lobed flower-like trunk with a brightly-colored interior for signaling.

But aside from the bearhounds, giant zingos of South Easaterra which would be muscled out by the blubbears, few other species would be affected by the merging. The land blubbats filled generalist omnivore niches comparable to mustelids, suids, and larger rodents of the more traditional kind, the blubbears would become increasingly omnivorous to avoid competition with the predatory lipgrips, and sea-going blubbats would persist on coasts and shores, exploding in even greater abundance with a now-bigger continent to inhabit. As such, Peninsulaustra’s species would coexist surprisingly well with those of South Easaterra, by becoming polar opposites: the creatures of South Easaterra being highly-specialized and those of Peninsulaustra being generalists, fitting neatly together and creating a more varied menagerie once more gradually changing to suit its new balance.

Soon Austro-Easaterra would be dominated by a wide range of biomes: mountains, deserts, forests and grasslands, with long coastal reaches along its southern half. A small offshore island, Isla Frigor, would be a remnant of Peninsulaustra before its collision, south enough as to still be covered heavily in ice, and thus would remain relics of a wintery past: white-furred southern blubbears and flocks of marine blubbats nesting on ice floes, a leftover from the days of the Glaciocene persisting while the rest of its world changes beyond recognition.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

In The Middle Of It All: The Fusion of Mesoterra and Isla Centralis

Mesoterra, the central continent, has long been an isolated region since the Glaciocene: save for the glaciation at the end that lowered the sea level and allowed podotheres and piggalo to cross over to Arcuterra. But as continents shift, break and collide in the Temperocene, this isolation has come to an end, as it has merged with another secluded landmass: Isla Centralis, a tiny island that for just as long been the breeding ground of bizarre lifeforms.

Thus would intermingle two ecosystems that had never met before. From Isla Centralis would come the scabbers and the rabbeasts, and from Mesoterra would come the lemunkies, the podotheres and the piggalo. And from the skies would converge three clades of fliers, the ever-present ratbats, the rising dynasty of the pterodents, and the newcomer class of the wingles, barely ten million years old and yet already surely spreading throughout the globe.

The collison would not be without its casualties, however. Giant, browsing thompers, knuckle-walking rabbeasts, would, with their destructive feeding habits of ripping down tree branches, quickly displace the last of the walkabies that still remained on Mesoterra, though their kin would live on in Gestaltia and Austro-Easaterra. The once-top carnivorous vulweirines, distant relation of the zingos, would be relegated to niches no bigger than a weasel once the scabbers invaded the land. And the giant scabbers themselves would have to contend with the Mesoterran loupagroos: starting an arms race between the two that would eventually lead to the loupgaroos reclaiming the role of apex predator, and the scabbers being relegated to mesopredator and scavenger niches, though their agile grasping paws would enable them to climb trees and hunt lemunkies, who, while used to predators in the previous arrangement, will have to face new hunters not only on the ground, but in the trees.

Today, however, competition has mostly leveled off, with niches being secured and stabilized and a diverse number of clades attaining relative balance. Herds of piggalo, such as the swamp-dwelling scoopdoop and the steppe-dwelling sporkchop, are common in large herds as the dominant large grazers, while long-legged, tusked bambunnies are generalist herbivores that low-browse or graze depending on food availability. Basal podotheres, such as the running strapflanks and the smaller toetippers, occupy foraging herbivore and omnivore niches while thompers browse on the branches of trees.

The arms race of the carnivores in the meantime would bring about the new apex predator of Mesoterra to fill the empty gaps the murderous ripperoos once filled: the saber-toothed fangaroo. Rather than the meathook claws and shearing teeth of the now-extinct ripperoo, the fangaroo developed a pair of long pronounced pseudo-canines from its upper first molars, ideal for attacking thompers and piggalo and quickly dealing deadly wounds. Its fangs, lethal but delicate, are contained within pouches of skin on the lower jaw that protect its enamel from drying out and cracking. This lifestyle would favor the fangaroo living a more solitary life, and dealing quick, efficient kills– and while still an apex predatory podothere descended from the loupgaroo, it thankfully lacks the high intelligence and capacity for sadism that the ripperoo once possesed: traits that, long ago, had spelled the rise of a terrible force never seen since.

While immigrants from collided continents find new places in a changed world, other newcomers, blundering in on accident, quickly make themselves at home occupying niches no other animal on either landmass had ever filled before. Wingles, a clade of flying rattiles, small and hovering, blew off course to the sea and ended up in Mesoterra in populations big enough to properly establish. Here, they have become important pollinators in their endless quest for nectar, bumbling low to the ground to locate the abundance of colorful blooms abundant on Mesoterra’s grasslands and savannahs.

A new natural order is formed, as two disparate ecosystems, products of evolutionary isolation, combine into one as the Temperocene map rearranges itself in increments almost to slow to notice. Yet its effects on the planet’s life are huge, as in the presence or absence of competitors new species rise and fall: with change fueling the forces of evolution that molded these creatures from humble beginnings.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Wingle It Just A Little Bit: Flying Rattiles of the Temperocene

Early morning dawns upon the jungles of southern Arcuterra: a land that, once dry and dusty desert, has seen the abundant growth of vegetation as the lower region of the continent, now stretched out into a peninsula, has experienced far greater rainfall than the drier center of the continent further north.

In the dawn morning rays of Alpha, small creatures begin to stir in the branches high up in the forest canopy, holed up in small, safe crevices. Warmed by the sun, they soon spread four slender wings and take to the air in a buzzing flight, drawn to the colors and scents of flowers growing up in the trees, laden with bounties of sweet nectar. At first glance, some, with their wings adorned with elegant patterns, might resemble butterflies, and their bumbling, hovering flight might bring to mind the hummingbirds of Earth, but a closer look at their tiny, quasi-saurian bodies reveals a far more baffling truth: they are miniscule rattiles, barely a few centimeters long, flying on two pairs of stiff rigid wings emerging from their backs.

Rattiles have found their heyday in the Temperocene Era’s warm and humid atmosphere: descended from ectothermic mole-like burrowers, a hotter clime than the Glaciocene would greatly favor this clade. Now found on every continent, and even on isolated islands from rafting, these small squamate-mimics have spread across land, and ventured into the seas, and, far more recently, taken to the air to join the ratbats and pterodents in the skies as easily the most unusual hamster lineage yet: the wingles.

Wingles descend from a group of rattiles called shingles, most of which are armored chelonian-like herbivores with movable armor plates formed of enlarged scales that cover their sides and back, but one lineage of smaller, more basal arboreal shingles would take to the trees. There, a diet of fruits and nectar would favor increased color vision, and from there would follow bright color displays, refractive structures in their scales reflecting all sorts of colors in a wide palette and intensified by pigments in their diet into a dazzling rainbow array. Their plates would thus be relegated to lighter, more mobile display structures with bright patterns, acting as flags that can be raised or folded to communicate with their own kind or serve as startle coloration to warn off predators.

Some arboreal shingles, traveling between trees in search of food or to escape enemies, began to leap from branch to branch, aided by their movable back plates, that, no longer needed as armor due to their more agile lifestyles, became thinner and broader, acting as a gliding surface to catch the air and parachute them from tree to tree. Slowly, over time, these glides would develop fluttering motions to gain small increments of additional height to prolong their glides, until, eventually, these twitches would progress into proper flaps– making the wingles the third lineage of hamsters to develop powered flight.

But unlike the ratbats or pterodents, or indeed any other vertebrate to ever truly fly in Earth’s history, the wingles did not modify their forelimbs into a pair of wings. Rather, it was four modified dorsal plates that formed into their wings: attached to muscular base knobs, they were unfurled from their resting position by hypertrophied hair erector muscles, and moved up and down by specialized anchoring abdominal muscles that attached to a keel formed of an extension of their ribcage cartilage. These muscles provided all the motion of the wings, entirely devoid of bending joints except at the base, though the wing itself was quite flexible with a stiffened shaft in the center for support and a thin and papery edge as a flight surface, similar in function and structure to a single avian feather.

