#You can’t be a vertebrate and not an animal that’s not how things work

[rotationalsymmetry]

ok I’m definitely not reblogging because I don’t want to shame OP, but I just read a really weird read on vegetarianism and pet ownership.

I’m an ecologist. My opposition to meat eating isn’t about the sanctity of life; most animals eat at least some meat some of the time, some animals exclusively eat meat, animals can eat meat and also have a functioning ecosystem. Actually everything has to be eaten at some point, either via predation or after death via scavenging or decomposition. That’s how we recycle nutrients.

The reason it’s not great for humans to eat meat has to do with trophic levels and carrying capacity . There’s about an order of magnitude more zebras than lions. If humans want to live like lions, our carrying capacity (how many of us can exist without breaking everything) is lower than if we live mostly like zebras. This is complicated by exactly what biome you’re living in (if you live in the arctic, living like a zebra is not an option) and it’s also complicated by the way all industrial agriculture is unsustainable. There is a sense in which all industrial ag is just terrible and we shouldn’t be doing it, at all. But just like you can’t live like a zebra in Alaska, in practice most people can’t opt out of industrial agriculture. But industrial animal agriculture is about an order of magnitude (ten times) more unsustainable than skipping the animals and feeding people plants, so when people can eat plant foods or mostly plant foods — and especially when people can avoid beef/cow meat specifically — it’s … harm reduction. It buys us a little more time.

My impression is indigenous cultures that aren’t in places where eating plants isn’t viable handle this by 1. mostly eating plants, or maybe some combo of plants and seafood, and 2. having a bunch of rules around hunting and harvesting that include the idea of asking permission to take life. I have no idea what that looks like in practice, but I’m sure it makes sense to people who were raised that way. Point is, while vegetarianism is a cultural anomaly, that doesn’t mean that cultures that do eat meat think everything is fine with every way of killing animals for meat.

As a side note the reason I can coexist without conflict with meat eaters is I have a very strong ethic around the idea that each person is in charge of their own life and moral choices, and I’m kind of straddling the middle of an older worldview of “some things that are good to do are mandatory for everyone, and some things that are good to do are sort of above and beyond, and most people aren’t going to do them and that’s ok,” with vegetarianism being one of the above and beyond things, and a newer stoicism-based “whatever anyone else does is none of my damn business anyways.” That’s got nothing to do with seeing animal lives as less valuable than human lives — I think humans should be eaten too, by worms or bacteria or fungi after we’re dead, so that nutrients stay in the ecosystem — and everything to do with “I’ve got enough to handle with my own life and my own moral responsibilities, I don’t need to be running other people’s too.”

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Me trying to reason with myself: not every obscure question you have will have an easy to access answer

Me, snapping back at my reasonable take: how hard can it be to find something on how vertebrae jaws work for carnivores, which traits are favored, especially terrestrial ones! All I can find are papers on different families. One on mammals, some vague ones on dinosaurs, and when I look up reptiles all I get are comparisons! It’s all “the difference between reptiles and mammals” and “synapsid vs diapsid” all interesting topics but I’m trying to design a terrestrial carnivorous alien with a vaguely vertebrae style skeleton here! Sure, I’m making them a shape shifter, I’m not going for total realism, but I’m hung up on jaw anatomy! I don’t want to do the whole “make the face flat, bam! Alien” thing, no shade to people who do, but I’m trying to figure out if there is a reason most of their (the real animals) jaws are long-ish and if the mammal style dip between the brain part and the mouth and nose part that you see in Carnivora for example is just a mammal thing or is it advantageous in general?! I know all vertebrates evolved from a common ancestor, even more recently terrestrial ones, but I don’t care! I’m already borrowing enough, I just can’t design a skull! And dentition! I’ve made a few designs but I wasn’t happy with how they fit the rest of the character. And of course I had to make even more species of aliens! Tearing at my hair like an ace attorney witness.

The chill me again: who tf would have an article video or post on that specific thing and how would you phrase it? Nothing you’ve tried yet has gotten anything. Just accept that you might have to ask a subreddit yourself and see what happens. Dig through sci show first though

Frazzled me: but… what if they don’t have anything? I wanted a video or article. :( and what subreddit would I even ask? World building? Would they know what I mean? Is anyone else as autistic about skeletons AND making ocs?

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

I’ve had a sucky week. I know you might not see this for a while but can I please have some weird animal facts when you get a chance to answer? :]

I’m sorry your week sucked, have some TURTLES.

Behold: one of nature’s best examples of min-maxing.

Armor plating isn't uncommon in vertebrates. Pangolins, ankylosaurus, armadillos, and placoderms all share similar stat allocation to name a few.

Some, like pangolins, just throw all the keratin they can into their skin and end up with tough scales. That's the same stuff fingernails and hair are made of, and also the stuff that makes our skin waterproof. Others, like ankylosaurs, also grow little bits of bone into their skin. A bunch do both. These are common, efficient, easy-to-evolve traits that occur multiple times in history.

Turtles said fuck all that.

I'm doing it my way.

(Well not ALL that, they do still have keratinized scaly skin on their limbs, but still)

They took their rib cage, sternum and spinal column- you know, things that normally go inside your body, and put 'em on the outside instead. Shoulder blades and hip bones grow inside the rib cage, too. Then, as if that wasn't enough, they covered the whole deal in keratin scales. Some turtles even have a hinge on their belly (plastron) that lets them close up completely. I promise, there's a turtle in there.

What could go wrong reverse-engineering an exoskeleton onto a vertebrate?

Turns out, a lot.

Take a nice deep breath in, and exhale it out. Can you feel your ribs move? Feel them expand and contract, working with your diaphragm muscles to pull large quantities of air into your body?

Show-off.

Yeah, when all your ribs are fused into one big dome it turns out you lose a lot of lung function. The good news? With your body fully enclosed and stabilized in bone, it's not like your abs and obliques are doing anything now. Might as well put them to work pumping your lungs. Except, not directly. Some muscles pull on the liver, which attaches to the right lung. Other muscles pull on the stomach, which pulls on the left lung. It’s pretty inefficient all around, so you may not get enough oxygen exchange to be a marathon runner, but as long as you don't have to worry about predators you know what they say about slow and steady.

However that's not always enough. What if, say, you did have to worry about predators a little. What if, hypothetically, you took a few points away from pure defense and gained a little more swim speed and mobility? You, like many semi-aquatic turtles, would need a backup source of oxygen. A breathing plan B.

In turtles, plan “B” stands for Butt. Some turtles (lots of freshwater semi-aquatic ones) can pump water in and out of their cloaca, which is sometimes enlarged and lined with specialized membranes that maximize surface area for gas exchange. Basically, improving any part of this fucked-up breathing apparatus is so difficult that it’s evolutionarily better to evolve proto-gills in the ass.

I was going to make a different joke here but these turtles are literally called “Northern Red-Bellied Cooters” and I really can’t top that

Turtles are cold-blooded, which of course means they don’t do shit in the winter. Turtles who are unfortunate enough to live in places that get winters bury themselves in the mud in a type of hibernation called ‘brumation’. You may wonder, how do they breathe THEN?

Easy, they don’t. They slow down their metabolism a crazy amount and spend the winter months doing anaerobic respiration. We can do this too, it’s why your muscles burn after working out. If your body doesn’t get oxygen, your cells can still burn fuel much less efficiently and produce a lot of lactic acid as a byproduct. Turtles can counteract the extreme acidity, buffering it and sequestering it with the bone in their shell. Literally, they leach calcium and magnesium out of their bones to prevent their acidic blood from killing them over the winter.

Just waking up from the winter, chock-full of acid and ready to snap.

The most infuriating thing, personally, is that all of this bullshit min-maxing works. Turtles are the longest-lived land vertebrates. The oldest recorded one lived to 187. There’s a little box turtle at my workplace that’s almost 90. This isn’t a glass cannon like a horse is, this janky tank build WORKS.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

MESOZOIC MONTHLY: Volaticotherium

by Lindsay Kastroll

Once again, spring has sprung. Prepare to see the gorgeous forests of Pennsylvania launch back into action. I, for one, can’t wait to get outside and explore as the weather continues to improve. I was recently reminded of the fact that Pennsylvania is home to two species of flying squirrels, and I am definitely adding them to my list of things to see. But of course, this is Mesozoic Monthly, so flying squirrels can’t be the stars of this article. Instead, the superficially flying squirrel-like “ancient gliding beast” Volaticotherium antiquum is stealing the spotlight!

Although Volaticotherium was about the size of a modern flying squirrel at 5–6 inches (13–15 cm) long, it belonged to a group of early mammals called eutriconodonts that includes some of the largest mammals that lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs. “Eutriconodont” means “true three-coned tooth,” in reference to the three longitudinally aligned cusps on their molars. Although not all mammals today have three-cusped molars, the ancestors of modern mammals did. Does this mean that modern mammals evolved from a eutriconodont? The answer is no, though they did evolve from a mammal with eutriconodont-like teeth.

We can split modern mammals into two main groups: the monotremes, which are egg-laying mammals like the platypus, and the therians, which include both marsupial and placental mammals (like kangaroos or humans, respectively). The ancestors of monotremes diverged (meaning, formed their own ‘branch’ of the evolutionary tree) before eutriconodonts and therians evolved. Eutriconodonts and therians share a different, more recent, and as-yet unknown common ancestor. Monotremes, therians, and eutriconodonts actually lived alongside one another for over one hundred million years before eutriconodonts became extinct near the end of the Cretaceous Period (the third and final division in the Mesozoic Era, or ‘Age of Dinosaurs’).

This flowchart represents a simplified phylogeny (aka, evolutionary tree) of the relationships discussed in the previous paragraph. A lot of ‘branches’ and intermediate steps are missing from this phylogeny to make it easier to follow.

The canines and molars of eutriconodonts were pointy, suggesting that these mammals were carnivores or insectivores. Volaticotherium is no exception, which makes it particularly unique, as most other gliding mammals are herbivores! Because it was so small, Volaticotherium was probably an insectivore, but a larger cousin, Jugulator, could probably eat small vertebrates. As an arboreal glider, Volaticotherium could soar from tree to tree to catch insects in midair. Instead of wings, it had a patagium, a broad flap of skin that stretched between the fore- and hind limbs, creating enough surface area to achieve gliding descents. The various limb adaptations necessary to make Volaticotherium an efficient glider also made it poor at maneuvering on the ground. It can be hard to understand why an animal would evolve features that would hinder its terrestrial movement, and multiple hypotheses have been put forth to try to explain this. Most of these focus on the benefits of leaping out of trees to escape predators or to quickly traverse territory between arboreal food sources, scenarios based on herbivorous mammals. Because Volaticotherium was a gliding predator, perhaps gliding conferred other advantages to this eutriconodont.

Restoration of Volaticotherium in mid-glide by Jose Antonio Peñas, used with permission. Take note of those sharp canine teeth, useful for catching tasty insects! You can find more of Peñas’ art on their DeviantArt, ArtStation, or YouTube.

The fossilized remains of Volaticotherium were found in a layer of rock called the Daohugou Bed in China. This deposit consists of lakebed sediment and volcanic ash compacted into solid rock over millions of years as more heavy sediment was deposited on top of it. There is a debate about how old the Daohugou Bed is, but most estimates place it near the middle or end of the Jurassic Period (the middle period of the Mesozoic). Getting the timing right is important. Because Volaticotherium is among the oldest known gliding mammals, its discovery pushes the origin of mammalian gliding back as much as 70 million years earlier than previously thought!

A variety of factors have led geologists to struggle in determining the age of the Daohugou Bed. In an ideal geologic record, rock layers would be perfectly horizontal, creating a continuous stack with the oldest layers on the bottom and the newest layers on top. However, this is rarely the case. Sediment may be eroded before new layers are deposited, creating a gap of time without record in that sequence of rocks. This phenomenon, where two rock layers do not represent a continuous progression of time and have a gap of data missing between them, is called an unconformity. Other issues with dating rock layers involve the squeezing, stretching, folding, melting, and chemical alteration of rock layers when they’re subjected to geologic processes. These forces can result in old rock layers being placed on top of younger ones, making it hard to determine the actual sequential order of the rocks. Changes can also occur within the minerals that compose the rocks, making radiometric dating much more difficult.

