just quickly patched together from the original but eh, you get the idea. basal shingles are quite big filling the armadillo/tortoise niches and wingles have to be small due to their flying style.
‘Two very different paths briefly cross one early morning on the ground of a grassy scrubland, as a wingle momentarily alights on a branch above a small, gopher-like basal molemouse rummaging in the leaf litter for an ideal spot to dig a burrow. For a few seconds, the two acknowledge each other’s presence in a moment of mutual curiosity, before going their own separate ways, the wingle buzzing away on scaly wings in search of flowers laden with nectar, and the molemouse hauling off dried, decayed leaves in its broad-clawed shoveling forepaws to form a soft lining for its den. Neither, in their simple, instinctive minds, would comprehend the strange truth that united them all: that in spite of looks they were more alike than it would seem.’
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‘The Early Rodentocene, 5 million years post-establishment.’
'Conflict ensues in the undergrowth as the planet’s first two apex predators, a squeasel and a huntster, clash fiercely over possession of the carcass of the huntster’s prey, a juvenile plains jerma. In so little a span of time, from a geological perspective at least, the briefly-idyllic landscape had become a battleground for survival. For a time, the huntster reigned supreme, but the squeasels have now rised to challenge its dominion of the grasslands. It is from these two lineages that many of the land predators of the later eras would arise: though, while the descendants of the squeasels would get ahead of their rivals in terms of species diversity, the huntsters’ descendants the zingos would later prove to be quite successful thanks to their adaptability and social intelligence.’
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A remarkable journey across 150 million years from a familiar ancestor to an unrecognizable descendant.
Loved the way the last image of the prologue turned out and thought it would make a nice title card. Hmm…
Which title card looks best?
The original one (the orange sunset)
The current one (the hamster prism)
The new one (the nighttime ship launch)
See Results
(Here you go, sorry for the wait lol)
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Surrounding the Middle Temperocene continent of South Ecatoria, the small, pelagic islands off its coasts have become the hotspots of unusual and remarkable evolutionary forms. Here species arrived either from being cut off from the mainland, rafting on debris in storms, or travelling there upon their own accord: and in isolation they have been morphed by time and natural selection into unique species found nowhere else on the planet.
Reef Ridge Isle, to the continent’s northeast, is as its name implies: a sandy landmass north of the North Bridge Reef with parts of old dead coral exoskeletons that extend above the surface to form a landmass that, in some areas, piled up with white sand–the eroded remains of old coral chewed, processed and excreted by a wide array of coral eaters over countless millions of years– and other sediments, upon which plants have taken root, delivered by the droppings of ratbats and pterodents.
These plants are fed upon by one rather unlikely and unexpected grazer: the insular giant landshrab (Megalocarcinocaris giganteus). Largest of the terrestrial shrish, this slow-moving, primarily-herbivorous species lives entirely on land as an adult, with other members of its genus widespread well across the mainland and the surrounding islands thanks to the manner in which they reproduce. While land-dwellers as adults, they return to water to breed, releasing thousands of planktonic young that drift into the sea far and wide, eventually seeking out islands and shores as they mature and moving onto land once molted into miniature adults. The insular giant landshrab, however, has become a distinct species, as it prefers to spawn in tide pools, where its young are well-protected. They bear smaller clutches, but larger and more-developed young, which, with their secluded upbringing, have become reproductively isolated from the other seafaring species of landshrabs.
The beaches and shores of this island, in the meantime, have become the rookeries of another unique endemic species, the ridgeland gnawrus (Macrootariimys dimorphis), an omnivorous bayver that gathers here in great numbers to rest, breed, and birth their pups. Most distinctively, males can grow up to thrice as large as females, and sport powerful incisors and canine-like first molars: useful for both feeding on a wide array of food like shrish, shrabs, bivalves and even marine plants on occasion, and also for fighting rival males to score breeding rights to harems of receptive females. This aggressive dominance-based hierarchy is the reason behind their marked dimorphism, as the larger males held an advantage when it came to battling for mates and territory, pushing smaller, weaker males to the fringes of the colony where they are both more exposed to predation by phorcas and have lesser reproductive success: factors that heavily skew the sex ratio of the adult gnawrus population toward fewer males and more numerous females.