The development of this amazing structure can be traced all the way back to their ancestors, the burrowing molrocks, which, upon becoming ectothermic, lost their insulating fur: but kept individual hairs on their naked skin as sensory whiskers to feel about underground. These hairs developed more voluntarily-controlled hair erector muscles that allowed them to act as mini-antennae in the dark. As they returned to the surface, however, and their powers of sight re-evolved, these movable hairs began finding a different use: as thicker and more solid defenses to protect their bare skins from injury, first in the form of sharp spines and later as broader, flatter plates, which came to resemble overlapping scales. Many rattiles would eventually lose their ability to move their scales individually, but one group, the shingles, would retain this: raising their plates for signaling or to cool off, but clamping them back down into tile-like armor in defense. These structures, relegated to purely display functions among arboreal shingles, would form the basis for the wingles’ wings: essentialy meaning that their entire wing is ultimately a single, very-derived hair.

Such an unusual means of flight would also require a far more unusual style of flying: rigid and flexible only at the base, the wingles would fly in a manner more comparable to an insect than a bird, alternating the hair erector muscle as a wing elevator and the abdominal anchors as wing depressors, flapping their wings as many as 50 beats a second: turning their wings into a blur in flight and allowing them to hover in place, some species better at this than others.

This unusual means of flight would come with its constraints, however. This insect-like flying style would greatly constrain them in size, with none exceeding a weight of 20 grams, and their rapid wing flaps would use up a lot of energy, forcing them to seek out energy-rich food sources: sugary sap, nectar or fruit to fuel their activity, and small flying insects to build up fat stores, particularly reserves of energy-boosting brown fat stored near their wing muscles that allow them to contract rapidly without exhaustion.

Fortunately for the wingles, however, they would find ways to use these limitations to their advantage. Being ectotherms they could use this wing-vibration to quickly generate heat to warm up rapidly in the morning: but at the same time, conserve energy by slowing down their metabolism when not in flight: otherwise, should a similarly-sized endotherm had developed such a means of activity they would very quickly lose heat due to their small size, and burn so much energy that they would starve to death within mere hours without food. Able to control their metabolic rates to suit their activity level, the wingles have no such problems, though they still do need to eat constantly when traveling for longer distances.

Their extremely small sizes too mean that they have little competition to the other fliers of the skies: the ratbats and pterodents. The more recent of the two, the pterodents, averted competition with the established ratbats by growing bigger: a feat accomplished by their lighter skeletons and more-efficient respiratory systems. Conversely, the winged rattiles would cope by being smaller, allowing them to fill ecological niches more on the level of the insects: even if it comes at the price of being well up on the menu of predatory ratbats, a pressure that has favored their increased agility and defenses to avoid becoming a meal.

Their tiny sizes also pose another problem: reproduction. At such a size, the mother is constrained to produce a baby big enough to be viable, but small enough to accomodate in her body: as such, she bears a single offspring at a time, after a gestation of 18 to 21 days, that is at birth already a quarter of her mass. The extreme energetic contribution of the female would lead to another unconventional adaptation, this time in parenting style: it is the male, rather than the female, that cares for and nourishes the young.

Unlike other rattiles, which produce many young and leave them to their fate, the wingles re-evolved parental care to compensate for their decreased fecundity. But the female, exhausted from her laborious pregnancy, contributes no further attention to the young at birth. During breeding, males and females pair off, with the male providing her with food in a safe nest during the duration of her gestation, but once she gives birth, she departs and leaves all further care to the male. The loss of mammary glands in rattiles meant that they have since done away with the benefits of milk, instead compensating with the aid of symbiotic bacteria acquired by the offspring during birth, but the wingles, secondarily re-evolving parental care, would produce a masculine analogue of nutritious secretions regurgitated by the male along with predigested food, which also provide necessary gut bacteria that provide the offspring with necessary immunity for its first few days of life. At about three or four weeks of age, the juvenile’s wings will have grown in, and it begins to follow its parent while foraging, learning through imitation which food to look for, and by the age of about three months is mature enough to depart and live an independent life. After this the male begins to court another female, who is receptive within weeks of giving birth: a typical female, within her expected three-year lifespan, can produce as many as one baby every two months, if conditions are favorable, often with a different male each time. This also has the unique effect of effectively reversing the more common sexual dimorphism found in nature: female wingles, who contribute little else but their genes, are often more colorful as signals of fitness, while males are drab and camouflaged, as they tend to their young and have to keep hidden from predators.

Within as little as ten million years since the first wingles started gliding, the clade has already seen an explosion into over several dozen species, a diversity favored by a relative lack of larger flying insects in the Arcuterran landmass that has allowed the wingles to effectively fill their niches as pollinators, sap-suckers and small insectivorous fliers.

Basal forms only capable of gliding are still extant, such as the purple spirer(Protopterosauromys glimmi), living in dense forests and still sporting multiple wing-scales , which have been reduced to four in the powered-flying, more-derived lineages. Some of the true flyers are relatively generalists, such as the colorful iridescent brightwing(Chromopterosauromys iridus), which feed on a variety of food, drinking nectar from flowers, eating small fruit, and catching small insects on the wing.

Other forms would specialize much further on these specific energy-rich sources to fuel their fast-paced lifestyle: and in turn develop unique adaptations to suit their niche. Some such as the splitwing bumblezard(Dracinosauromys dividopteryx) would specialize on catching small insects such as water-nesting, gnat-like flies, using sharp, jagged-edged incisors and developing the unique ability to flap their front and hind wings independently, giving them increased maneuverability with their slender tails aiding them in changing direction quickly. Others, such as the red-winged deckpecker(Erythropterosauromys melanoleuca), would probe for trees using sharp, beak-like incisors to feed on sap and opportunistically eat any wood-boring insects they find in the process. The most derived of them, however, are also among the smallest: the nectar-specialist hovering gallibee(Bombussauromys apimimus) which, at a weight of a measly two grams with a four-centimeter wingspan, is the smallest living hamster on HP-02017. Its front wings are rounded and flexible, allowing it to support its weight both forwards and backwards while hovering, while its hind wings are reduced to fly-like halteres that allow it to keep itself steady in the air. Its broad, flattened tail, acting as a stabilizing rudder, is boldly marked with yellow-and-black coloration: mimicking the appearance of a stinging insect such as a bee or wasp, granting it additional protection from numerous creatures that otherwise might make a meal of it.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

Ptemperocene Pterrors: The Pterowrist

North Westerna, a small landmass off the west of Arcuterra, had remained in isolation since the Glaciocene. Here, one final freeze of the Glaciocene’s end wiped out practically all the wildlife save for a few, but ironically, as the Glaciocene came to a close, this subcontient would become a lifeboat for the remnants of one of the Glaciocene’s most abundant and impressive clades: the hammoths.

Once ranging in sizes measured in tons, today the hammoths are small and miniscule compared to their gigantic forebearers. Some, as big as cows, or sheep, graze alongside herds of ungulopes, another herbivore successful on the landmass. Others have gone even smaller still: the marmoths, which have shrunk down to sizes of less than five kilograms, and become small, gopher-like burrowers.

For a time, the hammoths lived in prosperity. The smaller hammoths had but airborne falcyons and small, weasel-sized fearrets to concern them, while the larger species and their ungulope neighbors lived a blissful life free of any threat. But now those days of peace have come to an end, for a new enemy arrives from the skies–and for half of them, departs from it entirely.

Thus this isolated world was turned upside-down by the coming of the pterowrist(Phobornitherium dimorphium), a highly-unusual pterodent related to the ratavults that quickly claimed the throne of North Westerna’s new apex predator. And easily its most glaring and remarkable feature is the extreme dimorphism between the sexes: a strange consequence of their unusual initial lifestyle suddenly being introduced to an ecosystem with such a vacancy of predator niches.