The Daohugou Bed has an unconformity above and below it, and it has been folded, which makes attributing an exact age to it that much harder. When you go out hiking in the beautiful spring weather on the horizon, take a moment to look at the rock outcrops you pass and think about what those layers might have experienced on their journey to where they are today. And if you continue your hike after sunset, be sure to keep your eyes peeled. If you’re lucky, you might just catch a glimpse of a flying squirrel gliding through the forest!

Lindsay Kastroll is a volunteer and paleontology student working in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[fanfalc-616]

The Rights Of A Nindroid

This is chapter Two

(Chapter one can be found here.)

Enjoy! (:<

Kai paces around the kitchen, checking the clock again. “Zane said shortly after our normal breakfast time, which is at eight. It’s ten! Why is he not here yet?!”

He knows it’s unlikely that something is wrong, but he can’t help but worry. This isn’t something that normally happens with Zane…

“I’m sure he’s fine.” Nya assures, confirming his logical side. “Something probably came up. He’ll be back soon.”

“He’s never late!” Jay argues from his spot on the table, sitting on the ledge rather than in a chair- and action that Zane would scold him for, if he was home.

“If something came up, he would’ve told us.” Cole agrees as he sits down, staring at his watch. “We haven’t heard a thing.”

Lloyd chews on his lip, kicking out his legs from where he sits on the counter to occasionally mess with Kai’s pacing- something that he would normally be annoyed with, but is too concerned at the moment to actually complain. “Can we track him?”

Jay blinks a few times. “That’s… actually a good idea.” He admits, tapping at his BorgWatch. Then his eyes widen. “His signature’s gone.” He breathes out. “Why is his signature gone?!”

Kai feels himself snap to attention. “It’s gone? What could do that?” He demands, rushing over to his ginger boyfriend.

Nya taps at her own watch. “A lot of things- and none of them good.” She admits, glancing over at Lloyd.

Cole stands up from his seat. “Okay, so we know that something is wrong. We need to find Zane. How can we do that?”

Lloyd also gets up. “Jay, Nya- see if you can find any cameras that show what happened to him.” He instructs, then turns to Kai and Cole. “The three of us will go out and see if we can find any clues.” He decides.

Kai nods, practically vibrating with his worry. They need to find Zane, and they need to find him now.

With his signature missing, who knows where he is…

{ { { { { { { { { { ~ } } } } } } } } } }

Zane is instantly alert as footsteps come closer, and he tenses, preparing to make an escape. He may only get one chance, so he must use it wisely.

When the door opens, he surges forward, using his cuffed hands as a form of bludgeoning weapon.

Much to his dismay, the guards seem to have been expecting that, and no one is there- they had opened the door while standing to the side, leaving the direct forward empty. This results in him stumbling, as there is no force opposing his attack.

This stumble allows the guards to catch him once again, rendering him once again helpless to the whims of his captors.

Despite the way he struggles, they still manage to bring him into a new section of the facility, and-

Zane feels his eyes widen as he comes to a realization of what this room is likely meant for, given the things inside.

A workshop. This in itself would not normally be a cause for alarm, but given the specific tools and the way the work table has restraints…

He picks up his struggling once again, this time finding it within himself to speak.

“Stop! Let- let go of me!” He demands, unable to hide the quiver in his voice. The tools themselves are not inherently threatening; Jay has used many of them in his repairs. However, these circumstances are vastly different from the way his boyfriend would fix him after a mission.

“Stop, I said! Release me!” His pleas fall on deaf ears, it seems, because he is still taken to the table, his handcuffs hooked on a piece of metal and clamped in place, forcing his arms above his head. He attempts to kick the guards, but his legs are restrained just as quickly, leaving him helpless to whatever fate awaits him.

Without any words, the guards leave the room, save for two, one at each of the doorways that could have served as escapes if not for the way he had been bound to the table.

A new man comes up to him, dressed differently from the officials or guards, instead wearing an outfit more suited to a mechanic.

The man comes up to Zane, pulling apart the top of his gi to get to his chest plate.

“Wait!” Zane shouts, struggling in his bonds. “You can’t-“ He fumbles for words, too panicked to figure them out. “Please, stop!”

The man doesn’t listen, instead choosing to open up Zane’s chest plate the rest of the way. Unfortunately, it seems that they had thought this through- he’s almost completely immobilized.

“This isn’t- stop it! Let go of me!” Zane demands, despite knowing that if they’ve come this far, there is only an infinitesimally small chance that they would genuinely listen.

“Please!”

In a surprising but very relieving turn of events, the man does pause in his work, turning and calling out to one of the nearby guards.

“Should I mute its vocals?” He asks.

Zane closes his mouth fast enough that there’s an audible click. Mute him? They- no, they couldn’t do that! He- no, they… they can’t…

He’s not an it, either. He is capable of conscious thought, the same way a human would be. Where did they get the idea that he’s lesser? Despite being mechanical, he’s always been on par with the intelligence of humankind. Why would they think otherwise? There isn’t any evidence to support the idea that-

A wire being tugged on draws him from his thoughts, warnings popping up in his vision to emphasize the issue- though it’s not as though he didn’t notice himself.

“Stop it!” Zane snaps, straining against the bonds that hold him once again. They may attempt to harm him all they wish, but he will not allow this to happen so easily.

His words are ignored. “Give me that scanner, yeah?” The man calls towards the other doorway; the one that Zane had not entered through. “I’m gonna need it; its system’s more complex than we thought.”

A loud sigh comes from a young woman as she steps into the workshop. “I’m going to need it back.” She warns, handing the brunet the device.

The man turns back to Zane. “Yeah, I’ll give it back after this shift.” He confirms.

With a nod, the woman heads back into the side room.

The man returns to examining his wiring in such a way that makes Zane feel almost as though he’s some form of lab rat; a lesser being used for experimenting on.

It is not a pleasant feeling.

No matter how he strains and attempts to resist, no progress is gained, and he remains quite firmly trapped.

Eventually the man seems to grow tired of him, and roughly clangs a tool against one of his sensors, tearing a cry from him.

“Behave, nindroid.” He snarls. “I don’t have time for your delusions.”

“I am beginning to grow tired of this assumption that I am lesser.” Zane snaps. “I am just as sentient as any human, and I expect to be treated as such!”

A wrench is used to hit him across the face, hard enough that his head is roughly forced to the side, slamming into the side of the table.

Zane clenches his teeth and turns back to the man, preparing to unleash a rant- but something peculiar happens.

The man turns to a guard. “Yeah, this one will need training too.” He sighs. “Was kinda hoping it’d behave.”

“Training?” Zane questions. “What is that supposed to mean?” An edge of unease has crept into him. Something is telling him that the ‘training’ he’s referring to will not be pleasant.

No matter what he does, he’s ignored for the rest of the time- his words and attempts at resisting aren’t even acknowledged.

That is quite odd, but Zane would not put it past them to be finding enjoyment in his suffering- he’s found that some humans have the disturbing habits of putting salt on snails and squashing bugs solely because they have power over what is considered a lesser being.

They have blatantly stated that they view him as worth less than humankind- that point was quite firmly driven home by the use of the pronoun ‘it’ to refer to him. Due to the circumstances, it seems that all he can do is hope that they treat him with at least the dignity given to most kinds of laboratory animals- there are laws in place that allow the majority of non-human living beings that are tested to be treated humanely.

Yet even that seems unlikely. Such laws only apply to vertebrate animals, and while not explicitly stated in the legal documents, it is quite heavily implied that this only applies to organic life forms.

This is… less than ideal. Even so, he will do his best to power through until the others come for him- he had informed them that he would only be slightly late. It will not take long for them to realize that something is wrong.

They will come for him. He will just have to be patient… and pray that his captors do not plan to disassemble him fully in the meantime.

[dogtoling]

I’ve been thinking recently.

Before I say this, know that I absolutely love your head cannons and the thought you put into every one of them.

But in regards to the mechanics of things like how ink weaponry seems to literally melt into the ink and how the ink itself seems to have a depth that affects Cephaling technology but little else, it occurred to me that some Cephaling equipment may just be more advanced than anything humans are used to.

For example, staple Octarian equipment includes invisible platforms, floating platforms, and invisible floating platforms. Because of this, could it be possible to take this into account for future headcannons?

Forgive the lack of grace with this ask, my head feels a little hazy.

Thanks for the ask and the thoughts! This is actually interesting stuff and something I have thought of before. There are reasons for specifically why I exclude them from my headcanons, though, and I will go into them here.

I try to go with the general approach of “a type of technology only exists if we clearly see it in game”, and even then, take it with a grain of salt. As this is a GAME world we are dealing with, a lot of things are implemented for game mechanics and simplicity. If it’s seen in use outside of gameplay purposes or makes up the majority of an environment, I say it’s probably a safe bet that it’s just futuristic technology (for example the aforementioned anti-gravity technology and some kind of invisibility)! So I’m specifically going to talk about hammerspace here because it is without question the hottest topic when it comes to sci-fi in Splatoon.

It’s an interesting thought that the Splatoon world would have technology that makes objects soluble into ink. It is shown a LOT, but obviously I have a lot of problems with it. One theory I see thrown around a lot is that all gear and weapons are made of hardened ink (which is a plastic-like material that’s mentioned at least once in concept art) or just ink as a whole. This doesn’t work for multiple reasons,

A. Many of the weapons DO have plastic-y parts that could be ink, but they also have metals, cogs, rubber, stickers and whatnot, all things that would not melt into ink if we were talking about a hypothetical scenario where ink melts inside ink... for some reason

B. If there indeed was a way to make all materials soluble into ink, it still means they would not only melt within milliseconds, but also pull out and reform into exactly what they were before within some other milliseconds. This is like melting an ice sculpture (or since we’re doing regardless of material, a WHOLE LAPTOP OR SOMETHING) into a lake and expecting it to reform itself when pulled out... and you can’t even pull it out because it’s just water molecules now within the other 150 million water molecules that were in that square meter of water before that (i dont know how many water molecules fit into a square meter but it is probably a lot)

C. Since the object literally turning into liquid ink is out of the question at this point, this leaves ink as a hammerspace entity. As we see in the game, things just dip under the surface of the ink. This is a cool gameplay mechanic but in practice it means that this random liquid of a random animal has physics-breaking abilities.

Hammerspace as a whole is one of those plot crutch things where it’s implemented to make things play out smoother, for example Turf Wars in video game form would likely be a NIGHTMARE if your weapons and gear did not conveniently slide out of existence when you need them to do so. You can also pretty easily tell when it’s implemented for gameplay reasons and not because the world is MEANT to have it.

Aside from the INK being hammerspace which just makes no sense whatsoever but IS definitely cool, I would be down for hammerspace to generally exist. HOWEVER, The sole reason the Splatoon world is not meant to have hammerspace technology (and this could literally change any time who knows what lore curveballs they throw) is because it Does Not Have Any. And when I say that, I mean specifically OUTSIDE of when it’s a necessary tool for gameplay, for example:

We see hammerspace technology in the game when it’s needed and used for flavor, convenience or game mechanic purposes. Gear and weapons disappearing into ink, Sting Ray from a lunch ration bag that couldn’t even fit a sandwich in it, 15 Cohocks popping out of one cooler box during Mothership (and we have to note these are probably 1,500lbs+ vertebrates with bones and muscles, NOT entities like Inklings that can squeeze into a jar or possibly even be made of liquid considering how closely you follow the game), THE ENTIRETY OF MAWS, secret boxes through the single player, Octobosses.... list goes on.

This might look bad because I’ve just laid down like 5+ examples of hammerspace indeed BEING in the game while trying to explain how it’s not. Looking back at all of these, they all specifically exist to enable something that the game does. Because it is convenient in a Game. You wouldn’t realistically have a Sting Ray in a Salmon Run because nobody is dragging a pressure washer into a fish mob where you’ll get your limbs ripped off, it’s there to add strategy and fun into the GAMEPLAY.

Now, how does this in any way imply that the world itself has no hammerspace tech? Well this is when we look past the gameplay and look at the WORLD itself.

Technology is usually developed to either make something pre-existing more effective or convenient. What does hammerspace make more convenient? It makes things fit into a smaller space, obviously. It would be an absolute turning point for logistics and cargo business everywhere. You basically wouldn’t need cargo ships, containers, delivery trucks. Or maybe you still would if you were to transport x200000% items as opposed to what they would fit in them before, so small scale is where this comparison makes more sense:

If hammerspace existed, we would KNOW. Space-warping technology would turn the entire society on its head. Inklings’ society is very human-like, meaning their technology has to be much like ours. Having hammerspace only in a sport and NOT in something like logistics and literally everywhere else, with the implication that it’s mainstream enough to be used in a kids’ sport and a crappy part-time job company, just does not work. That’s like if we invented the wheel and ONLY used it in like, uni-cycle races for people in their 30′s meanwhile Larry from downtown is still dragging home lumber on a plastic bag through the snow because no one puts wheels on things that they would be useful on.

Hammerspace is BIG technology and basically, if it existed, it would be the new mainstream. You can buy your house in a can and just unleash it onto some random plain if you want to. Buy your car inside a bottle and just uncork it when you want it. Nobody needs a backpack to school, just put your books inside a locket. Want a new couch? Put it in a bag. Bought a bunk bed? Put it in your pocket. Want to move the entirety of the Ruins of Ark Polaris into a nicer spot so it can be a tourist attraction? You can take it!

TL;DR Hammerspace is WAY too powerful and to make it “make sense” there have to be tons of unspoken rules about what it can or can’t engulf, how, or how long for. Also the point of this post was that while the Splatoon era and especially Octarians definitely have more advanced technology, hammerspace is not one of them. We would know.

[i-am-a-meat-popcicle]

I have, for some ungodly reason, decided it would be a good idea to figure out the possible taxonomy (has to do with the naming/grouping of living things) of Pandoran creatures.

Because, ya' know, I'm a sane person.

This is my invitation to you, to watch me lose my fucking mind.

Quick list of the main taxonomy ranks:

{Think: Genus<Species as "Species is contained in the Genus" if that helps}

Life<Domain<Kingdom<Phylum<Class<Order<Family<Genus<Species

We'll probably avoid getting into the orders, families, genus and species as I want to avoid making stuff up. At least for the time being.

The simple stuff: [We're focusing on Indigenous creatures by the way, which excludes threshers]

All (or most) mentioned creatures are in the domain or Eukaryote (organisms whoes cells have a nucleus enclosed in a nuclear membrane/nuclear envelope).

Kingdom Animalia: skags, stalkers, bullymongs, wings, rakks, rakkhives, Boroks, spiderants, varkids, scythids, crab worms, scaylions, sand worms, and drifters.

Phylum Vertebrata: Skags, Stalkers, Bullymongs, Wings, Rakks, Rakkhives, and Boroks (There's also a fish that I'd like to include in that list but for the life of me I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT IT'S CALLED so I won't be listing it and that makes me very sad.)

Class Mammalia: Skags, Bullymongs**, Rakkhives, and Boroks*

Class Aves (birds): Wings

Class Reptilian: Stalkers

I have no idea where the fuck to put rakks.

*I have some uncertainties about Boroks, but I'm more confident that they're mammals than anything else.

**There's this thing about mammals being under the superclass tetrapoda (meaning they have four limbs), which Bullymongs are not. They have six limbs which would make them part of the superclass Hexapoda, except this usually is reserved for arthropods - non vertebrates. This is why I've elected not to worry about superclasses as I already have a small understanding on how taxonomy works, and this just makes it all the more complicated. (And PLEASE DEAR GOD SOMEONE GIVE ME A NICE CHART WITH EVERYTHING LISTED I KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE HUGE BUT STILL)

The simple stuff ends here

Phylum Arthropoda: Spiderants, Scaylions, Drifters, and Varkids

Class insecta:

Varkids are solidly in the class insecta as they are hexapods, have an exoskeleton, have a three part body, and have wings.

I think Scaylions might also fall under this as they too are hexapods, and while they look a lot like scorpions, they share more traits with insects than arachnids. [as they do not have wings they'd be classified as entogntha.]

Class Arachnida:

Spiderants are fucking weird since they're not hexapods or look like traditional spiders. But since they share a lot of traits with arachnids I'm opting to have them be classified as such.

Drifters have the same issue as spiderants, but I also consider them arachnids as well.

Phylum Annelida (basically worms): Sandworms and Crabworms

Sandworms: My main hangup with these is that they look nothing like an actual worm. They look more like fucked up snakes which makes me think that they could be reptiles that are simply called worms by the people that colonized Pandora. If they ARE snakes, then that'd put them with the vertabrates. Which if I think about it, the leviathan looks more like a messed up sea turtle, which would definitely make it a reptile.

Crabworms: It's a big ol' wiggly armored bug that wants to kill me, that's all I know. From what I can tell it could share a lot of traits with other arthropods, but at this point I really have no idea.

All this being said I'm really stretching the definitions here.

Special cases:

Sycthids:

I think that all the sycthids are resulted from convergent evolution, kinda like crabs. Personally I'm stuck between them being like trilobites (old ass ancient water bug found in fossils), isopods (think like roly polies), in the subphylum myriapoda (which contains milipides, centipedes, and the like), or being gastropods (which places then under the super class of mollusca and haves them to be like snails and slugs)

That being said not even the cannon will know because supposedly they have similar dna to horses and were probably experimented on by the Eridians. Yay.

Spores:

It's likely the Kingdom is Fungi, but I'm not 100% sure. I'll have to play tftbl again to see if there's an echo eye entry to narrow something down, and play the comander lillith dlc if they mention something. They're definitely not animals.

Rakks:

I was tempted to have them under the order of reptiles, but the thing with reptiles is that they have a cold blooded metabolism. In borderlands 2 you see them flying around the frozen wastes in extremely cold weather, so it's likely that they're warm blooded like birds and mammals. What keeps me from identifiying them as mammals or birds is the fact that they share very very few other traits with them.

Crystalisks:

I don't list them in the animal kingdom, or even in the Eukaryotic domain because I literally have no idea how it's biology might work.

One theory I've heard of is that it's similar to the Guardians in that they were probably created by the Eridians to guard some of their technology. This would probably place them in an extremely different domain, definitely one that doesn't exist, since I have no idea how their cells (IF they have them) are characterized.

But yeah, I don't know what to do with this one.

This is totally a worthwhile thing for me to think about.

[f-nodragonart]

Vertebrate Wings, PART 3: Flight

Return to main post + TOC >>HERE<<

Flight TOC

  Basic Flight Theory

  Bird vs. Bat vs. Pterosaur

  Aspect Ratio and Wing Loading

  Special Cases: Hoverers

Basic Flight Theory

I will openly admit here and now, I’m not well-versed in physics. I apologize if this section is a bit disorganized, since I’ll be stitching together others’ more comprehensible flight descriptions/explanations.

This first bit is from a kind follower, Rahjital, who sent us this quick explanation of flight theory a while back (sadly the images they added no longer seem to be working, so I tried to find fitting images as substitutes):

The first step to learn how lift works is to debunk the popular explanation of how lift forces are created, called the Equal Transit Time theory. The reasoning is that air flowing around the wing splits into two streams, one of which has to travel over the wing and another which travels below it. Due to the shape of the wing, the upper stream has to move faster to cover the same distance. This difference in velocities generates a difference in pressure and therefore lift.

However, what happens if you fly upside down?

The upper side of your wing points towards the ground, and so does the lift force. I would have said you’d fall like a rock, but the fall would actually be faster since your wings would drag you down. We all know that’s not how flight works, though, so how is lift actually created?

All you need to do is tilt the wings a bit. Seriously, I’m not kidding. No need for a specialized wing shape, as the majority of people seems to believe. (although it helps.) Why? Let me explain:

There are two phenomena causing lift to be created:

1. As air flows around the wing, its direction changes downwards and it leaves the back edge of the wing moving slightly more down. Mister Newton tells us that every action has its reaction, so if the air moves down, our wing has to rise.

2. Due to the tilting, the air flowing on the underside of the wing ends up colliding with it and slowing down, raising the pressure. On the other hand, the air flowing over the wings goes upwards because it has to get over the raised front edge, but as it can’t get back down immediately, it ends up travelling in an arc over the wing. This forms a small ‘pocket’ of low pressure straight above the top surface of the wings. These two fields of pressure then generate additional lift. (this is similar to how the Equal Transit Time theory states lift is generated, but with a very different reason, and not as important as the theory states it to be).

Next time you are traveling in a car, try reaching out of the window with your arm when going reasonably fast. As long as you keep your hand parallel to the ground, not much is going to happen, but once you tilt it even a little, the wind is going to push it up. (or down, depending on which direction you tilted it.) That’s it - your hand is generating enough lift to hit the frame of the car window. Just imagine how much lift does a properly built wing get in a similar situation.

The tilt I am talking about the entire time here is called the angle of attack, often abbreviated just AOA. The greater the angle of attack is, the more lift is generated, but the more drag there is, too. For airplanes, the AOA is negligible from an artist’s perspective, but for winged creatures, this is far more of a concern.

Therefore, the flight theory rule #1 is: Whenever you draw a flying creature, always make its wings slightly inclined. It wouldn’t be able to fly otherwise.

~~end quote~~

Bird vs. Bat vs. Pterosaur

This first bit will be borrowed from Koryos’ article “Bat Flight Versus Bird Flight” (which I highly suggest reading in-full for a deeper explanation). Fair warning though—from the short explanation they give of basic flight/lift, it seems they do believe (at least at the time of writing the article) in the now-defunct Equal Transit Time Theory, though their points on bird vs. bat flight are still valid otherwise:

If you look closely at the above gif, you’ll notice that at several points during flight, the bat actually bends its fingers, which dramatically changes the shape of its wings. Birds do not have joints in their feathers, so they cannot do this.

....

Flexible joints are not all the bat has in its arsenal. Its actual bones are flexible, due to a lack of calcium in its diet. This means that they deform and reform their shape during flight.

Birds minimize air resistance by rotating their primaries during their upstroke, allowing air to slip between the feathers. Bats, with solid membranes, can’t do this- so they have an even finer means of control. There are lines of muscle present within the bat’s wing membrane that can actually change the stiffness and malleability of its skin. You can see them quite clearly under the skin of our entangled bat friend.

This is a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), by the way.

These muscles allow the bat to make their membranes flexible during their upstroke to decrease resistance, yet stiff during their downstroke in order to provide lift. It also allows them to change the camber (angle) of their wings on a whim!

This slow-mo video really displays just how incredibly flexible bat wings are.

Bat wings are also covered by millions of tiny, hyper-sensitive hairs that allow the bat to sense air currents and adjust accordingly.

So what does all this control do for the bat?

Well, for one thing, it means they’re not limited by symmetry. Bird wings will almost always mirror each other in shape, while bats may form two different wings shapes at the same time, allowing them to perform some crazy aerial acrobatics. Some insect-eating bats will actually grab an insect by wrapping one wing around it midflight (don’t believe me? You can see it in the beginning of this video!) and then get the insect in their mouth all in a split second, while still flying.

Now, in terms of speed, birds can generally outpace bats. But in terms of maneuverability, bats can fly circles around birds.

The fact that bats’ bones, unlike those of birds, aren’t hollow, and that their skin is heavier than feathers might seem like a disadvantage- but it isn’t. Birds have much more mass in the center of their body than they do in their wings; by contrast, bats have more mass distributed through each wing (12-20% per wing). This means that bats can actually push off their own mass to do things like flip, spin, roll, etc. No bird can stop midflight and flip over to land upside-down, but bats can.