Smaller species live on the island as well. In the absence of typical “basic rodents” such as furbils and duskmice, a small, flight-inhibited ratbat, the ridge rockbat (Micropteronyctus coralinsulus), fills their niche instead, scurrying about on the ground to feed on seeds, roots, tender shoots and small invertebrates, being a poor and infrequent flier that spends most of its time on the ground seeking cover underneath dense vegetation. A small rattile lives here too: the reef ridge rafter (Insulosauromys coralis), which roams the coasts of the island during dusk and dawn, feeding on insects and other small arthropods. Able to float on water thanks to microscopic hairs on its underside that make it nearly completely waterproof, holdovers from its ancestors that lived in the rainy, flood-prone jungles of South Ecatoria, a lucky few survived being washed out to sea and made it to the island by floating there, either on their own accord or hitching a ride on driftwood or beachpeach fruit, a small percent arriving just in time before they succumbed to dehydration or predation.
But rafting is not the only way for a rattile to settle onto a secluded island where they can evolve in isolation. On the Strait Isle, east of South Ecatoria, some have done so in a perhaps unexpected manner: they flew there.
On the forest floors of the island, the thorny quilldrake (Echinopteromys stridulus) roams the leaf litter, searching for the abundant small invertebrates that it eats. It would otherwise be a typical rattile at first glance, save for four spiny appendages on its back that in males, are rubbed together to produce high-pitched noises: a feature that betrays its ancestry as a flightless wingle that had emerged independently from the nephtiles of Isla de Oof.
Unlike the nephtiles, however, the flightless wingles of Strait Isle have remained small and inconspicuous, and no longer produce a flighted juvenile stage. Their wings, modified hair attached to muscular knobs, have been reduced to small keratinous spikes, as is the case with the ground spurwing (Apterasauromys rotundus), a burrowing herbivore that uses its moveable spikes as defensive structures when the solitary creatures tussle against their own species over territory and food.
The forest floor, in the meantime, is teeming with more unusual creatures: golden miteshrabs (Aurocarcinocaris minimus), tiny land shrabs that time their breeding cycles to the high tides as they, like the giant landshrabs of Reef Ridge, are terrestrial crustaceans that still return to sea to breed. They swarm along the ground by the thousands, even millions, carpeting the forest floors and beaches in a bright yellow mass of moving bodies migrating oceanward. Such conspicuous gatherings draw the attention of many predators, such as quilldrakes as well as seagoing ratbats and shore-living skwoids, but, numbering in such quantities, the proportion consumed by predators scarcely even dents their teeming numbers.
The isle’s most remarkable and intriguing inhabitant, however, is perhaps the muddy fudgeback (Amphibiocheloimys pterapus), a member of a group of marine shingles known as the sterapins. Uniquely among its clade, which are fully-aquatic as they give birth to live young, the fudgeback retains the ability to haul itself ashore and bask in the warm suns’ rays, its dark coloration helping it raise its temperature quicker at such a cool southern latitude. Feeding on mockjellies and sea plants as adults, the young are conversely carnivorous to fuel their rapid growth, and their ability to clamber onto land enables the juveniles to pursue and feast upon the abundance of golden miteshrabs whenever they migrate to the seashore.
North of the mainland is the Peachland Isle: a small landmass once connected to the mainland that broke off at least a few million years ago. As such, most of its species, as recent divergences, still resemble the species of the northern beachpeach forests, yet are still recognizable as their own distinct species.
The entire landmass is basically covered in beachpeach forest, and thus its residents are ones specialized for a mix of the aquatic and arboreal. Present here are the sunkeys, specifically the yellow sunkey (Xanthaquapithecomys insularis), living in social groups that forage in the water for aquatic plants, beachpeach fruit and marine invertebrates, and retreat into the canopy of the overhanging branches to seek safety from occasional transient predators such as bayvers and cricetaceans that sometimes visit the flooded forests. Similarly adapted is the peachland tree rodder (Arbolutromys leptopus), which can climb up the trunks of the beachpeach to rest safely for the evening. They coexist quite amicably with the sunkeys due to them being specialized eaters of quillnobs and other marine gastropods and thus competing very little over food, though during the breeding season when the sunkeys become more territorial the tree rodders are often bullied away by their otherwise usually placid neighbors, and thus wisely learn to keep their distance during this time.