The ancestor of the pterowrists was, much like other pterodents, markedly dimorphic in size. Due to needing to bear young, females were larger by at least 30% on average– a size difference that proved useful for reducing dietary competition between a mated pair. This, however, has been exaggerated to extreme lengths by the pterowrist, where the female, weighing as much as 50 kilograms, can outweigh the male fivefold and stand to a height of five feet: and thus, has entirely lost the capacity to fly at all, an adaptation favored by more-sedentary females and wide-ranging males. As such, the pterowrist manages to reduce intra-species competition by having the males and females specialize for entirely separate ecological niches.

Male pterowrists, as flighted as any pterodent, are small-game hunters that hunt from the skies. Their opposable first toe is equipped with a hooked claw, allowing them to grab small prey, plucking them off the ground and carrying them away to eat elsewhere. Male pterowrists are not picky eaters, and tackle a wide array of game: small hamtelopes, duskmice, furbils, rattiles and ratbats are all on its menu, and on occasion even swoop over water to catch shrish or pescopods. And like their ratavult cousins, the male pterowrist also scavenges on occasion, on carrion of larger herbivores.

But the female pterowrist is an entirely different creature: bulky, flightless, and equipped with a more powerful set of jaws, her wings now used for balance when running but also for seizing larger quarry, she hunts on the ground instead: borne by powerful legs that can allow her to sprint at speeds of up to 25-30 km/h for sustained distances, running down her prey for long lengths until it falters from exhaustion, before using a powerful bite to the neck to dispatch it. The female pterowrist’s first toe claws are very large and hooked: allowing to anchor and pin down carcasses while the teeth do the work in tearing off chunks of meat.

This unusual arrangement has many benefits: a larger population of pterowrists can thus thrive in a given area without vying for resources. Females, who occupy smaller ranges in territory, are large-game specialists who go after ungulopes and the bigger hammoths, while the wide-ranging males, whose territories may cover those of multiple females, take on smaller game: thus leaving plenty of food for the females and their more energy-intensive role of producing, nurturing and protecting their young. During the breeding season, males and females may pair off, with the male bringing his mate food while she is nesting and rearing her young, though once the young are weaned the male soon departs and the remaining care falls upon the female until the young are fully independent– males taking their first clumsy flights at about half a year and fully independent by a year of age, joining groups of wandering males during the early years, while females, never once flighted, sticking around by the mother for as long as three or four years, depending on food availability, though she eventually evicts her mature daughters once they become too much competition for food. Once fully grown, both males and females are typically solitary most of the year, but may occasionally tolerate others of their same sex if prey is plentiful enough.

The sudden introduction of a new predator would spell trouble for the hammoths, but ultimately, they would adapt, as they had retained their herding behavior and their tusks: though none had seen predators for millions of years, they were competitive and territorial enough to re-learn how to fight when they once again needed to. In particular, the tiny marmoths, who still had to deal with predators too small to concern their bigger kin, would handle the pterowrists well with their own sets of defenses.

One species, the gregarious marmoth(Nanomammuthomys rectodon), would become a favored prey for ground-dwelling female pterowrists– but they would not go down without a fight. Burrowing communally in groups as big as forty, in deeper and more complex burrows made possible by their cooperation, the gregarious marmoth would find strength in numbers: when attacked, they would rush to the entrance and barricade the door with a wall of bodies, their forward-pointed straight tusks just as able to inflict painful wounds onto a predator as it does use as a digging implement. If lucky, a female pterowrist might be able to snatch one as they scramble for cover, but once their defenses are up, she has little hope of snagging a victim without risk of injury.

Now shrunken so greatly from their Glaciocene ancestors as to even barely be recognizable as the last of a line of giants, the marmoths now have to deal with many new dangers, and many deadly predators, that their immense precursors would scarcely have paid any notice of. Yet it is this sense of tenacity, and the unity of a herd, that allows the marmoth to persist in a world no longer safe– traits that long ago had similarly helped their great cousins cling on to a harsh and frigid world.

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The Early Temperocene: 145 million years post-establishment

The Map and the World of the Early Temperocene

The Temperocene is a far different world than the Glaciocene that came before. Melting ice and rising sea levels have flooded most of the globe, to an extent that 80% of the surface is now water. The continents have significantly shrunk, their ragged edges and offshore isles a telltale sign of land swallowed by the sea, while meanwhile in the ocean, vast swathes of shallow sea, breeding grounds of kelp forests, coral reefs and seagrass mats scatter in abundance.

TheCentralic Ocean is now but virtually gone: now divided into multiple small seas connected by narrow straits. Ocean currents cycle in loops around the continents, creating a turbulent pattern keeping the seas cycling cold and warm water, producing, in turn, warm and cold sea breezes that affect the climate even on the air and land, creating random, irregular patches of temperate forest and tropical jungle all throughout the continents due to the varying temperatures and the plentiful rains. These currents also cycle nutrients from the deep back to the surface, providing sustenance to sea plants and phytoplankton, two important food sources and the basis of all of the ocean’s food webs.

Scarcely any ice caps remain, except on the very northmost and southmost tips of the continents. The Glaciocene continents still remain somewhat similar, though with a few important changes. South EasaterraandPeninsulaustra have since merged into the continent Australo-Easaterra, and have traded their fauna: blubbats and blubbears have moved into the plains of Easaterra, while carnivorous rhinocheirids and tetracorns have migrated into the Peninsulaustran continent. Isla Centralis has fused with Mesoterra, and despite a rough start, its native animals– the rabbeasts and the scabbers– are flourishing alongside Mesoterran locals such as the podotheres and the piggalo.

But the most significant effect of the Temperocene is the formation of isolated landmasses: as sea levels rose, islands were cut off from the mainlands: and so were the flora and fauna from their relatives. Exposed to new environments, they begin to evolve separately, giving rise to highly-divergent forms. On North Westerna, relics of the hammoth lineage, shrunken by time, now have to contend with a new predator from the skies. On the offshore island of Isla de Oof, a beast of hulking inefficiency soldiers on in spite of everything. On the North IslesandIsla Junctus, the last fragments of tundra linger on from an age of ice. On the new subcontinent of Fragmus, lineages once marginal and insignificant find new opportunities for diversity and greatness. And in the temperate forests of South Ecatoria, thirty million years after the demise of the harmsters, a promising new species–or two– glimmer with the potential of a new intelligence.

The Temperocene has brought about a diversity unlike anything that the history of the planet has ever seen before. Numerous small clades, marginal in the harsh climates of the Glaciocene, now find perfect opportunities to spread, adapt and evolve. Now, land, sea and sky teem with stunning abundance and difference: an array of various forms that will only grow as the forces of natural selection shape the species to their different environments.

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The Early Temperocene: 140 million years post-establishment

Dare To Be Stupid: The Big Oof

The favorable conditions of the Temperocene have seen evolution working wonders in ascending life to a degree of diversity and derivedness like never before. Thousands, if not millions, of new species have emerged to take advantage of so many new niches available in the increased warmth of the globe: and even more so following a mass extinction whose vacant gaps have quickly been filled by new pioneers.

With increased competition giving rise to ever-more efficient grazers, hunters, swimmers and flyers, an illusion of progress is made prevalent, as natural selection weeds out the poorly-suited ones unable to compete for a niche in the environment. Yet, on one small island off the coast of Arcuterra, one very unusual animal, remarkable for seemingly all the wrong reasons, challenges this very notion, a living testament to evolution’s lack of a direction, and the complete absence of any goal except current survival. It is a highly aberrant member of the lemunkies: a clade of social, intelligent and adaptable creatures, with some possibly even bordering on semi-sophonce– yet this beast is anything but.