Because they have such fine control over their airfoil shape, bats can also generate lift using less energy than birds. Remember when I talked about minimizing surface area during the upstroke and maximizing it during the downstroke? Bats can bend their fingers and ‘crumple’ their wings as they raise them, conserving energy. Think of it like opening and closing an umbrella. While birds can pull their feathers together more tightly, they can’t exactly clench them like fists.

Decreasing energy costs is good in any situation, but particularly for fliers. It takes a lot of energy to fly. In this case, bats can outcompete both birds and insects for energy efficiency- one study found that nectar-feeding bats, though the largest in size, expended the least energy hovering when compared to both moths and hummingbirds.

~~end quote~~

As for pterosaurs, I’ll leave it up to Mike Habib’s article “Feathers vs Membranes”:

The structure and efficiency of pterosaur wings is obviously not known in as much detail as those of birds or bats, for the simple reason that no living representatives of pterosaurs are available for study.  However, soft tissue preservation in pterosaurs does give some critical information about their wing morphology, and the overall shape and structure of the wing can be used (along with first principles from aerodynamics) to estimate efficiency and performance.

…((I’ll just be pasting the basic findings, but please read the full article if you’re interested in specifics))…

Now, for some punchlines...

Based on the structural information above, we might expect the following regarding pterosaurs and birds:

- Pterosaurs would have a base advantage in terms of maneuverability and slow flight competency.

- Pterosaurs would also have had an advantage in terms of soaring capability and efficiency

- Pterosaurs would have been better suited to the evolution of large sizes (though this was affected more by differences in takeoff - see earlier posts about pterosaur launch).

- Birds will perform a bit better as mid-sized, broad-winged morphs (because they can use slotted wing tips and span reduction).

- Birds would have an advantage in steep climb-out after takeoff at small body sizes (because they can work with shorter wings and engage them earlier).  This might pre-dispose them to burst launch morphologies/ecologies.

~~end quote~~

(other articles by Habib about Pterosaur anatomy and flight can be found here and here, for anyone interested)

When Exdraghunt linked us this information about pterosaur wings, it was in relation to a question about pterosaur keels and why they differed from bird keels. Exdraghunt suggested this might be due to pterosaur preference for soaring compared to bird flapping. However, plenty of inland pterosaurs could have been flappers, so I think the shallowness is more likely caused by their muscular setup compared to birds, discussed in more detail in the Basic Anatomy section.

Aspect Ratio and Wing Loading

Now that we have a basic understanding of the different modes of vertebrate flight, we can get to the fun stuff—wing diversity! Believe it or not, my friends, wing shapes and sizes can drastically effect an animal’s flight style.

Aspect ratio is the ratio of length to width in a wing, where high ratio indicates narrow wings, and low ratio indicates wide wings.

Loading is the ratio of body weight to wing size, where low loading = large wings + small weight, and high loading = small wings + large weight.

Measuring these two aspects against each other helps us determine different flight styles.

For a short n’ sweet rundown:

1)      Long, narrow wings (low loading, high ratio)= gliding, low speed

 2)      Long, wide wings (low loading, low ratio)= soaring

 3)      Short, wide wings (high loading, low ratio)= high acceleration (burst speed), maneuverability

 4)      Short, narrow wings (high loading, high ratio)= high speed

Though there are other aspects of wing shape to take into account as well.

(via^)

Pointedness refers to a wing tip’s position on the leading edge; IE- is the longest point of the wing further back behind the leading edge (A, round), or does the longest point lie along the leading edge (B, pointed)?. Rounder wings increase thrust, and lend towards greater maneuverability-- particularly in short/wide wings. Pointed wings reduce drag on the air (which increases speed), particularly in short wings, and can make for smoother flight.

Convexity refers to the acuteness of a wingtip; IE- is the shape of the wingtip curved relatively inwards (C, concave) or outwards (D, convex)? Concave wings are better suited for constant high speed. Convex wings create more lift, so are ideal for slow flying and increase acceleration.

Measuring these two aspects against each other gives us another fun chart of wing types.

(via^)

And let’s not forget that slotted wings—those whose primary remiges have notches which create gaps between these feathers—reduce drag and tend to be found in wide (low ratio) wings.

Put all these aspects and little details together, and you can observe some very unique flight patterns. Most ornithologists tend to organize wings into 4 different types, as shown below.

Though I personally like to use a few more types as organization (list via):

  1) Marine soarers are birds that fly for long periods over the open ocean and have very high aspect-ratio wings and average or low wing loading that reduce the energetic cost of flight. Birds in this category include the albatrosses (Procellariiformes).

  2) Divers/swimmers are birds with medium to high aspect ratios and high wing loading, including murres, loons, grebes, scoters, mergansers, ducks, and swans. These birds fly rapidly, but with limited maneuverability, characteristics useful for birds that often fly long distances (e.g., during migration or to feeding areas) and take-off and land on water where precise maneuverability is not as important.

  3) Aerial hunters are birds with high aspect-ratio wings and low wing loading, a combination permitting rapid flight and excellent maneuverability. Aerial hunters include swallows and martins (Passeriformes), swifts (Apodiformes), nightjars (Caprimulgiformes), Swallow-tailed Kites (Falconiformes), frigatebirds (Fregatidae), terns (Sterninae), some falcons (e.g., hobbies and Eleonora’s Falcon), and tropicbirds (Phaethontidae).

  4) Soarers/coursers include birds with low aspect ratios and low wing loading, characteristics that allow relatively large birds to either soar or fly just above the vegetation in open habitats in search of prey. Birds in the soaring category include hawks and eagles (Falconiformes), vultures, condors, and storks (Ciconiiformes), and cranes (Gruiformes). Coursing birds include some owls (e.g., Barn Owl and Short-eared Owl; Strigiformes) and harriers (Falconiformes).

  5) Short-burst fliers are birds with low aspect ratios and high wing loading that fly infrequently and only for short distances. Birds in this category include those in the orders Galliformes (e.g., turkeys, pheasants, quail, grouse, and megapodes) and Tinamiformes (tinamous).

  6) Hoverers are birds capable of flying in one position without wind and have high aspect ratios and, surprisingly, high wing loading. The high aspect ratio reduces the energetic cost of flight, whereas the high wing loading permits relatively fast, agile flight (Rayner 1998). The only true hoverers are the hummingbirds (Apodiformes).

~~end quote~~

I don’t have an outside source to verify this observation, but I’ve found that a longer “hand” section and shorter arm generally correlate with high-speed flight, while a shorter “hand” and longer arm correlates to low-speed gliding. I can only assume this may be due to a shorter arm section being easier to flap rapidly, but again, this is conjecture.

While much of this information is bird-specific, I was able to scrounge up a graph of bat aspect ratios and loading, so I can only assume these concepts similarly apply to bat flight.

(via^)

There sadly seems to be much less information available on bat wing/flight diversity…

As for pterosaur wing diversity, exdraghunt sent in some great input (as well as that chart of different bat wings featured above~):

There actually is a fair amount of wing diversity among pterosaurs, and it fairly closely parallels that in birds. (Though they do not reach the extreme variety in shapes that birds do, due to the limitations in variety of “arm+wing finger” combos)

One of the most extreme examples is Nyctosaurus gracilis, a long-distance marine soarer, similar to albatrosses. They have very long, thin wings (and also lost their other wing fingers, presumably because they came on land rarely)

Other species of pterosaur, like insect eaters (which need short, broad wings for manuverability) or over-land fliers would’ve had different wing shapes.

Some of this difference was achieved by varying the ratio between “arm” and “wing finger” lengths. You’ll notice that smaller, earlier “Rhamphorhynchoids” (the top half, with the long tails) tended towards  short arms vs long wing fingers. While larger, later Pterodactyloid species developed longer arms in relationships to the wing finger. (Especially in the wrist)

Wing shape silhouettes, by Mark Witton. (Not to scale, obvs.)

~~end quote~~

Special Cases: Hoverers

Hoverers such as hummingbirds are special cases in the world of vertebrate flight, because much of their lifestyle and physiology mimics that of insects-- including their flight.

The basic rules of flight theory discussed above won’t exactly apply to these guys, because air doesn’t travel over their wings in the same way it does in other vertebrate flyers. Take a look at this post and compare the animations between the hummingbird, goose, and bat. What exactly is unique about the hummingbird animation compared to the other two?

A few things-- for one, hummingbirds don’t have nearly as many points of wing articulation during flight. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s no bend at the elbow or wrist for a hummingbird; they move their whole arm in a completely stiff, figure-8 pattern. Such high-speed flapping can’t handle that much articulation.

Why a figure-8? Here’s the thing-- hummingbirds don’t technically have an upstroke they have to account for. Every stroke of their wings is a downstroke because when they pull their wings back, the topside of their wings tilts down and also pushes against the air as a “downstroke”. Thus, there’s never a gap between downstrokes-- they’re always efficiently pushing down against the air.

This is also why, unlike most every other flying vertebrate, their flight is more vertical than horizontal. In order to properly swing their wings in a figure-8 motion, they have to tilt their bodies up.

While hovering flight is cool as hell, it comes with a lot of restrictions; mainly, hoverers are always small. The energetic restrictions required for hovering are so incredibly high that bodies much bigger than a hummingbird wouldn’t be able to consume enough energy to make up for hovering. Plus, hoverers tend to live right on the edge of starvation because what energy they do manage to consume is used up so quickly.

If you do want to integrate hovering into your dragons, consider making it a secondary form of flight that they can only keep up for short bursts, rather than their primary mode of flight. Unless you’re ready to give your dragon a lot of physiological restrictions, which is cool too.

-Mod Spiral

[thesilkenlair]

(Casey Here!)

As much D&D as I play, you'd imagine I would eventually get around to illustrating some of their most iconic monsters! Which is to say, the ones that I personally find the most iconic. Which is to say, the ones I memorized when I was reading my dad's monster manual at age nine. Purple worm - Sandworms never go out of style. I've seen a lot of rad designs for this bugger over the editions, but I favor the slightly less reptilian older takes for this particular critter. It's kinda basic, but sometimes that's what you want. It's like a shark or a crocodile: Just flat out unchanged across the ages. Hook horror - I've heard it rumored that Gygax used a small Gigan figure to represent this monster. I can't verify that, but it definitely sounds right. Hook horrors are one of the very first things you meet when you play around in the caves, and they kind of remind me of the Father Deep monsters of the Hork Bajir homeworld that way. Mind flayer - Mind flayers! Basically, take all of your Dracula conventions and dip them in a fresh coat of Lovecraft. There's that old "decadent aristocratic upper caste system who literally eats the poor, but still somehow comes across as less evil than the actual real life 1%" setup that will never stop being relevant. Though personally, I see mind flayers as the first alternative for folks who want to play that monster-who-feels-the-urge-to-eat-their-friends-but-refuses-to-do-it shtick but don't want to deal with vampire baggage. You know, the furry option! ... Slimy? Rubbery? Do we have a word for anthro-cephalopods? I'm only a casual furry. Gelatinous cube - I'm not apologizing for giving this one a slot. Froghemoth - So, back when I participated in my very first long-term campaign, I played a druid. You've met Talia before. Naturally, I was chomping at the bit for the day I finally got to turn her into a froghemoth, and celebrated the day my wish was finally granted and she was allowed to chug human-supremacist-cultists like popcorn. Yeah, okay, the froghemoth is one of the classic vore-monsters. But it's a charming design in its own right. Kind of a freaky Hanna Barbara critter, like you'd see Space Ghost fighting. No matter how many artists draw it, they can never shake that inherent goofiness that third edition tried so hard to purge. I would probably cram them somewhere onto Fronterra if I was sure they were public domain. As is, I'm 99% certain that this is what Visser Three turned into when he ate Elfangor. Tarrasque - D&D's original kaiju! Kind of just takes the name and nothing else when it comes to its mythological origins, but I don't mind. The Tarrasque is that endgame "let's test the players" final boss monster... Or at least it's supposed to be. My DM reskinned it for our final Pathfinder session, and one of the PCs still nearly killed it in a single turn. Also, he let Talia turn into one, so maybe Pathfinder is just bullshit? Regardless, the Tarrasque has one of those simple, iconic designs. I've heard rumors it was based on the concept art for Fallout's deathclaws, and like the Gigan-figure, I can't verify this in any way. With its reptilian features, twin horns, spiny carapace and grabby fingies, it has an undeniable lizardlike quality that I can't help but find charming. Kinda feels like a more refined version of Zilla? Though for an insatiable eating machine, I notice a lot of artists give it very little belly to work with. Come on, this guy eats entire cities! Give him somewhere to put it! Rust monster - An icon of icons, the rust monster! Drawing its origin from a bizarre Chinese "dinosaur" toy, later designs have made it more insectoid in appearance, but never feeling QUITE like anything Earthly. It's the four limbs. Between the four limbs and the tail, it's hard to tell if it's an arthropod mimicking a vertebrate or the other way around. I'm pretty sure this is part of what inspired my ossaderm creatures for Fronterra. Also, Ryla can turn into one in our campaign. I have no shortage of havoc to wreak when the opportunity comes. Behir - Dragons in D&D are kind of... extra. Godlike beings, paragons of whatever personality trait they represent. Whenever there's something uber powerful in D&D, it gets compared to dragons. It makes them kind of unapproachable. Behirs provide all the essentials of a dragon - Serpentine body, scaly skin, horns, sapience, breath weapon, taste for human flesh - wrapped up in a smaller, weirder, IMO cooler package. You know, your Lambton Worms. A lot easier to port in and out of adventures, a lot less of an event when they show up, but still a formidable force in their own right. I like the behir. The behir knows how to taunt me just the right amount. Bulette - Another Chinese "dinosaur" figure monster, the bulette is actually another one I associate with Talia. Whenever we faced a problem that didn't have a glaringly and immediately obvious solution, she would turn into a bulette, whether it was for beating up robots, digging through obstacles, trampling smurfs, navigating labyrinths, distracting slashers with cute dog tricks... it was kind of her signature form. But shenanigans aside, the bulette is just an excellent monster. While the "land shark" shtick may be common, there's a lot more going on with the bulette's design. It's rumored to be a mad wizard's creation, as he combined a snapping turtle with an armadillo and mixed in a helping of demon blood to taste. Personally, I always considered that to be a neat little rumor to flesh out the world, but never assumed it to be true. The bulette just feels too naturalistic for that. Like some kind of protomammal or crocodylomorph, or weird triassic monstrosity. Magic and demons and dragons and so on DO affect the ecosystem. I always figured the bulette was just something that evolved to compete in this new biosphere. Owlbear - This one, on the other hand, I fully believe the "mad wizard was bored" explanation. Another chinasaur critter, the owlbear is frequently made fun of. What makes it scarier than a regular bear? It can't fly, so why have owl parts at all? Why trade fangs for a beak in what is at best a latural move? Well, first of all, fuck you, owls are creepy motherfuckers, and that alone is enough to justify it. But secondly, that's part of its charm. Besides some improved vision, the owl DOESN'T make it more dangerous. What makes the owlbear dangerous is that it's an insane, Frankensteinian monstrosity roaming uncontrolled through the wilderness! It doesn't need weaponry, its sheer temperament is enough to make it a worthy opponent. Sure, the practical threat might not be hugely above that of a bear, but storytelling isn't about numbers. Any asshole can go outside and get eaten by a bear. The owlbear is part of this world. The owlbear is a reminder of what magic can do. Someone somewhere actually made this thing, for whatever reason, and now the world is irrevocably changed because of it. Owlbears go beyond practicality. They bring the lore! Also, bears don't have very good eyesight, so the big owl eyes probably make them better hunters. Flumph - Is that a Japanese-style martian? Do we just have aliens in D&D? Dear lord, I love them! Okay, the flumph has got a sizable hatedom. And that hatedom can eat my ass, because the flumph is precious and perfect just the way it is! Flumphs are designed as a sort of sidekick-type creature. They're not very good fighters, but they bring knowledge and lore to the table. Whether they're aliens from some far off star, seeking your aid to prevent catastrophe, or psionic natives of the Underdark eager to bask in your positivity and hopefully stick it to the tyrants they're forced to share real estate with. My group generally treats them as straight up aliens, benevolent but strange. Course, we're all pretty strange, so we get along just fine. Otyugh - Okay so, the aberration creature type implies that this is something from another world that doesn't belong. And yet otyughs, which are aberrations, are an essential part of this world's ecosystem? Okay, I can buy the idea that an alien organism adapted to our world and is now a key part of it. Fronterra's got a TON of that. It just feels like after a point, the otyugh would be considered a beast? Otyughs are great. Every ecosystem needs a decomposer, and every fantasy story needs at least one dive into the sewers. Otyughs provide both, and are intelligent enough to keep the plot moving if it hits a snag. There's always going to be garbage, refuse, carrion, decay, things that need to be broken down and processed. Carrion crawler - The carrion crawler is pretty similar to the otyugh in that it's technically not considered a beast, and therefor must have its origins elsewhere, but feels so integrated into the ecosystem that it just feels like it belongs. They usually can't talk, so they're not just reskinned otyughs, but I still consider them pretty essential. Otyughs find a singular spot where waste is dumped and shovel it down at their leisure, while carrion crawlers skulk through the tunnels, actively seeking their food. The crawler got one of the most radical redesigns on the transition from second to third edition, but I can't really choose a single favorite. The oldschool tentacle-faced cutworm looks like it could be a real animal, while the googly-eyed Halloween decoration feels like it could be from another world, merely having set up shop here. Could there name apply to two wholly different creatures? If so, then I'm not sure which one mine would be considered. I kinda mashed them together into something that doesn't quite feel like either. But I like it for what it is. Maybe I'll sneak it onto Fronterra. Aboleth - Tentacled, telepathic sea creatures who turn humans into slimy minions, who remember everything their race has ever seen, and who are always plotting something behind the scenes. Yeah, the aboleths really crank up the Lovecraft elements. Actually, between the mind flayers, the flumphs and the aboleths, even the most oldschool D&D covered quite a few essential Lovecraftian bases. The flayers are your corrupt yet still recognizable humanoids who can be considered truly evil, the flumphs are benevolent-yet-bizarre guardians who know more than you, and the aboleths are the truly unknowable, sinister intellects. The fact that they can barely function on land honestly only adds to that, IMO. They're inherently difficult for a party to reach, and they offer some nice underwater adventure seeds. Not enough adventures go underwater. There's this perception that the ocean is bad for storytelling because so many writers lack the creativity to make it work. I wanna run an underwater adventure now. Beholder - Icon of icons! THE D&D monster! The beholder! Paranoid, jumpy, always five steps ahead and twenty steps perpendicular! Beholds are fun in just about every way. Between their wacky, diverse designs, their elaborate lairs, their eccentric personalities, their bizarre powers, you're never gonna run out of fun with beholders. Remorhaz - It's always been a thing that bothered me with environment-based monsters. Why does the ice monster who lives in the cold use ice as a weapon? Aren't most of the things it encounters going to be resistant to the cold? Sure, a cone of cold will still kill a polar bear, but a lot of the monsters in the tundra are outright immune to cold. A while dragon's not going to get much use out of its breath weapon fighting frost worms and frost giants. That's one reason the remorhaz sticks out to be. We have an icy tundra beast whose insides are a scorching furnace, which it can intensify and weaponize as it sees fit. Which also conveniently explains why its design - a sort of cobra-esque centipede - invokes warm-weather creatures, despite its icy environment. It's a nice subversion of the usual tropes, plus it's just a memorable, cool looking critter to begin with. On a smaller note, the remorhaz feels like a good loophole for Ryla's "no cold weather morphs" rule. Turning into something elementally affiliated with ice is no good, but a non-magical monster that survives the cold by superheating its insides? That seems perfectly viable to me!

[encyclopika]

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #74

Brought to you by a marine biologist who knows coming in second ain’t so bad...

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

So, coming in second for our voting event was the Soft-Shelled Turtle. I honestly thought this buddy was gonna win, but y’all surprised me. It’s not rare, per se, but it’s not available for long, so get on it, fellow Northerners.

Now, we’ve gone over turtles before. ACNH has two other turtle friends you can catch/find, that being the Snapping Turtle, which you can fish for in the river, and the Archelon fossils. However, we never covered, like, the one thing that sets turtles apart from other vertebrates - the shell. It’s honestly a weird af adaptation to say the least, and we’re going to talk about it. This will get long because of it, but I hope you find this interesting, because it really is.

And when I say it’s weird, I really mean it. That shell and it’s evolution, as well as other turtle features, have been stumping evolutionary and phylogenetic biologists for a long ass time. No body really knew where to put turtles on the tree of life until relatively recently. Until then, it was hard to say whether the turtles belonged with the Archosaurs (crocodilians, birds, dinosaurs) or the Lepidosaurs (Lizards and Snakes). We now accept (at least for now!) that turtles belong in the former group. 

Turtles themselves are classified in one of two ways depending on how they retract their necks into their shells. The first group, Pleurodira, turn their heads to the side and it actually leaves their necks somewhat exposed. They can’t retract their neck neatly backwards like the second group, Cryptodira. And that’s where today’s turtle belongs. I’m fairly certain this is the Chinese Soft-Shelled Turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis):

They’re native to China, as the name suggests. Like other Cryptodira turtles, the Chinese Soft-shell can retract its neck fully backwards into its shell, which is actually very soft, as the name also implies. It’s not hard and covered in bony scutes like other turtle shells. Instead it’s more leathery and yeah, it doesn’t really afford it as much protection as a harder shell might. However, the loss of armor means this turtle can actually run to escape predators. It also makes them much more hydrodynamic. Just another example of evolutionary trade-offs - armor or speed? Pick one, cuz ya ain’t gettin’ both. 

Turtle shells in general are kind of fascinating when you learn it’s simply the animal’s rib cage (which makes it insane the Cryptodiras can retract their neck back into it). So, please don’t think for a second a turtle can come out of its shell; you have no idea how many times I’ve had to answer that question. Look at this picture of a snapping turtle skeleton:

By Daderot - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8894607

The shell is the ribcage. The ribs evolved to be flat and bulky and at some point, the leathery skin we suspect covered it in ancient turtles became more calcified in most turtle species we see today. 

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

[electric-sympathy]

Vampire!Dean fic excerpt

Right, so, I know I said I was going to post a bit of Cathemeral, but I was going through my files and yet another unfinished Vampire!Dean fic caught my eye. I wrote it a number of years ago after a “painful transformation” commentfic prompt at Hoodietime. 

So, here is a quick excerpt from my Hellsing-inspired fic!!! Just finished fleshing it out. It’s about 1.5k words. Takes place after Dean has busted himself and Sam out of a stronghold of Crowley’s with a little help from an impromptu vampiric transformation, but as you can see, something went Very Wrong. I guess you could call this Chapter 3?

Enjoy!!!! Concrit welcome!!!

Sam is concentrating intently on a scan of a 14th century manuscript when he hears a noise right at his ear, like wings, drawn out and distorted as if through water, quiet and delicate.

There are four pure black moths on his forearm, gathered three in a circle at one point and one scuttling towards them, looking to squeeze in.

He flaps his hand at them. They collapse into shadow and swirl round his fingers like fog before dissipating, drawn unseen into the surrounding darkness.

There are three pinpricks in his skin.

--- * \ \ * \ \ * ---

Sam’s immediate thought is of Dean, unconscious in the bedroom. He rushes away from the computer, but pauses when he reaches the bedroom door, open just a crack. For just a moment, the suppositions that Dean needs protecting and that Dean himself could be the danger fight each other before Sam's guilt and protectiveness wins out. 

Cautious, he presses the pads of his fingers to the aged wood and eases the door open as silently as he can, edging inside, demon killing knife at his hip...

And then he stands in the doorway, staring, half in half out, one hand clutching the door frame. Trying to make sense of what he sees.

The shadows on Dean's body have broken their bounds.

They've spread out strangely, bigger than they should be, and are reaching out into three dimensional space. And like shadows, all he can see at a given point is the outline of the entire semitranslucent mass. 

At first, it looks like hydrangeas flowing in the breeze.

Sam edges cautiously further into the room. He can't match whatever this is to anything he knows about vampires, real or fictional, and can't help but use the caution pounded into him through years of hunting, Dean or not.

Closer now, he can make them out: Hundreds of moths made of pure shadow are clustered on Dean's body. Small wings flutter sluggishly as they wander drunkenly in each space portioned out to them, oblivious to Sam's entry. He waves his arms in the air, trying to get their attention, but none take notice. The revelation doesn't make any more sense to Sam than before. It doesn't seem like they're doing anything to Dean. They almost seem to be a part of him, with the way they seem to be reaching out from the shadows on his body. Part of whatever transformation he's going through. Sam can't think of anything like this, nothing he's read or encountered. Even Daeva are dramatically different shadow creatures-- more invisible than really made of shadow. The effect could almost be pretty, if it were not so obviously unnatural, or infesting his brother.

...Should he wake him? Would that make it stop? Should he make it stop? The answer seems obvious.

Sam creeps to the head of the bed. Slowly, he reaches towards the intersection between Dean's neck and shoulder. At the edges of that mass, he can see their beady little eyes as holes punched through the shadows.

It parts at the intrusion of his hand for a moment, the little things bumping lightly into each other as they move away, seemingly not sure what to make of him. But when the wave crests, they clamor for him as one. They reach out in a strange symmetry, four tendrils made up of a column of bugs to wrap around his forearm. Tens of dainty, long proboscides reach for his skin, and this time, he feels the pain. He panics, yanks his arm away, and there's a delicate pull like little threads snapping as he does. The moths are pulled free, and collapse from the force back into shadowy tendrils that recede into Dean's neck. That shadow looks normal again.

There are four rows of perfectly spaced lines of pinpricks wrapping up and around his forearm. Just barely big enough for blood to bead before clotting.

He waits, knife at the ready.

Nothing happens.

They've forgotten about him already. He waits as long as he can stand it, knife hand eventually falling dejected at his side. He concludes that their intelligence is rudimentary, if they are even sentient.

Well, he decides, at least I have something to go on now. He trots back to the side room to retrieve his laptop, focus newly replenished.

By the time he's back, setting himself up at the little desk at the window to watch out of the corner of his eye, little wings are budding like petals from the shadow at Dean's neck again.

Sam tries to cover up the knowledge that he is sitting vigil with the idea that at least he can tease Dean about being the Butterfly Boy when he wakes up.

--- * \ \ * \ \ * ---

"...The genus Calyptra is a group of moths in subfamily Calpinae of the family Erebidae. They are a member of the Calpini tribe, whose precise circumscription is uncertain but which includes a number of other fruit-piercing or eye-frequenting genera currently classified in Calpinae.

The common name of many of these species, vampire moth, refers to the habit that they have of drinking blood from vertebrates. Some of them (C. thalictri) are even capable of drinking human blood through skin..."

"...The Carpathian Mountains arch through the Czech Republic and then turn east, continuing on through Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine before finally ending near the Danube River in Serbia. It is here in this mountain range that there lives a species of vampire known as a mahr. Living off the consumption of human souls, the mahr swoops down upon its victim in the form of a moth, taking a bite or two before flying off. The more often a mahr attacks a single victim, the easier it becomes for the vampire to do so in the future. Eventually the prey is killed and the soul consumed. Fortunately, there are two ways in which a mahr can be slain. The first is to...."

Sam stretches and runs his hands through his hair, turning away from the desk, and freezes.

Dean's awake.

Mostly.

The shadow moths are gone. Oversized, red irises with blown out pupils wander the room. He doesn't seem entirely aware of what he's looking at, or even what he's looking for. 

He's baring his fangs, and God, they're gigantic. 

As he works unconsciously to keep himself from drooling, his tongue laps out of his mouth like an angry dog's.

The expression on his face, however, is one only of sleepiness, confusion. Sam can tell that there's a slight undercurrent of distress trying to work its way through the fog.

Sam wonders if this is what it feels like to keep tigers.

"Dean?"

No answer. A little more confusion. A little less drooling.

Sam approaches the bed. He cards his hand through Dean's hair and lets it rest there. The warm weight seems to snap Dean out of it slightly; his pupils visibly retract, and he slowly stops his search through the room to stare sleepily at nothing, face slackening. His eyes seem to lose most of that preternatural scarlet glow; the structure of his irises is now visible through it again, which are now an odd brownish-maroon color. 

"Go back to sleep, Dean," he murmurs, soft and low, and tries unsuccessfully to hide the sadness  in his tone.

Dean's eyelids grow heavy and the alert tension drains out of him. His head burrows into the pillow and a soft, utterly self-unconscious exhale of breath escapes his lips. He falls back asleep almost immediately.

Sam has wished since before Dean's deal that he would accept the comfort he obviously needed, but not like this.

Falling asleep so easily... It made him look like a big kid. Sam welcomes the choking love for his brother, so absent this past year.

He stays by the bedside for a long time.

--- * \ \ * \ \ * ---

Castiel shows up at dusk a few hours later, a sizeable jar of demon blood held to his side, furtively, like contraband. As usual, there is no expression on his face, but his body language seems uncomfortable. It's something he must have scavenged from Bobby's pantry which, strangely, makes it look for all the world like a harmless half gallon of blackberry preserve.

The fact that it isn't for Sam doesn't make him feel any better.

Castiel ignores its presence entirely and gets straight to the point. The moths returned shortly after Dean fell back asleep, but if Castiel is surprised by them he doesn't verbalize it.

"How is he?"

"He woke up for a few minutes a couple hours ago, but he didn't seem..." Sam's face screws up. He tries again. "It was like he could tell there was a... A source of blood in the room, but he wouldn't focus on anything. Didn't respond when I tried to talk to him."

Castiel is staring at Dean all the while, head tilted in that way of his when thinking hard. Usually, it seems as though he's scrutinizing the space between atoms, but there's a line of frustration in his brow that makes it seem like he can't see anything. Sam wonders if he paid any attention to what he'd just said.

In that moment, Dean's head lifts from the pillow, drawing both their gazes.

Sam would've thought that having his pupils less dilated would make Dean's gaze feel less... animal, but it didn't. The glow had returned, making his owlish irises shine with a smooth, ruby iridescence.

The moths surge up from behind his neck, piling over each other, restless. Sam can actually hear the agitated titter of their wings this time.

He doesn't think he can watch this.

[royalreef]

(( I think it’s been long enough to where I’m starting to feel the need to re-explain why I gave my merfolk the body plan that I have, why they have a tail and why I went with a crocodile-adjacent design instead of a more typical mermaid design.

Mainly it started as me just trying to figure out how Miranda was supposed to swim. She’s a mermaid and it’s a pretty big part of who she is as a character, so I couldn’t just... not know how she swam. That’s a major part of any lifeform, and to neglect how locomotion happens would just break any other worldbuilding or development I could create.

This is a pretty big distinction! Mammals and their vertebral column are extremely constrained, almost entirely limiting aquatic mammals to an up/down motion like whales, while both fish and nearly every other aquatic tetrapod went with a side-to-side motion. And I know canon went with a very clearly mammalian design, being so specifically humanoid that there’s nothing else her skeletal structure could be, but... Almost nothing else about her was mammalian. The gills, particularly, were what threw me off, along with the mention of scales here and there. Nothing else besides the bland humanoid elements said mammal to me, so she had to be something else. Definitely still a tetrapod, so a lobe-finned fish, so that gives me at least a general idea of what I’m working with.

I ultimately decided to keep her legs. Having cases where she didn’t have legs just felt bulky to me, something I’d have to tinker around with to make her switch from legs to something else, be it a case like seals or an extension of the spine like whales or marine reptiles, and that still has major implications for the rest of her body plan, beyond just the “tail”. Such as where the spine would attach, since in humans and in her sprite, it attaches at the bottom of the skull, when in animals with that kind of body plan, it attaches to the back of the skull.

So that was about when I decided to do with a more crocodilian body plan, with shorter, but still present, limbs, and a large tail used for locomotion. You know the crab meme that’s popped up recently, about how everything becomes crabs? Well, the same thing happens to tetrapods and crocodiles. It’s honestly just another case of convergent evolution, where aquatic ambush predators will evolve very similar body plans to deal with very similar niches and very similar physics at play no matter what. Here’s just a few examples, most before crocodiles themselves even evolved, and none of them in the picture are actual crocodiles. So saying that merfolk took a croc-similar body plan wasn’t too out there, and would allow me to play with Miranda walking around on land, while still knowing how she got around underwater and how she managed!

The shape of her tail, then, was similarly decided by these factors. She needed a tall paddle, not a flat one like what whales have, and a LOT of animals have also convergently evolved tail flukes very reminiscent to the vertical paddles of sharks and fish. Combine this with how crocodiles and that body plan would naturally mean Miranda swims with her legs at her sides, not using them at all, you can easily imagine how someone might mistake her from afar as just not having legs at all, and having a fish tail instead.

If you’ve been around long enough, you may know that I didn’t immediately give Miranda her tail either. It was a big, fun, slappy tail, and it made me happy to know this, but... Earlier on, I was much more hesitant about diving into the same type of canon divergence I now have. Until I just... Eventually bit the bullet and gave Miranda her tail!

Before that, too, I tinkered around with her fins. I really don’t like how canon made them so dinky, and her having ray-fins on her face just... Never settled right with me? They were dinky and looked entirely useless, a needless addition. I’ve also long since been a fan of the way amphibian gills looked, their feathery fronds, and it’s been a pre-existing bias, so... Eventually I just swapped her fins out for the gills she has now. Their existence also did mean her more piscine-appearing gills migrated further towards her earfins/gills, as functionally they’re the same thing, doing the same job. Their frilliness was justified easily by them assisting in extracting more oxygen from the water around her, which is something a lot of animals make use of when in low-oxygen environments.

( The shape of them came about when I realized that I had an extremely social creature on hand, meaning that she would need a way of reaching out to others of her kind, and I had to think about what her most powerful senses would be. And the thing is... Sound travels WONDERFULLY over and through water. Whales sing for a reason, and they’re very social animals already, so it wasn’t hard to imagine merfolk taking a similar route to communicate with each other. Them being semi-mobile and already fairly large also meant that they began to fit a role a lot like the facial feathers of owls - as a kind of biological radar dish, to direct sounds into their ears, and their mobility allowed them to immediately adjust to pick up on what type of sounds were being heard and allowing them to fine-tune their own hearing for any situation. )

Which brought me to what type of merfolk Miranda was. Funnily... I never really considered her as anything other than an abyssal? Like, sure, some reef fish are indeed pink, and pink as coloration shows up everywhere in the ocean! It’s a VERY popular color choice. But... I never thought about her in a reef. Because pink as natural coloration in the ocean seems to be most popular in the deep sea. This is just due to how light works - red light has the shortest wavelength and blue has the longest, so a lot of species in the deep sea just can’t see red light, so it becomes natural camouflage to become red, without devoting a ton of pigment to being pure black. It’s also why a lot of creatures really deep down are just pale and colorless. Nothing can really see well down there, so you don’t have to worry a lot about that kinda thing. Path of least resistance and all. That also satisfied what color her eventual bioluminescence would be, as blue light does travel well, and a lot of creatures can still see blue light, making it a popular choice for signaling or hunting. That, and I suppose I have a bias against coral reef merfolk, being as they’re hopelessly overdone.

This began to clue me in on the rest of her biology. Something like 75% of the ecosystem at such depths are just scavengers, and merfolk being the size they are means they probably take the role of an opportunistic scavenger/predator. Aka, anything that they can eat, they have to be able to eat. There’s literally no way for them to afford to be picky at those depths. And, as it is, this niche both already exists, and is occupied by greenland and sleeper sharks, and both are already around the same lengths as merfolk already! Hence, it was easy enough to see what kind of adaptations they might need to cope and what that niche might favor, and thus, shape their anatomy by it.

So, hopefully this gives some newer people some ideas as to how I got all of these different ideas for Miranda’s biology!

[kariachi]

The Endless Desert

We have the animal life settled out on the coast, where there’s water and shelter and things like that, but coast and shoreline is not common on Osmos V. Most of the planet is desert, with some large lakes (19 large lakes, across the entire damn planet) and a proportional number of springs and ponds dotted around. That’s it. Most of the planet is deserts, with little to no perspiration (we’ll hit up the mountains later, where things’ll get mixed up a skosh), rare pockets of water, and the kaminobrach acting as the only real equivalent to plantlife because they got there first and are using up all the water and space you don’t need to be moving around to get. Fuckers are extending some damn magiroots, let me tell ya.

But the plantlife we already know, what we need is to get our animals out here, teach them the ways of the sand.

Red Sea species are not happening. There is not enough of, anything they need to survive. Oxygen. Food. Water. There is not shit available. Red Sea species are shoreline only, and at this point Red Sea only. But we still have the Grey Sea species to work with, and they have changes to make for their own sake.

Issues faced in the desert are-

One, so much sand. All the sand. Pretty sand, yes, because it’s made up of like iron and gold and amethyst and shit like that alongside fucking rocks, but still. Fucking sand everywhere.

Two, where is the water? Is there water? Probably not. They’re gonna have to figure out how they’re getting and retaining that shit. Because holy fuck.

To start with, we’re going to make some adjustments to some fuckers. Nobody has a respiratory system, so we’re going to replace it with a complex water storage system. This should increase the amount of time all these fuckers can go without drinking, especially if over time it becomes more efficient, keeping more water in less space. Make things a bit easier for everybody.

The kamees have it relatively easy on the water front, at least. Their food is literally just magic and water, so they can probably get the majority of their water intake from their food. Still, they’ll need to adjust to best take advantage of the situation.

We’ve been splitting things into twos so far, so we’re going to continue here. Two diametrically opposed designs. One will optimize to get all of it’s water from the kaminobachs they eat, while the other will very much not.

First one is going to have the least efficient water storage system, but then it won’t really need it all that much. It’ll be a smaller kamee, say two foot at the shoulder, since it’s foodsource is lower down to the ground and it’s relying on it for it’s water consumption. It’s forelimbs have webbed fingers and webbing running to the shoulder from the outermost fingers, to maximize skin contact with dinner, while it’s mouth will specialize to suck up the sort’ve gel manacytes start becoming as they lose energy.

It’s not the biggest change in history, but it’ll do them, and they will be muskamee, literally ‘mouse kamee’ since they’re a small.

Second branch will go the opposite direction. They’re going to grow out those legs. This will not only give them a better vantage point to sense the kaminodendri that signal the presence of large amount of water without other things getting in the way, but also help them get to that water faster with their longer strides. As a result they’ll also probably have longer necks than other species descended from the oophera, sorta like shorter alien giraffes. Since being tall sort’ve fucks with access to dinner in this case, their forelimbs are going to grow longer, with small claws, webbed fingers, and grasping abilities. This will allow them to reach down and rip up parts of the kaminobrachs to eat.

To add a little bit to this, long legs means they can get a far distance, not just from predators if needed but also from each other and so they’re going to start developing a tubular outgrowth on the shoulders that, when opened and faced into the wind, gives off a distinct whistle they can use to find mates across larger distances.

They’ll also practice a new step in childcare, traveling to the nearest body of water when it comes time for their eggs to hatch, so their young have ready access to food and water. Until this point members of this phylum have just, dropped their kids wherever they are when they hatch.

These guys will be cankamee, ‘singing kamee’.

Which brings us to the fendven, who are gonna have to change to work with their new circumstances. Gonna have a change a lot.

These guys, I don’t know if you remember, eat of the meat-things. Now this is fine, but because they’re not using the things they properly eat for energy, just for proteins and things, there’s a lot of waste going on. Lot of shit that’s going in that can’t really be used and so just has to come back out. And since they’re getting their water from drinking and from their prey, which is spread out across a massive fucking desert, they don’t have a lot of that coming in. And digestion takes fluids. And hacking up waste like they’ve been takes fluids (saliva and shit, to help shit go down, to help shit come up). They’re just using a lot of fluids they can’t recover all that great. So, what does a bitch do?

Well, a bitch has figured out absorbing matter. And a bitch has been able to convert fats and meats directly into energy. So they’re just gonna lean into that.

From now on this family doesn’t need any of this digestion bullshit, they’re just going to drag nutrition straight out of the dinner right then and there. Instant usage, some extra can go into their preexisting fat storage for use between meals, bing bang bosh, Bob’s your uncle. This definitively restricts them to eating live prey, but they were gonna struggle to find dead prey anyway. Plus, without need for the stomach to digest shit this will allow it to shrink down and make more space for things like a larger water storage system.

These fuckers will be able to go for ages without getting a fucking drink, camels eat your heart out.

But now, for the specific specializations. We’re gonna go for two, as is the theme- one for hunting small critters and one for hunting large.

The small-critter-hunter is gonna be larger than the muskamee, much like coyotes are larger than hares. They’ll have the same sort’ve webbing adaptation they have though, able to just grab hold and immediately get to optimal eating. Still gonna have the claws and bony spikes to keep a solid grip while they do so. The toes on their first pair of legs will also have some digging ability to them, allowing them to get under and flip pelvore if they find them.

Again, not a lot of changes, but it works for them. These shall be the ampliven, for ‘ample hunter’, since they’ll have larger numbers than the others.

The large-critter-hunter is gonna be a bit more. They’re going to specialize in hunting the cankamee, which means while they’ll get the same webbing adaptation (is handy) they’re going to get larger than the ampliven, taller and sturdier. They’re also going to move into another all new skill for Grey Sea species-

Pack hunting.

These guys are going to form mated pairs, hunting together and raising their young, which in this case is more letting their young hang around for safety. Because cankamee are large, it’s more effective to hunt in twos than alone. To coordinate these hunts, their stridulations have gotten more complex to allow them to communicate basic things like ‘that one’.

Them we shall call cynamath, ‘sand dog’.

Now, we’ve gone over all the desert descendants of the celven, so let’s take a little break here to go over some shared physical traits, for future reference and work if nothing else.

First off, because nobody was nice enough to recommend numbers everything has three toes because Power of Three. Three toes, three fingers. Yes I am a nerd, if you didn’t notice.

Second off, limbs, these fuckers have, in order- 1 pair of forelimbs used for manipulation of the environment specifically food, 3 pairs of legs used for locomotion, 1 pair of almost winglike limbs on the back associated with a piece of textured armor they use for stridulation, 2 pairs of a sort’ve flippery-handy limb at the ass end for use in carrying stones and metals for absorption purposes, and 2 pairs of flippery-handy limbs at the far ass end for egg carrying purposes. On males the whole of the ass end in dedicated to material holding.

Next, sensory shit. There’s three main senses for perceiving the world around them- energy-sensing, hearing, and smell. Their ears take the form of frog-like tympanum, with one large set on either side of the head and a smaller one behind the shoulder of every leg. A series of gel-filled organs exist along the sides and back as well as in the head that form the energy-sensing system. Feathery scent-receptive tendrils follow the same lines along the sides, with a few appearing at the front of the head. Since so much sensory input comes from so many parts of the body the brain is vaguely decentralized, by which I mean a good chunk of it resides in the head and the rest just sort’ve trails down the back in a protective shell of iron sulfate-based bone.

Side effect of of their iron sulfide-based skeletons- all Grey Sea vertebrates can detect magnetic fields, and as such always have a sense for what direction is north. Some babes will get funky with this later.

Coloration, straight up don’t come into play. They don’t need it for camouflage, they don’t need it to handle the sun, they don’t need shit. Pick a color and/or pattern and go hogwild, have fun.

And, with that over with, we move forward.

The geoppoie have no real changes to note. Seriously, they just followed fuckers out here to eat them. “But there’s no water our here at least” speak for yourselves these fuckers have the power of dig. They can burrow down to water and eventually something is going to figure out you can take advantage of that. As it is right now the females are the biggest predator around so nobody is starting shit yet.

Which leave us with the sculpanettes. The taurthyre aren’t going to be coming out here, mostly because they’re already heavy and their method of locomotion doesn’t really work well with kaminobrachs and eating them. Too high, can’t climb. The other two will be moving to the desert though, because they can.

Both will be gaining the water storage system and both will be figuring out water absorption because it works best for them, but beyond that-

Well, beyond that the pelvore won’t be changing at all. Getting larger maybe but that’s about it. They’ll do a bit more to head for living things as well, like kaminobrach sprouts and sleeping or downed critters, because they need that sweet sweet water.

It’s the scurufla that are going to be making some major changes. And they’re going to be fun ones. For the most part they’re going to function as standard, but their shells have developed several segments. This doesn’t come into play most of the time, but when they begin dehydrating these babies will go into a brumation state and curl up into a vaguely spherical shape, allowing the wind to carry them until they eventually hit water. They’ll also do this when an ampliven tries to flip them, leaving the predator unable to get at their vulnerable underbodies.

They are, drumroll please, amenspher, ‘wind balls’.

And lo, but we have a basic desert ecosystem. Next up is either going to be the meeting of the animals, the progression into the mountains, or everything continuing to refine. We’ll see.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

Mesozoic Monthly: Gryposaurus

The Late Cretaceous-aged (~75 million-year-old) large-nosed North American hadrosaur (aka duck-billed dinosaur) Gryposaurus by ginjaraptor on DeviantArt.

Anyone who frequents the Pittsburgh area is familiar with ‘Pittsburghese,’ the regional dialect given full voice in what was once voted America’s ugliest accent (a fact that does not diminish our pride for it). One of my personal favorite Pittsburghese words is “nebby,” which translates to “nosy” for any non-local readers. “Nebby” can be used in a variety of contexts: the distant relative asking prying questions about your love life at Thanksgiving dinner is nebby, the pet cat trying to crawl under the bathroom door to see what you’re doing is nebby, and even the statue of Carnegie Museum of Natural History mascot Dippy the Diplodocus, silently judging your driving on Forbes Avenue, is nebby. We can assume other dinosaurs were nebby too, since so many had huge noses to stick into things. One of the biggest noses in the fossil record belongs to Gryposaurus notabilis, the star of this edition of Mesozoic Monthly.

Gryposaurus belongs to a group of dinosaurs called hadrosaurs, which are commonly referred to as duck-billed dinosaurs. Hadrosaurs were herbivores that got their nickname from the flat, toothless, somewhat duck-like beaks at the tips of their jaws. These beaks were used to bite through tough vegetation so that it could be ground up by the numerous teeth embedded in the rear half of the jaws. There are two main groups of hadrosaurs, both of which are featured in CMNH’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition. Probably the more famous group is the Lambeosaurinae, known for their distinctive head crests that housed extra-long nasal passages. Virtually everyone can recognize the incredible backward-curving crest of Parasaurolophus (featured multiple times in the Jurassic Park franchise), and visitors to CMNH will also know the helmet-like crest of Corythosaurus. The second group is the Saurolophinae (traditionally known as the Hadrosaurinae), which typically lack bony crests. You can find a simulated carcass of the saurolophine Edmontosaurus (lovingly known to those of us in CMNH’s Section of Vertebrate Paleontology as “Dead Ed”) between the two imposing Tyrannosaurus skeletons in Dinosaurs in Their Time.

A gallery of hadrosaur heads. Top left: the lambeosaurine Parasaurolophus at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (photo by the author). Top right: the lambeosaurine Corythosaurus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (photo from Wikimedia Commons). Bottom left: the saurolophine Edmontosaurus at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (photo from Wikimedia Commons). Bottom right: the saurolophine Gryposaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City (photo from Wikimedia Commons).