Meanwhile, inching along the branches of the canopy trees is the green beachpeach piedviper (Arbophiosauromys viridans), a burrowurm that much like the sunkeys and tree rodders lives a double life as both tree-climber and semi-aquatic swimmer, equipped with both hooked limbs and tail for clinging onto branches, and a long, flexible body that can undulate smoothly to propel it through the water. Most piedvipers are insectivores, and in this case it plays a similar niche in a very different ecosystem: its diet consists of peachroot mermites (Myrmecocaris spp.). These colonial shrish live among the root systems of the beachpeach trees, and even excavate tunnels in the wood with their claws to build shelters in the roots where their egg-laying queens can reside. The green beachpeach piedviper, while resting amidst the treetops most of the time, descends into the water to feed on the mermites, providing an important service in keeping the mermites under control lest they damage the roots too much and harm, weaken or even kill the host tree.
And furthest east to the mainland is the peculiar Isla Pterodens: an atoll composed of a circular volcanic landmass surrounding a shallow central lagoon. This lagoon is teeming with life where photosynthetic algae grow in abundance and small shrish and pescopods gather in large shoals to seek refuge from deeper-water predators: eventually bringing about one of the most remarkable phenomena of evolution illustrating both its resilience and also its limitations.
Titan prunejaws (Titanopteromys thanotherium), notable for their wrinkled, ridged and brightly-colored lower wattle found on the males as a sexual display, are one of the heaviest of the flying pterodents, and range around the southern coasts of the mainland, primarily feeding on small aquatic prey but also being drawn to beached carrion of dead marine animals, being opportunistic scavengers as well when such a calorie-rich meal presents itself. Due to their weight and laborious takeoff, flight is an energy-intensive effort that remained due to its payoff in allowing the prunejaw to find food and escape danger: which makes it perhaps rather unsurprising that, upon settling onto Isla Pterodens, the prunejaws very quickly abandoned flight in just a few generations when presented with a productive land, with no terrestrial enemies, where they could simply wade through the lagoon and easily forage in the abundance, becoming the insular subspecies known as the inevitable prunejaw (T. thanotherium invictus).
And inevitable indeed they seem, for, prior to their current colonization in the last few hundred thousand years, the atoll of Isla Pterodens had completely sunk beneath the waves during warmer periods of decreased glaciation and elevated sea levels. Their idyllic paradise now an inescapable death trap, the now-flightless prunejaws were unable to escape the demise of their home, and quickly became extinct…at least, for the time being.
In the fluctuating sea levels of the Temperocene, as the polar ice caps expand and recede, the atoll had since submerged, and subsequently, re-emerged, at least several times in relatively recent history, within the span of a couple million years. And each time, as its productive shallow lagoons became ever so suitable, nearly tempting, to the prunejaws, they repeatedly came to settle here, became flightless to conserve energy and resources, and invariably perished when the landmass disappeared into the sea. Evolution, devoid of a goal, had cyclically doomed a small population to repeated extinction in its haste to remove an ability no longer currently useful, without the foresight of it becoming advantageous in a later ecological change. And yet, in seeming display of what could almost be called stubborness, the same species landed upon the same atoll and became the same thing that had lived and died there not too long ago: perhaps again and again for as long that the island’s empty niche, and the species built to fill it, continue to exist across the span of deep time. The inevitable prunejaw is but the latest iteration in a series of evolutionary experiments that serve as examples to highlight the absence of any direction to evolution’s random progression– save for whoever or whatever is just ‘good enough’ to survive in the moment.
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The Middle Therocene: 35 million years post-establishment
Searet Relationships: Marine Fearrets of the Middle Therocene
As the Great Lakes of Nodera opened up to the seas, the aquatic hamsters of the large landlocked water would find a new frontier accessible to them: the oceans. First would come the tailless pondrats, expanding into the seas and becoming even more specialized to water to become the bayvers, a diverse clade including herbivores, omnivores and carnivores in their ranks. But they would find an ocean already contested by a now-dominant clade that reigned unchallenged in the absence of vertebrate competition in marine ecological niches: the shrarks. Growing to immense sizes for an arthropod, with the biggest being the two-meter long megaprawns of open seas, and armed with powerful ‘biting’ pincers, they patrolled the shallow coasts, reefs and open seas as the apex predators of their time. Originally hunting only other shrish species, many of which grew quite big at sizes of a meter or more, the bayvers found themselves quickly added to the menu: and thus, in these early days, remained semiaquatic and pinniped-like to escape onto the shores out of reach of the marine hunters, most restricted to bouncing and wiggling on their bellies on land, and some, the more basal wavewaddlers, retaining the ability to clumsily walk using their fused rear flippers: ties to the land being a constraint that had restricted their diversity for the past few million years.