Known as the big oof(Tardipithecus stultus), this lumbering browser is everything that its relatives are not: a slow-moving, clumsy, solitary animal that does little else but spend much of the day highly inactive, with intermittent periods of constant feeding, on tough, scarcely-nutritious and highly-toxic foliage. Doing little else other than pluck leaves from branches and stuff them in tremendous quantities into its mouth, the big oof has thus abandoned one of the lemunkies’ most valuable assets: their large and adaptable brains. The big oof, despite standing almost six feet on its hind legs and weighing as much as five hundred pounds, has a brain scarcely larger than a potato and weighing little more than half a pound: further confounded by its smooth texture lacking most of the folds and wrinkles typical of the mammalian brain. This adaptation gives the big oof a very distinctive flat-headed profile, and extremely inflexible behaviors: its diet of toxic plants, primarily weedwood pseudo-trees, means it just barely gets by on just enough energy to survive, and as it feeds by reaching up to tear branches from trees, if it sees any leaves on the ground it will no longer even recognize it as food: as such the big oof is a very messy eater, as any food it drops from its grasp may as well have ceased to exist in its perspective.

This complete lack of brainpower and utter lethargy makes the big oof a highly-solitary creature, unlike its gregarious close living relatives, the chimpmunks and the hamrambes. In fact, the big oof basically even lacks any capacity to recognize or interact with members of its own species, simply passing them by should two meet by chance, and any semblance of social interaction occurs only during mating, when males are attracted by the scent of a receptive female, easily the only time any thought other than food ever crosses their tiny, simple brains. There is no courtship, no affection, no competition, or even anything resembling pair-bonding: the male simply mounts the female and instinctively completes the act in but a few minutes, while she is almost entirely oblivious to his presence, and once the job is done, he departs with no further interest. The female then gestates a single offspring for as long as a year, due to her nutrient-poor diet, before delivering a well-developed pup that can walk nearly right away. The complete lack of predators in their island means that mother oofs barely even bond with their young, simply passively allowing them to nurse on the thin, watery milk, and once weaned, at around a year and a half due to the low-fat content of the milk, again from the mother’s poor diet, the youngster simply wanders off to forage independently– and the mother scarcely notices the absence and forages as she always has. Instinctively, the youngster learns with no guidance how to pull off branches and shovel them into its mouth: about the only thing a big oof even knows in the first place.

The big oof thus seems like a very terribly designed creature, and indeed it may well be. Slow, lethargic, dim-witted to an extreme, virtually defenseless and, worst of all, completely incapable of adapting to new behaviors, it looks and acts every bit like an utter evolutionary failure inherently doomed to extinction. Yet, despite all, the big oof is, quite unbelievably, a triumph of natural selection. Stranded on an island with no danger, but also little other food except the abundant but highly-non-nutritive weedwood, the ancestors of the big oof were shaped, generation after generation, to become suited to this harsh new environment. An absence of useful calories made a large and energy-hungry brain a liability, and so over time its brain atrophied to such a level as to just remain functional enough for the animal to live. There were no predators on the island, so the oof lost all fight-or-flight responses or protectiveness toward its offspring. There was no benefit to social groups, so it lost its higher capacity to recognize and empathize with its own species. And as there was an abundance of one particular food with weedwood regrowing very fast due to its rhizome system and numerous shoots per plant, energy and resources was better off spent on a digestive system that can efficiently squeeze every last caloric drop from this one food source, at the expense of basically every other bodily function: it didn’t need to be agile, to move fast, or to be flexible or creative in finding its food– all it had to do was reach up, pluck, and stuff in its mouth, reach up, pluck, and stuff in its mouth…rinse and repeat, every single day, for the rest of its 30 to 40-year life.

Perhaps, indeed, the big oof has effectively doomed itself by crippling overspecialization. If faced with new food sources, it would simply ignore them, their survival benefits all but alien to its smooth little brain. If threatened by new predators, it would not understand the danger they pose to itself or its young. If challenged by even the slightest change to its secure environment, the big oof would literally just sit in place until it starved to death. And yet, by thriving on a food source that would be useless to any other creature, by surviving in a place where most other large animals would struggle to find enough nourishment to fuel their bodies, the big oof, nonetheless, is an evolutionary success story. It illustrates as a perfect example of evolution’s lack of foresight, not geared toward making organisms “better”. For perhaps tomorrow, or in a million years, the specialized big oof might be faced with changes it cannot adapt to and go extinct. Yet today, it thrives in the environment it adapted specifically to: hanging on not as a demonstration to the survival of the fittest, or survival of the strongest or the smartest: but the survival of the simply good enough.

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The Early Temperocene: 140 million years post-establishment

Phyte or Flight: Flora of the Early Temperocene

The Temperocene Era has seen the diversification of animal clades that re-emerged after the end-Glaciocene mass extinction, filling ecological niches left vacant by the victims of the catastrophe. But animals are not the only things that evolve– it is easy to forget that plants too, despite their seeming inert nature, are equally struggling in the game of life in a quest to rise to the top: fighting, competing, and migrating just as animals do, albeit on a far slower timescale.

The Temperocene, thus, is lush with new plantlife, the warm and humid clime favorable for the survival of dense temperate forest and tropical jungle, as well as vast grasslands, steppes and scrubland home to millions of species of flora that stabilize the food web from the bottom up.

Most influential, of course are the trees: conifers, once abundant in the Glaciocene, have now receded further south and north, and decidious trees, the stonefruits and citrus, have returned to much of their former range in the Therocene. While most of them have remained generally-unremarkable variants of the basal state, a few odd specialists have taken hold of unusual new niches suiting a warm tropical clime.

Coastal beachpeach(Littoraprunus dispersus) is one of the most successful trees in the Temperocene. Adapted to coastal marshes and resistant to saltwater and submersion, this stonefruit tree stands on stiltlike roots to allow it to breathe, lifting its main trunk well above high tide line. Its buoyant fruits are able to migrate long distances, floating on ocean currents and taking root on isolated islands: and while it originated on the south of Arcuterra at the Glaciocene’s end, this highly-enterprising fruit of the sea has now made home on nearly every coast: even the northern, non-frozen coastline of icy Peninsulaustra.

Another unique tree of this age is the dwarf desertade(Aridocitron succulens), a citrus species thriving in another biome more common in the hot age: arid desert. Where once chilly drylands spread, now the heat has turned up, spelling doom for many cold-desert plants and the animals that eat them. Yet the desertade thrives. Its trunk, short and stocky, contains spongy tissue that store water, while thick waxy leaves prevent dehydration and thorny branches deter herbivores. But while herbivores are a bane to the desertade, it does enlist their help for a crucial point of spreading its seeds. And there is no better way to draw in thirsty travelers than with a refreshing drink: thus, the desertade’s fruit are big, juicy and are less sour than most of the citrus family, a welcome trade for desert animals in the price of transporting its future generations.

Strangely, however, plenty of what appear to be trees are in fact not trees at all. Indeed, even on Earth, the classification of “tree” is a polyphyletic one, with numerous unrelated plants becoming large, rigid towering giants. And here on HP-02017, several plant groups would follow the trend: though functioning quite different from a proper tree.

One such example is the grovegrass(Arbomimogramen spp.), a type of weedwood growing up to eight feet in height. Its kind first grew in such heights following the extinction of their primary consumer, the mison, at the beginning of the Glaciocene. With the tropical Temperocene weather conducive to their growth, grovegrass quickly spread to most continents by its floating dandelion-like seeds, where it now grows as the understory of forests, and at times even dominates large-plant niches solely on isolated islands.

And it is not the only grass to mimic a tree: the notorious saberleaf, in northern region of Gestaltia that was once Borealia, now grows as the twelve-foot sabertree(Arbogladius spp.), largest of a subclade known as sabershrubs and every bit as sharp and abrasive as its ancestor– yet a favored food of the tall ungulopes known as altolopes, which had replaced the now-extinct girats. Another towering grass, the spiny bramboo(Spinaschoenus spp.), also forms prickly forests reaching as high as twenty feet in tropical regions across Gestaltia, where specialized unicones and badgebears feed on their abundant growths.

One major advantage these tree-mimics would have over true trees is that they were, despite their greater size, still grasses: growing from a singular underground rhizome and sending up shoots as they spread. As many as a hundred separate “trees” are thus just a single plant, allowing them to regrow quickly and sprout up new shoots: making them a resilient and abundant food source that can sustain even large quantities of browsing herbivores, all too common in the Temperocene.

Other, unrelated plants too would reach tree-like proportions. Sandfans(Monofoliopluma spp.) are towering cloverferns adapted for desert life, filling a role akin to cacti with their thick sturdy stem and leaves fused into a single giant plume that minimizes water loss in dry climates. Also abundant are cabbage descendants, the brasstics, which grow into huge, herbaceous mock-trees, such as the swamp-dwelling tropical salaspire (Brassicarbor spp.), and the mountain-growing, cold-adapted mountplume(Montanobrassica spp.), which is a vital food spurce for many mountain dwellers such as ungulopes and cragspringers.

Smaller plants, of course, are vastly more abundant: forming low-ground foliage the carpets plains and steppes and serves as plentiful forage for grazers. Ever present are more-typical grasses, such as the prickly thornbriars(Gramenosentis spp.), and the Gestaltian flameweed(Pyrogramen spp.) with its stinging chemical defenses few herbivores can tolerate. These grasses are abundant as ever as they were prior to the Glaciocene freeze, and today are vastly diverse: each species with unique defences that favor niche partitioning among grazers.

Another extremely successful plant are the descendants of clover: initially introduced during planetary establishment as a forage crop, the plant has since flourished and filled many niches of herbaceous plants of virtually nearly every shape and size. Some are similar to the ancestral form, such as goldtip trefoil (Prototrifolium aureum), but others developed bigger leaves with more leaflets, giving rise to the cloverferns like the pinkpom cloverfern (Polyfolium rosae), which often spread across the forest floor. Some cloverferns have adopted unusual traits in the ever-enterprising quest to expand, such as coalclove(Erythrotrifolium trichromus), with distinctive red coloration due to having such quantities of red and black pigment as to almost mask the still-present chlorophyll, partly as a warning to grazers of its distasteful flavor, and partly to harness Beta’s faint rays during Beta-twilight.

Cloverferns, however, have long branched out into many diverse niches in the race for sunlight. Some, such as clovervines(Vitifolium spp.), have taken advantage of nearby woody plants as support to grow taller than any typical herbaceous plant, anchoring itself with grasping tendrils modified from branching stems. Others, such as torchbush(Foliofrutex spp.) become shrub-like bushes with more rigid stems and feeding low-level browsers on scrubland and forest floors. Some cloverferns have even taken to the water, like pondspinners(Aquatrifolium spp.), with large leaves floating on the surface and flowers on stalks that breach the surface during suitable breeding conditions.

The flooded world of the Temperocene, in fact, is highly conducive to aquatic plants, and many have not simply taken to rivers and lakes but to the sea: and are primarily responsible for the sheer diversity of herbivorous aquatic megafauna, a niche rare on Earth but extremely prevalent here. Primarily, grasses dominate the seas, alongside kelp and algae (which technically are not true plants), descended mostly from two varieties: the floating coast kudzu and the rooted undergrass.

Coast kudzu has reached peak diversity, forming blankets of vegetation on the surface that harbor mini-ecosystems of their own. The highly-prolific floatvine(Pelagogramen spp.) grows massive branching rhizomes extremely fast as to cover massive areas of surface water in the span of a few days, kept only in check by the grazing of hamatees such as whaleruses, its sheer abundance being key to support such enormous marine herbivores. Other coast kudzu, however, are far less spreading: the thick raftroot(Mareradix spp.) consists mostly of a single thick nutrient-storing rhizome, allowing it to thrive in colder seas and remain dormant until conditions are right, or the plantform(Pulpitophyton spp.), which forms small but dense mats of stems and roots: dense enough that small, sea-going ratbats occasionally roost on them, and also have been instrumental in allowing terrestrial minifauna, like duskmice, furbils, rattiles and various invertebrates, to raft from continent to continent and reach isolated islands, whenever such animals washed out to sea by accident or intentionally hitched a ride.

The other clade of marine grasses, the bottom-growing undergrass, in the meantime is mimicking the dynamics found on dry land by developing specific defenses to ward off herbivores: but, more often than not, ends up favoring the evolution of specialized herbivores that specifically evolve to breach their defenses. Whiteblot(Albomarinogramen detestus) is one such species, bearing distasteful compounds that it advertises with white markings easily visible in the blue light of the sea, and thornocopia(Spinatomar aquasentis) possesses spiny stems and leaves to deter herbivores from eating it. However, over time, sea grazers gradually develop resistances to such methods of defense, and a familiar trend begins to emerge: niche partirioning, rotational grazing, and specialized herbivores adapted to tackle one defense but not the other– a dynamic nigh-identical to the plains grazers on dry land.

Pressured by herbivore “predation”, competition with neighbors and the constant struggle to beat rival neighbors in the quest for water and sunlight, the merciless brutality of nature quickly surfaces in the plant kingdom. Nature red in tooth and claw is most evident in animals, visibly devouring and hunting one another in exuberant displays of the battle for survival. But plants are no exception. They too are living creatures simply operating at a slower frame of time, seemingly inanimate in an animal’s perspective. But they, too, fight one another, compete with one another– and at times, even actively try to kill one another and the animals that eat them.

One of the more blatantly vicious examples is the mace-bud destrotor(Vehemephyton telumgermen), a grass descended from the now-less common bleedweed. Stalk upon stalk, it rises along the ground as its rhizome steadily creeps sideways beneath the surface. But unlike its now-increasingly-rare relatives, the destrotor does not take kindly to competition. As each new stalk rises, it emerges as a spiral, with a tip covered in pointed hooked barbs, and once grown, the stalk gradually unfurls, spinning its barbed tip in circles like a mace in slow motion. With each spin, lasting about a day, it tears apart, uproots and impales neighboring plants within an eight-inch radius, purposefully killing off any competition for sunlight and soil nutrients and creating ominous, empty circles of barren soil around each new stalk that rises from the soil.

Some plants, in fact, not only eradicate their neighbors, but actively prey upon them. The white witherer (Radixavenator vampyrium) is a cloverfern growing along damp shady places like the forest floor, where, while seemingly innocent and even beautiful with its pale pinkish-white leaves, beneath the ground is up to something far more insidious. Its roots snake out long distances in search of other plants’ roots, and upon detection, latch onto them, pierce their outer layer, and release smaller rootlets to grow inside the host tissues and begin draining them of nutrients. So dedicated is the white witherer to attacking other plants that it has lost nearly all its chlorophyll, instead getting all its energy from stolen sustenance from other, photosynthesizing plants, which turn yellow and droop all around while it flourishes. Ultimately, the white witherer eventually runs out of neighbors to feed on, and as energy dwindles, the mature plant blooms, spreads its seed, and dies, leaving its next generation to continue its silent, botanical massacre.

Not only other plants are the victims of the Temperocene’s ferocious flora: animals too, particularly herbivores, are the main enemy of most plants, which try to defend themselves in many different ways from the eager gnawing teeth of rodent grazers big and small alike. Some sequester bad-tasting chemicals, develop hard outer coats, or produce thorns that make them painful to consume. But due to extreme herbivore pressure in its native range, one member of the weedwood family, the stinging barbriar (Mortiphyton vireum), takes its arsenal to a frightening new level. Coated with long, yellow spines, it secretes from the root of each one a potent cocktail of enzymes that, if injected into any would-be consumer, acts as a potent cytotoxin that causes cell death, internal bleeding, organ failure and even tissue liquefaction in minutes, with the barbed spines easily breaking off and remaining embedded in the target to continue delivering their deadly dose. Larger herbivores are lucky enough to leave with grisly swollen scars at worst, but small grazers, such as small hare-like hamtelopes, can easily acquire a lethal dose in as little as three or four spines, collapsing within minutes in violent spasms as they foam at the mouth and bleed profusely from every orfice as hemotoxic effects rupture their blood vessels– victims of the planet’s first venomous plant.

And while the barbriar simply targets animals in defense, other, more enterprising plants attack small creatures as a source of nutrition, especially in poor soils lacking in nitrogen– they have actively become carnivorous, trapping insects and digesting them to acquire vital and essential compounds otherwise lacking in their environment. A grass known as the shmuckbait(Flosacaptionem spp.) is a key example: native to nitrogen-poor deserts, it spreads its seeds and pollen by wind, and thus has no need for pollinators. Yet still, it produces colorful flowers with sweet-smelling nectar for an entirely different purpose: hungry bugs drawn by the scent and signals home in to feed– only to find themselves on the menu as they get stuck onto the sticky petals that then close over them to begin digestion.

Carnivory in plants, however, sometimes requires a little help, and a more indirect means of predation. The gluefern(Glutinofolium spp.) is a marshland cloverfern that, like the shmuckbait, produces sticky secretions to trap prey: but rather than emitting a sweet fragrance to lure pollinators, it instead emits the pungent smell of rotting meat to draw in scavengers such as carrion flies. But the gluefern cannot digest them on its own, as it lacks the necessary enzymes: instead, it enlists the symbiotic services of a specialized beetle: the gluefern bootbug (Decipulahabitus defecatum). The bootbug, equipped with specialized hairs on its feet and antennae and a waxy coating on its wing cases, is able to scurry about the gluefern without getting stuck: and feeds on the unlucky insects that get trapped in the plant. The plant basically functions as both home and prey trap, much like a spider’s web, and in return, the beetle’s droppings are a source of nitrogen compounds, now pre-digested and packaged for consumption. Thus plays out a peculiar case of mutualism: the plant acts as a home for the beetle that provides it with easy food– and all the beetle needs in turn is to pay its rent with poop.

The Temperocene has proven itself to be a lush haven for animal life to rapidly diversify into complex ecological webs, as unusual adaptations create ever more complicated interspecies relationships. Yet, among a world of increasingly unusual beasts, one must not forget the living things that make all them possible: living things that, despite appearing as mere scenery, are every bit as alive as their faunal counterparts: and every bit subject to evolution in all its beautiful, bizarre, and brutal ways.

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The Early Temperocene: 140 million years post-establishment

Not Quite Flight: Arboreal Gliders of the Temperocene

Since the Middle Rodentocene, the skies of HP-02017 had been filled with ratbats, quadrupedal flyers of distant relation to the squizzels and lemunkies, that had dominated the air for eons. And much more recently, they were joined in the air by the pterodents: airborne podotheres that, akin to the ratbats, would emerge from gliders, before truly taking to the skies on their own power.

That is not to say, however, that gliding was a prerequisite to true flight, as, in the Temperocene, several small lineages convergently had developed this form of half-flight– and stayed there. Evolution, being a random process with no goal except survival, allowed these seemingly-transitional forms to become a niche all their own, and as long as this partial airborne ability allowed them to thrive in their environment there was little need to progress further: unless, by chance, changing ecosystems or unexploited niches goaded them in the right direction.

One such species is the eyespot parachu (Volaticosciurumys oculus), a gliding kiterat descended from the lineage that would give rise to the ratbats: unlike its relatives, however, it would only use this ability to move from tree to tree and not much further. This was an easy way to traverse the forest, where the parachu could easily seek out its favorite food– insects in bark– as well as the sugary tree sap it spills while gnawing for bugs, supplementing its protein-rich diet with carbohydrates. The parachu thus is well suited for its current niche, and thus, unlike its ratbat cousins, has not evolved its patagia into a proper wing. The patagia, while used for gilding, serves another practical purpose: it bears large spot markings resembling false eyes, which it uses in defense: when startled by a predator, it spreads its patagia instantly, creating the illusion of a larger and more deadly creature, halting the predator in shock and giving the parachu time to glide to safety.

While the parachu glides with membranes of furred skin, stretched between its ankles and wrists, another common arboreal glider uses entirely different structures to get airborne: the plumetail wingle(Squamopteromys caudopluma), a rattile of the shingle family, particularly the lineage of arboreal tree shingles. Equipped with scaly plates modified from hair, most shingles use them for armor: using hypertrophied hair erector muscles to raise their plates or clamp them down. This movability, however, allows the wingle to utilize its plates, now thin and papery with a hard central shaft, for a new purpose entirely– spreading them out into a gliding surface, with its tail also adorned with plumes of its own that allow it to change direction. Wingles are omnivores, and use their skill to roam the forest quickly to find a meal: they are not picky eaters, and fruit, fungi, bark, sap, nectar, insects and occasionally smaller rattiles are well on the menu.

However, evolution is ever ongoing, and different species respond differently to changing pressures: forcing them to either become more specialized or remain generalist. With the abundance of ratbats equipped with true flight, the parachu does well staying in such a niche. The wingle, on the other hand, is pressured to migrate further and further by competition from other rattiles diversifying in the Temperocene: and gradually, the modified erector muscles that once just folded and spread their plates developed brief vertical twitches to prolong their glides to access new trees– in ever increasing distances. Soon, in time, the ratbats and pterodents will be joined by new company in the sky ever more crowded and diverse: by something completely unlike anything that had ever flown before.

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The Early Temperocene: 140 million years post-establishment

Shroomor Has It: A Lingering Legacy of a Darker Past

Dawn breaks on the steppes of Early Temperocene Mesoterra, as on the plains, the animals of the grassland begin to stir, to begin their day and their usual, instinctive routines like they alwas had for millennia. Among them, in the shade of a small grove of trees, a pair of loupgaroos– now Mesoterra’s top predator since the extinction of their fiercer relative the ripperoo at the end of the Glaciocene– opportunistically stumble upon the decaying, half-eaten remains of a dead podothere. Loupgaroos were normally active predators, going after live prey they hunted themselves. However, they did not hesitate to take advantage of an easy meal, even if it was far from fresh.

Equipped with strong stomachs and hardy immune systems, the podotheres of Mesoterra have a strong resistance to many diseases, thanks to small-gene mutations that protected them from cellular damage and negative gene expressions. This adaptation, ocurring in their ancestors, the drundles, may indeed be the reason why they kept their most bizarre adaptation yet– a rear-shifted ribcage that functionally granted them additional neck vertebrae– without any problems even as they became more active, with such conditions normally being found only in slower-paced mammals.

But not all is perfectly right with this pair of scavenging loupgaroos, as becomes clear as, momentarily startled by ambient sounds, the female raises her head in surprise, surveying the surroundings for danger– and revealing, on her snout, a set of small, telltale growths that may be alarming to one knowledgeable of the horrors of the past.

But, fortunately, the plague of eons ago has passed. Too virulent and destructive for its own good, much like its very hosts, the contagious cancerous strain, known as NO-SIHTT, had destroyed itself, just as its hosts did themselves, by destroying what it depended on to survive until it had nothing left for itself. These growths on the loupgaroo’s face, however, are a different story. It is a far more benign, and far more bizarre strain, that, through eons, has surprisingly found a niche in the environment and become part of the world around it: the shroomors.

From the original strain that infected the long-gone harmsters, a few would jump to closely-related species through passive infection, and end up taking seed in related species: ones genetically similar enough to the harmster as to allow it to thrive. First to be hit was the harmster’s direct ancestors, the ripperoos, which were similarly wiped out, and next to the more-distantly-related loupgaroos, who bear this condition to the present.

But it would be inaccurate to call the shroomors a “disease”, as, except in extremely rare circumstances, it was not at all harmful to its host: it was a benign commensal no more damaging than a few wart-like growths. It spread through scavenging, as loupgaroos ate dead animals as eagerly as they hunted their own meals, but they were kept at bay by the host’s immune system– something that the shroomor exploited in its new, bizarre life cycle.

Travelling on the host, the shroomor was given easy access to find new seeding ground. But instead of infecting living hosts, it grew on dead ones: once it was stimulated by a suitable environment, one without an immune response, it would then begin to grow quickly: forming fleshy, pink cauliflower-like growths very similar to those that adorned the infected harmsters’ faces during the height of the outbreak millions of years long past, the closest one could come to literal walking corpses.

But this time, it would feed upon a decaying, dead host rather than a live one: the enzyme excretions the cancer cells once released to latch onto blood vessels to fuel its growth, now being used like digestive enzymes to break down dead tissue and absorb its nutrients through its cell membranes, allowing it to divide and grow over a span of several days. The entire mass is made solely of undifferentiated cells, so it rapidly divides quickly as long as it has access to nourishment, but eventually, when conditions turn out poorly, as it runs out of nutrients or the carcass begins to dessicate, the shroomor mass slowly dies off, requiring a warm, moist environment to thrive.

But then came a unique innovation: certain cells, on the outside of the mass, became more resistant and could remain dormant for longer periods until conditions were right. As such, these specialized cells became key to the shroomor’s survival, as the rest of the mass died off: they would remain on the carcass until a suitable scavenger came along and ate from it, the loupgaroo now a vector that allows it to be transferred to new growing grounds to flourish elsewhere.

This unusual life cycle, like everything else on the planet, was a unique product of natural selection: more virulent strains of the transmissible tumor have long since died out, with selective pressures favoring those that could live surprisingly amicably with their hosts. While the plague-like infection of NO-SIHTT allowed it to spread quickly, it was a short-term gamble, and the strains that had moved on to other, related host species, that could last on them longer without becoming lethal, were the strains that persisted. Having latched on to scavenging carnivores, it was inevitable that a few cells from the host’s benign warty growths would be dropped off in the carcass, and the hardiest cells that could survive the longest away from a living host persisted, gradually by chance having some actively grow on the carcasses to be passed on by the next scavenger: and slowly some would develop the ability to become more resilient to conditions while they waited for a new host. The ones that remained too active exhausted themselves and died out, the ones that were too sensitive were killed by the unsuitable environment, and what was left were those that grew quickly when conditions were favorable but could also become resilient single cells with thick outer capsules that could conserve their energy by halting cellular processes. Growing on dead decaying matter and spreading itself by what were essentially spores, acting as a decomposer contributing to the breakdown of dead organic matter, the end product was, for all intents and purposes, a mammalian fungus.

This was the harmsters’ final legacy: the disease that destroyed them, borne and cultivated by their own vile ways that ultimately bit them back hard in a terrible, karmic blow, now flourishing in the wild as an animal that could barely even be considered an animal anymore, despite its genetics that would say otherwise. In a way, a part of the harmsters lives on, in a form thankfully devoid of conscious thought or their murderous nature, managing something, in all its simplicity, that its source could not: the ability to find a stable purpose in the natural order, to thrive sustainably in balance with their surroundings– and to finally coexist with other forms of life without being a blight upon them or the rest of the world.

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The Early Temperocene: 140 million years post-establishment

Ocean In Motion: Marine Life of the Early Temperocene

A global increase in temperatures following the end-Glaciocene mass extinction has opened up new ecosystems in the oceans of HP-02017. Indeed, as the ice caps melted in the Temperocene temperatures the sea levels once again have risen, to an extent that coastal regions have flooded into shallow seas, and now as much as 80 percent of the planet’s surface is covered by water.

It is tempting to think of the ocean as merely one big biome, but the truth is far more complex. Here unusual dynamics in the ecosystem allow a far wider range of ecological niches to overlap and coexist, and a tangled food web with numerous trophic levels exist due to the existence of numerous types of producers at its very base, with algae, marine plants and phytoplankton to name a few, which in turn allows a staggering diversity of life to thrive. Floating mats of seagrass, forests of kelp, shallow reefs, open seas and coastal shelves all harbor different, specialized organisms, just as how jungles, tundras, savannahs and deserts would on dry land.

And there was no better age than the Temperocene to showcase marine biodiversity, as a wide range of separate unrelated clades now make a living in the sea: both creatures native to the seas since the beginning, to secondarily-aquatic species descended from numerous hamster lineages: all converging on the abundance of resources and vacant niches that the sea had to offer.

In the shallows, enormous reefs rise above the sea floor like castles, providing homes for a wide diversity of sea life. But, as with nearly everything on this planet, appearances can be decieving, and not everything is what it may seem.

Some of the reefs are comprised of millions of small, hard-shelled barnacle-like creatures rooted in place and extending long feathery appendages to scoop up drifting particles and plankton, while six-limbed starfish-like creatures crawl slowly across the seafloor, foraging for food and feeding upon the shelled reef-creatures. But despite appearances, both of these invertebrates are actually snails: the sessile filter-feeders are quillnobs, hard-shelled snails that have free-swimming larvae, juveniles that settle to the bottom and slither about like typical snails, and as adults finally fuse themselves to one spot and never move again, using modified extensions of their gills to feed. The “starfish”, on the other hand, are asterisks: shell-less gastropods with six extensions of their foot that, equipped with suckers, can anchor themselves onto surfaces with incredible strength.

Meanwhile, drifting through the currents are transluscent, tentacled cnidarians: mockjellies. They are, true to their name, not jellyfish, but neotenic coral larvae that never matured into sessile reef-building adults, becoming what are technically speaking enormous plankton. Some, such as the smaller, stinging stheno, are predators: possessing stinging cells in their tentacles used in capturing small prey such as swimming crustaceans, while their bigger relative, the euryale, have developed a unique symbiosis with photosynthetic algae: allowing them, once adult, to live almost entirely on sunlight alone: but still possessing stingers that ward off most predators from eating them.

In the absence of fish, Earth’s most abundant marine swimmers, the ecological niche was instead filled by the shrish: descended from krill, these shrimplike swimmers dominate oceanic and freshwater habitats alike, in a staggering thousands of species: not quite as diverse as they used to be in the Rodentocene when they were the sole rulers of the sea, but still ever present wherever aquatic ecosystems were: as the long-bodied centipede-like shreels, the bottom-feeding trilobugs, or the predatory shrarks, which once were the top of the food chain, but with the coming of aquatic hamsters have now been relegated to smaller mesopredator roles, with none growing larger than two feet.

The success of the shrish has even brought about an evolutionary trend that occured so frequently on Earth that it would have been more surprising to not happen here: a crustacean with a reduced, folded abdomen, an armored thorax, a rounded body shape and two pincers for feeding–basically, a crab. Known as the shrabs, these amusingly-familiar shrish are bottom-feeding opportunistic omnivores, eating carrion, small animals, algae, corals and even one another. And most remarkable of all are some shrabs that have left the sea entirely to make a living on an entirely new frontier: dry land. These terrestrial shrish are the first of their kind to leave the sea, and are able to survive near-indefinitely on land, as long as their gills remained moist.

But the shrish are not alone in the seas. In the Glaciocene, another marine clade had rose to prominence: the pescopods, a group of swimming sea slugs that propelled themselves with rhythmic undulations of their fin-like foot. In many niches the pescopods have supplanted the shrish thanks to their rasping radula that allowed them to feed on a wide variety of food. However, shrish and pescopods alike have thrived side-by-side thanks to niche partitioning, and due to their widely-disparate anatomy– shrish being armored and exoskeletal and pescopods being soft and rubbery– the predators that feed on them have also evolved dentition suited for one or the other, allowing again for partitioned niches that permit a great diversity of clades in the sea.

Another successful gastropod is the skwoid: a marine gastropod descended from the shelled, tentacled notilus, which is also still very abundant today. Skwoids, however, have ditched their protective shells for an internal support pen, as they are speedy predators suited to chase down their prey with the help of excellent vision from eyes mounted on retractable stalks. To defend themselves in turn from their own enemies, they spray thick mucous secretions to ensnare an attacker: though some skwoids have innovated on this defense and instead became ambush hunters in reefs: spinning mucous webs like some undersea spider for some unlucky shrish or pescopod to blunder into and find itself trapped.

With such a wide range of available resources, the aquatic hamsters of the sea have equally reached enormous diversity. Niche partitioning came to govern their evolution in unusual ways, producing numerous, disparate and completely unrelated species living side-by-side with minimal competition.

The mass extinction at the end of the Glaciocene, partly the work of changing climes and partly the work of the long-gone harmsters, had freed up many marine megafauna niches, and the Temperocene began with a race to fill it from all sides. With so much food available there was enough for everybody so long as they were adapted to consume it: and so marine megafauna hits its peak in the diverse and productive Temperocene seas.

The old rulers of the sea are still here: the seavers. Now, however, they are a fraction of their former glory, though still quite plentiful. Descended from the last Glaciocene survivor, the derelict seaver, they are now much smaller, as warmer seas and fewer cold-water upwellings were no longer conducive for giant filter feeders. Today, the derelicts have rebounded, feeding on swarms of small shrish and zooplankton, but now they never exceed more than eight meters in length.

Cricetaceansandbayvers as a whole still dominate the seas, but they have plenty of new neighbors. Among them are aquatic blubbats from the continent of Peninsulaustra, who, while heading out to sea to feed, came to colonize small island archipelagos in the open ocean and are now a common sight across the Centralic Ocean. They coexist by specializing on different prey: blubbats, with pointed conical teeth, are well-suited for tackling soft-bodied pescopods, while the seal-like bayvers with sharp slicing incisors and crushing molars are well-adapted for shrish, and the long-snouted roddolphs prefer skwoids, learning through social teaching on how to remove the mucous gland and sharp internal pen to make them safe to eat.

Herbivoroushamatees also cruise the warm shallows, with the largest, the whalerus, specialized to eat a floating seagrass known as coast kudzu, which, fittingly, grows at an absurdly fast rate and can form immense masses that blanket the surface. They are also an extremely abundant source of food for whaleruses that they can sustain sizes exceeding ten meters, and gradually shift away from filter feeding to specialize on this resource: an adaptation that may have been a saving grace of the derelict seaver that earlier had declined from their competition.

The rattiles too have taken to the seas, with the monisaurs: some now fully aquatic and bearing their independent young in the sea. The vast majority of them, with a few herbivorous exceptions, are durophages: equipped with broad, blunt teeth and strong jaws, eat mostly hard-shelled invertebrates, with shrabs, quillnobs and bivalves comprising most of their diet.

The monisaurs now are not the only rattiles in the sea: aquatic shingles, known as sterapins, have made their way in too. Their armor-plated terrestrial ancestors being resistant to irritating chemicals from eating land plants and invertebrates with such defenses, the sterapins were well suited to take on something in the ocean that no other animal eats– the mockjellies. Mostly water and armed with stingers, hardly anything else bothers with them, as they are scarcely worth the effort. But where there is a niche something will evolve to fill it: and the sterapins did, uncontested in their unappetizing diet by any other competition, even if they did have to eat plenty of mockjellies just to gain sufficient nutrition.

Another common species in the seas are rodders: small remnant searets of distant relation to the now-gone leviahams that once roamed the seas. They avoid competition in the hectic ocean environment not by specializing as others have done, but by becoming generalists. Thus they are not limited to one food source as competitors come and go, and these small, semi-aquatic omnivores forage both underwater and on the shore, their flexibility being their key to success to survive where their giant cousins could not.

With so many new competition some of the bayvers and cricetaceans have adopted odd new specializations to ease the pressure of sharing their food sources and territories with crowds of newcomers. The whiskered walmus, a species of hamatee, has returned to a mostly-carnivorous bottom-feeding diet, probing out the bottom substrate for buried invertebrates such as clams, worms and shrabs. Meanwhile, the porpoid, a cricetacean relative of the roddolph, relieves competition with its long-snouted kin by specializing on shelled notiluses, aided by rounded, globe-shaped teeth that can easily crack the shells to get the soft meat inside.

One of the more unusual hunters in the sea, however, comes not from the water, but from the sky. The pterodents, a young but very promising clade, too have made a foray into the blue depths, in the form of the wanderganders: sea-adapted soaring flyers that, in just five million years, have radiated into over a dozen species, comprised of surface-skimmers, plunge-divers, shore-probers and even sky-pirates that harass smaller pterodents and ratbats in order to steal their food.

With such a vast diversity of large prey species it was no surprise that marine predators too would experience a boom of diversity themselves with so many different prey to hunt. These were the phorcas, cricetaceans adapted to tackle large prey, and with the disappearance of their old rivals, the leviahams, at the Glaciocene-Temperocene boundary, they would quickly fill the role of top marine predator left in the leviahams’ wake, now spanning over twenty distinct species: all adapted for taking on different game.

Some, such as the sheartooths, specialized on small, fast prey, like blubbats and small porpoids and blippers, which they pursued in short, quick bursts and dispatched with conical stabbing teeth, primarily hunting quarry that could be consumed in a bite or two. Others, such as the whillers, went after larger prey, coordinating in social groups with the help of distinct dark-and-light contrasting markings for communication, allowing them to fell large whaleruses and seavers. Still others adapted to armored, slow-moving prey like sterapins and monisaurs, like the striped shellbanes, with broad pointed teeth with fewer cusps designed to concentrate their bite force onto small areas and penetrate even thick rattile scales.

With many predators abound and even more prey, death was always around the corner and carcasses were not hard to find: either by natural causes or the leftovers of predatory phorcas. As such, a specialized scavenger, the seayena, would diverge from the shellbanes, adapting to feed upon bones to access the marrow. Broad crushing molars and the strongest bite force of any living animal on the planet allow the seayena to exploit a resource others could not: consuming not only the marrow but the bones themselves, which powerful digestive juices can handle perfectly well to extract the maximum nourishment from their unsavory diet.

Predatory phorcas have become so abundant and numerous in the Temperocene that they now occupy virtually all the ranges in the oceans worldwide, sustained by the vast abundance and diversity of megafaunal prey that flourish in the seas. This has reached such an extent that an entirely new ecological niche would open up in the marine ecosystem: a predator that specializes to prey on phorcas themselves.

Enter the sarchon(Phorciphagus tyrannicus): ten meters in length, it is unquestionably the top rung of the Temperocene marine food web, and in fact is on an entirely new level of its own– a top predator specialized to eat other top predators. Its diet, based on local availability, too includes other, more placid prey such as seavers and whaleruses, and likely began its predation of its fellow phorcas from initially just killing them to dispose of competition, before finding them an equally nutritious and abundant food source in their own right. As such the sarchon has attained truly impressive weaponry: rather than the sharp-cusped molars of more-typical phorcas, it relies on its incisors, ever growing like those of a more typical rodent, as flesh-slicing shears, with its first molars modified into broad cutting edges and its second and third molars gone entirely. Its head is heavily armored with thick, keratinized plates to protect its vulnerable snout from the bites of smaller phorcas, leaving them defenseless while the sarchon deals its lethal blow.

Unchallenged by virtually anything else in the sea, with no natural enemies of its own to fear, the sarchon spends most of its time lethargically floating near the surface to rest and digest, and, contrary to its fearsome feeding strategies, is otherwise a very lazy creature: like all cricetaceans, it only rests part of its brain at a time to breathe at the surface, and can spend as much as twenty hours a day just drifting around in a half-asleep stupor, occasionally floating belly-up at the surface to let sea ratbats pick parasitic louse-like shrish off its skin. Subsisting off such a nourishing diet, and without any danger to concern it, the sarchon hunts only once every few days, sometimes as little as once a week after a large meal, and spends much of its free time in a surprisingly relaxed state: its epic hunts towards other predators, which have come to define it, actually taking up very little time in the long, fascinating and complex life of the Temperocene’s ultimate ocean carnivore.

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