As a crestless hadrosaur, Gryposaurus was a saurolophine. Despite its lack of crest, its skull still had pizzazz: its nasal bone arched dramatically, giving the impression of a ‘Roman nose’ (which is very noticeable if you compare the skulls of Edmontosaurus and Gryposaurus in the image above). The name Gryposaurus notabilis means “notable hooked-nose lizard” in homage to this feature. G. notabilis is the type species of Gryposaurus; type species are typically the first ones to be named in a genus, and therefore become the reference to which all new specimens that may belong to that genus are compared. The other species (such as G. monumentensis, shown in the photo montage above) are similar enough to the type species that they can be referred to the genus Gryposaurus, but they differ in too many ways to be assigned to G. notabilis itself.

Occasionally, paleontologists will revisit a fossil species or genus and decide that it is either too similar to another to justify its own name or that certain specimens are too different to be grouped under the same name. Kritosaurus, another saurolophine with a ‘Roman nose,’ has fallen victim to both of these circumstances. It was originally considered its own genus, but was subsequently revisited by paleontologists who decided that it was so similar to Gryposaurus that the two genera were lumped together under the name Gryposaurus (when combining taxonomic groups, the first name that was published is the one that gets used). However, later paleontologists reviewed the evidence again and split a single species of Kritosaurus back out of Gryposaurus. The famous sauropod (giant long-necked herbivorous dinosaur) Brontosaurus underwent a similar series of changes over the years: originally, it and Apatosaurus were considered different animals, but after a review they were lumped together under Apatosaurus. Recently, the two were split apart again and the name Brontosaurus was revived (to the delight of fans of that name around the world).

It is not uncommon in paleontology for species to be lumped or split based on new or revisited evidence. When you consider that the decision to name new fossil species is often based on fragmentary, highly incomplete skeletons, you can see why it might be difficult to get things right the first time! These changes sometimes give people the impression that paleontologists “can’t make up their minds” or “contradict themselves,” but we must remember two things. First, that science is meant to change based on new evidence. Second, there have been thousands of paleontologists over the course of history, and every one of them is an individual person who can draw their own conclusions based on the same evidence. Although the resulting changes can disappoint fans of a specific animal or hypothesis, revision is normal and beneficial for the field as a whole. Scientists are supposed to be nebby – it’s how we make new discoveries!

Lindsay Kastroll is a volunteer and paleontology student working in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[ckret2]

crashorpie replied to your post: I can’t get on board with any sci-fi plot that...

is this @ the Golgafrincham plotline in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe/Life, the Universe, and Everything

No, Douglas Adams can get away with anything he wants.

And Earth in HGTTG is a supercomputer programmed to calculate a specific question and custom-designed by luxury planet builders, and so it’s possibly much younger than it looks, with earlier fossil records having been deliberately inserted to give the planet an air of verisimilitude. I don’t recall if the books specify how old Earth is (and I wasn’t able to turn it up in a quick google), but the fact that the fjords of Norway were custom-sculpted and still visible when the planet’s destroyed suggests it’s a pretty young planet.

More importantly though, HGTTG is absurdist comedy, so nonsensical violations of how we think things ought to work is par for the course.

(tbh, the one thing that actually bothered me about the Golgafrincham plotline is that, if humans are an invasive species, wouldn’t that have thrown off Earth’s calculations and prevented it from figuring out the question?)

No, this is actually specifically a callout for Prometheus, which opens up with “an alien who’s obviously a musclebound albino human man goes to Earth and dissolves into dust, and from the DNA of his body evolves all life. Presumably this includes life starting from single-celled organisms and slowly working its way up from trilobites and the like; and yet somehow by the time this DNA re-evolved into humans they were so similar that when they tracked down this alien species they did a DNA test and identify these aliens as a match with humans.”

Now.

You can tell humans apart from chimps with DNA tests. As in, our closest relatives. We’ve got 99% of our DNA in common with chimps. For them to go “oh these aliens have human DNA” they need to be more similar to us than chimps. If you follow the human evolutionary tree backwards, it goes:

human apes monkeys primates+rodents+rabbits+couple other close relatives all those+whales+bats+most carnivorous mammals+most hoofed mammals every mammal that isn’t a marsupial every mammal that doesn’t lay eggs every mammal proto-mammals the ancestors of all reptiles+birds+mammals the ancestors of all four-limbed animals bony fish the ancestors of all vertebrates (which at this point, meant only fish) worms the ancestors of all animals shit like sea sponges fungi slime molds single-celled organisms that don’t even have nuclei one musclebound albino human alien

This alien dissolved into nothing and the random DNA that scattered from his dissolving body re-evolved up from bacteria through fungi through worms through fish through four-legged creatures through multiple kinds of mammals through monkeys and somehow, by the vague acts of evolution, ACCIDENTALLY recreated a creature SO SIMILAR to the starting alien that humans can match their DNA against it.

The only possible logical explanation would be that something was coded into the initial species’s DNA that would somehow push later generations toward evolving back toward that initial template, like that’s some sort of “default” form that any DNA evolution based on this strain would trend towards—but if that’s the case, then human-like things would be evolving over and over as the evolutionary history on our planet repeatedly strained toward trying to match that initial blueprint. It would be like how a whole bunch of different crustaceans keep trying to evolve into crabs except the entire animal kingdom would keep trying to evolve into humans. Is there any evidence that that happened in this fictional universe? No! That means humans re-evolved almost identically by random chance!

It’s seven years later and I’m still mad.

[sciencespies]

Here's Why This Smithsonian Scientist Studies Ancient Pathogens

https://sciencespies.com/nature/heres-why-this-smithsonian-scientist-studies-ancient-pathogens/

Here's Why This Smithsonian Scientist Studies Ancient Pathogens

Smithsonian Voices National Museum of Natural History

Get to Know the Scientist Studying Ancient Pathogens at the Smithsonian

April 14th, 2020, 6:00AM / BY

Margaret Osborne

Sabrina Sholts is the curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. (Paul Fetters, Smithsonian)

Meet a SI-entist: The Smithsonian is so much more than its world-renowned exhibits and artifacts. It is a hub of scientific exploration for hundreds of researchers from around the world. Once a month, we’ll introduce you to a Smithsonian Institution scientist (or SI-entist) and the fascinating work they do behind the scenes at the National Museum of Natural History.

When Dr. Sabrina Sholts curated the exhibition “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World” in 2018,” she never imagined that two years later, the museum would close because of a coronavirus pandemic.

As a biological anthropologist focused on health, diseases are part of Sholts’ specialty. Sholts studies how human, animal and environmental health are connected, lately focusing on our microbiome—the communities of microorganisms that thrive on and inside our bodies – along with the pathogens that can cause illness.

Sholts tells us more about her work at the National Museum of Natural History and the “Outbreak” exhibition and gives advice to the next generation of scientists in the following interview.

Can you describe what you do as curator of biological anthropology at the museum?

I study the biological aspects of humanity – the biological molecules, structures, and interactions that are involved in being human. I’m particularly interested in health. It’s fascinating how we can understand disease as an expression of how we interact with our environment — the environment being pretty much everything that’s not our bodies. So from metals in our water, soil and food to microbes that are not only part of us and good for us, but also those that can be harmful.

My research can be a bit diverse, but for me, it’s easy to see the themes — I’m looking at connections between human, animal and environmental health to understand how human impact on ecosystems can affect us.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve got a great group of students in my lab right now, Rita Austin, Andrea Eller, Audrey Lin and Anna Ragni – as well as wonderful colleagues across the museum. We’re doing a few different things.

One large project that’s been going on for several years is looking at indicators of health and disease in our primate collections from different human-modified environments. Andrea conceived the project, and we’re looking at how we might relate some of those conditions to changes in the microbiome.

I’m also working with Audrey and fellow curator Logan Kistler on ancient pathogen research using the museum’s vertebrate zoology collections. We’re interested in the evolutionary history of some human viruses that originate in wildlife, like the one that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Some of my work is what we call bioarcheology. It’s the study of human remains in archeological contexts. I was recently in Amman with my colleagues Wael Abu Azizeh and Rémy Crassard, where I was looking at an ancient skeleton that they excavated as part of their ongoing expedition in southern Jordan. Bones and teeth can provide more information about the diet, health, and movement of people in the past.

Sholts works on an archaeological skeleton in Jordan. (Rémy Crassard)

How has your research changed since the COVID-19 pandemic?

We can’t go into the museum, we can’t access specimens, we can’t use our labs and we can’t go into the field. We can’t do a lot of the things we’ve come to rely on for the research that we’ve been trained to do.

But already you see people adapting, brainstorming and really trying to work around these challenges in new ways. So we’re having these virtual conversations, and thinking about how we can continue with our research in creative ways. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m forming new, virtual collaborations – not just for doing science but also in communicating its role in all of this.

What excites you about working at the Smithsonian?

I’ve got the perfect combination of doing really exciting research, and also being able to see and experience how it can be shared. I didn’t imagine when I got the job that I would become so passionate about outreach and connecting to the public through our programs and our exhibits — we can impact people in so many ways.

Do you have a favorite item in the collection or one that sticks out to you at the moment?

That’s a really hard thing to ask a curator. We spend so much time researching collection items and writing papers based on our findings. Some scientists compare publishing a paper to giving birth. You can get very attached to every single one of these publications and whatever they’re about.

So we’ve just “birthed” another one. It’s about the cranium of a chimpanzee, which we came across in our survey of the primate collections. It’s notable because there are tooth marks on it that suggest that it was chewed on by a somewhat large mammalian carnivore, maybe a leopard. Along the way, we gave it a cute name — we call it “Chimp Chomp.” The paper, literally called “A Chomped Chimp,” just came out. I have to say, seeing all the lovely photos, right now, that’s probably my favorite.

What are you most proud of accomplishing so far in your career?

I’m very proud of what we’ve done with the “Outbreak” exhibit. Particularly because of its “One Health” message and huge network of supporters and partners that we convened. The exhibit shows people how and why new diseases emerge and spread, and how experts work together across disciplines and countries to lower pandemic risks.

A pandemic is certainly not something that we knew would happen during the exhibit’s run. You hope an exhibit like that won’t become so relevant as it has with the COVID-19 outbreak. But I’m grateful that it’s prepared me to help the public understand what’s going on right now and communicate the science of it.

Sholts works with her team to develop content for the “Outbreak” exhibition. (Sally Love, Smithsonian)

What advice would you give to your younger self or to the next generation of biological anthropologists?

Appreciate the value of having someone to guide you and mentor you — someone who really cares about you. Understand its significance and carry that relationship throughout your career, if you can.

And be open-minded. Don’t be afraid to work at the intersections of where disciplines and fields traditionally divide us. Have conversations that may put you at a disadvantage in terms of what you know, or what’s familiar, but from which you can learn a lot and hear different perspectives. Embrace a broad skill set and a really diverse community of peers and partners.

Why is having a diverse community of peers important?

We need different ideas. We need to see things from every possible angle to get the most out of anything we study, learn and understand. I think that if you only interact with and listen to people who are like you, you limit the kinds of conversations you have. You’re going to miss some other valuable ways of looking at things.

Sholts looks at data from a CT scan with colleagues at the National Museum of Natural History. (Smithsonian)

Have you had any mentors or role models that helped get you where you are today? Is that something that you think about now that you’re at the top of your field?

I’ve had a number of really significant mentors and guides on this journey, going all the way back to even before high school. I credit them all.

When I was a student, I was operating with so much support. I had the independence to pursue something that I was interested in. That’s something I try to do with my students: give them the freedom, flexibility and encouragement to really pursue their interests as they grow.

I take very seriously the privilege to be able to support such amazing young scientists and to facilitate the incredible work that they’re doing and that we can do together.

Related stories: ‘One Health’ Could Prevent the Next Coronavirus Outbreak Meet the Smithsonian’s Newest Chief Scientist New Smithsonian Exhibit Spotlights ‘One Health’ to Reduce Pandemic Risks

Margaret Osborne is an intern in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Her journalism has appeared in the Sag Harbor Express and aired on WSHU public radio. Margaret is an undergraduate at Stony Brook University, where she majors in journalism and German language and literature and minors in environmental studies. She’s spending her last semester in Washington, D.C. and will graduate in May.

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