keystone-arc

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Anatomy

General and Subterraphynx anatomy:

Both Subterraphynx and Litholurians, known colloquially as “Cavesphynx” live in primarily subterranean environments on their rocky desert planet. They have large eyes suited for seeing at lower light levels and they struggle to see in the harsh light on the surface.

One of the two species' most striking features is their jagged crystalline horns, which are grown using the minerals ingested from the rocks and crystals that supplement their mostly carnivorous diet. The color is determined by the same gene that controls the pigments in the eyes and the fins behind their eyes, shoulders, and hips. These serve a similar purpose to whiskers in helping a Cavesphynx sense its surroundings. They also have a frill running down their spines, usually splitting into several chunks on the head, mimicking hair. The frills help increase surface area helping to regulate body temperature.

The meat in their diet mainly comes from small reptile-like creatures that burrow near the surface and the smaller amounts of vegetation come from woody shrubs that grow on the surface. These usually have to be processed in some way in order to be digestible.

Litholurian Anatomy:

Litholurians are overall shorter in both height and length and are more adapted to tighter, winding tunnels. Since they live deep underground, they also don’t need the same surface area to release heat as their cousins closer to the surface do, leading to smaller frills. Because of the greater availability of minerals, they tend to have larger and usually more complicated horns. Litholurian claws are adapted to digging through rocks and are too large to retract. They display much wider color variations, though they tend to mostly have a counter-shaded pattern

Litholurians are also slightly more adapted to an amphibious environment because of underground lakes and generally damp caves and are likely to be more affected by the surface environments

The meat in their diet mainly from fish like animals and “zooid salamanders” though those are less common to eat due to being difficult to prepare (I think it would be hard to eat something that is actually many things). The vegetation in their diet consists of aquatic plants and mosses that grow on the damp cave walls

[keystone-arc]

Welcome to Keystone Arc

Keystone arc is a world-building and speculative evolution/biology project focusing on two cave-dwelling sister species, a rouge ai controlling a lunar colony, a galaxy wide organization, lovecraftian rocks, and various individuals caught up in things much larger than them. The actual stories will hopefully be told through various different media, but this blog will be documenting overall world-building as well as sneak peeks into the other connected projects.

I’ve been working on Keystone since around middle school, and it was originally a plan for an over ambitious fantasy game. A few years and several plot heavy dreams later, and it is now an even more over ambitious game plan (now sci-fi) and a massive creative endeavor.

This part of the project was actually started as an assignment for a writing class I took this past semester to create some sort of project that involves research of some sort and would use skills we wished to develop. So, like any time I��m given an opportunity to be creative with my school work, I immediately went and used an existing idea I wanted an excuse to work on. I think these past few months have been the longest I’ve consistently worked on a project nonstop so please enjoy!

I’ll put tags and stuff here eventually