But another species from the lakes had spread out from the seas in this time, and would eventually turn the tide in the favor of the hamsters. The lake searet, an ambush predator related to the carnohams, that fed on aquatic and terrestrial prey alike, found the Centralic Ocean a very welcome place to expand, and soon spread throughout the inner coasts of Ecatoria, Nodera, Westerna and Easaterra. In the past ten million years these had diversified, diverging into a wide array of species occupying varied niches.
Propelled by enlarged, webbed hind feet and tails adapted for steering, the searets were well-suited for maneuvering and foraging in the water. Their powerful jaws, in particular, made them superbly built for tackling hard-shelled prey: a useful adaptation that prevented them from competing with the other main marine hamster lineage of the time, the bayvers, which fed on smaller shrish, bottom-dwelling crustaceans, and even marine plants.
Brown coastal rodders (Lutromyocricetus vulgaris) are among the most basal of the species, and the most widespread. They have a preference toward hard-shelled prey too tough for bayvers to crack, such as slow-moving armored shrish. The bayvers, faster in the water, were pursuit hunters of shrish that specialized on speed and shoaling to evade predators, while rodders, more suited for maneuveravility, dexterity and stealth than speed, preferred those that were more heavily defended but were slower and easier to catch.
Some species, such as the dappled rockasheller (Duroclastemys circulupunctus), would even rely on beyond just their physical limitations, and augment their diet with the help of primitive tools as well. Using stones or bits of coral as blunt hammers, they break open the shells of bivalves, large snails, and heavily-armored lobster-like shrish as well, in order to access the nutritious meat within. This is primarily an instinctive, rather than learned, behavior: young rockashellers will often carry around small stones and use them to hit hard objects as an act of play, completely oblivious of the reason of this behavior and gradually learn to use this behavior for feeding through experience and imitation of older members of their species.
Marine searets, as a whole, are far more independent of land than bayvers are, and can in fact spend their whole lives at sea: feeding, sleeping, mating, grooming and bearing their young all while floating at the surface of the water, gathering in family groups of a dozen or two for safety. Fiercely protective of their packmates, they, instead of timidly fleeing from danger like bayvers do, instead mob and attack any predatory shrarks that threaten them, and occasionally even successfully killing their assailants: setting the stage for a complete overhaul of the dynamics of the ocean biomes as a whole.
Over time, this defensive mobbing behavior turned into active predation in some of the larger species, with shrarks, and other large shrish, no longer being seen as enemies or competitors, but as prey. The largest searet species of this time, the goliath searet (Titanolutromys goliah) can reach lengths of over eight feet from snout to tail and weigh about two hundred kilograms: making them formidable predators of the open seas, and the first hamsters to fill the niche. Goliath searets are powerful swimmers, so much so that they basically never come to land willingly, and, while big enough to prey upon bayvers, rarely do so unless desperate, as bayvers are too fast and evasive for their liking while they are much slower ambush hunters. Instead, their preferred prey of choice are the giant armored meter-long shrish abundant in the shallows, including filter-feeding, grazing and predatory members of their clade. At their size, they are large enough to tackle shrarks on their own, and now live by themselves or in mated pairs, as well as their offspring which stay with their parents for about two years before becoming fully independent.
Rather than becoming yet an additional danger to pose a significant threat in the water, if anything, the presence of the searets actually was a net benefit to the bayvers, as their rampant hunting of predatory shrarks in the shallows gradually forced the deadly arthropods further out to sea: and reduced the predator densities of the tropical coastal reefs that did prey on the bayvers regularly, to make a relatively safer sea for the marine pondrats to press onward into, and finally diversify. At long last, the monopoly of the seas by the shrish has been challenged by the hamsters: and in the eons to come, the searets’ impact on the ocean ecology will have lasting effects felt even millions of years later as they, and the bayvers, attain remarkable proportions only creatures with internal skeletons could ever hope to achieve.
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More art remasters, this time from SIHTT Hits The Fan: A Cancerous Pestilence Of A One-Celled Menace !
Original:
Remaster:
