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Since Alien Worlds just came out of Netflix (it’s pretty meh) I thought I’d make a thread
Resources :
https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Category:TutorialReccomended Projects:
https://sites.google.com/site/worldofserina/
>A world colonized by Canaries, Sunflowers and othershttp://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5694942/1/
>A Chinese cave with very strange inhabitantshttp://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/8050626/1/
>An Antarctic island home to strange lovecraftian creatureshttps://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?showtopic=67
>The Seychelles are a collection of miraculous islands, carrying a precious cargo of life from vanished world. But what if the Granitic Seychelles were merely the mountain peaks of a much larger island? What strange life might call such an island home?https://www.deviantart.com/biofauna25/gallery/39451145/Epimethius
>Several hundred lightyears from Earth, the planet Epimethius is remarkably similar in its composition, but it is larger, has greater weather extremes, is subject to frequent solar radiation storms, and full of bizarre life forms.https://www.deviantart.com/dragonthunders/gallery/49884273/The-Future-Is-Far
>Be the spectators of the history of life on earth in the next million of years in the future.https://www.deviantart.com/herofan135/gallery/45327524/The-urban-future
>This project takes place 10 million years into the future, in a world were the entire planet consists of one giant city.https://www.deviantart.com/biofauna25/gallery/43433793/odin
>A strange planet filled with stranger creatures with even stranger life cycleshttps://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?showtopic=2642
>The Planet of the Venezuelan Red Howlers -
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I’ve been drawing some shitty spec evo stuff about a future mammal clade that takes on the sizes and shapes of sauropods and theropods due to evolutionary convergence.
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Yeah I’m aware that it’s not an original idea. Just couldn’t think of any other shapes they would attain in order to achieve those sizes, since the only frame of reference we have for terrestrial life that big is dinosaurs.
I don’t even hate some of the designs in that link, aside from the bad use of markers and the style which is clearly furry-derived.-
I’ll post some of it anyway.
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I really wonder what kind of shapes giant mammals could take. All we have to go off is giraffes, paraceratherium and elephants like paleoloxodon. I’m sure those could be scaled up a bunch to reach sauropod sizes with some minor evolutionary adaptations, and long necks seem like a sensible adaptation.
What really beats me is predators. Knowing that theropods were the only semi-warmblooded land predators big enough to reach sizes of 10+ meters, and with mammals like pic related taking on shapes very reminiscent of theropods, makes it seem to me like slapping an andrewsarchus head on a t. rex body isn’t as stupid as it seems.-
I don’t think carnivorous land mammals could reach T.rex sizes.
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It’s said that land mammals can’t get bigger than paraceratheriums because of their heavy bones. I doubt predators would come even close. The biggest mammalian land predator was some kind of bear, only slightly larger than a polar bear.
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Heavy bones is something that can be solved by making them hollow. Someone in another thread mentioned that elephants already have hollow skulls, similar to sauropod bones.
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Note the large air pockets.
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Are there mammals that don’t have sinus cavities?
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IIRC one of the other factors was that huge mammal gestation was too dangerous, it already takes 2 years for an african elephant to be born, if a argentinosaurus sized mammal existed it would probably have a long as fuck gestation period
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Another instance of mammal bipedalism in a related animal.
The evolutionary tendencies of these "Leptictida" was to increase in size, but they went extinct relatively shortly after their appearance as a result of the colder climates and subsequent loss of forestation in the Oligocene. Colder climates with decreased oxygen levels like the one Earth experienced not too long ago tend to lead to smaller life forms. Who knows what sizes these and other mammals could’ve obtained if the warm temperatures and high humidity of the Eocene would have persisted.-
I just looked up mammal bipedalism and found this hilarious video, I didn’t know they walked like this. That tail counterbalance is crazy, they look like they’re always about to fall onto their front limbs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B95NdS77fZM-
He little dino.
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like indricotheres and pangolins/jerboas? lets see what you’ve got
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I have a theory. Let’s say we solve the problem of overpopulation in the short term. Birth rates drop but, as reproducing is a choice now, natural selection pushes us in the direction of voluntary baby making machines. Overpopulation is inevitable because of evolution.
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>life strives to be as successful as possible
>if life becomes too successful it destroys the ecosystem
this shit is bugged -
isnt that what predators are for
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That’s what wars are for
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That’s what putting chemicals in the water that turn people gay is for
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How would a gay frog even work? The reproduce externally.
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https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
>“These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” he said. “In an environment where they are competing with unexposed animals, they have zero chance of reproducing.”Had he said "sterile" instead of "gay" he wouldn’t be such a meme. But yeah this stuff does get into the water. It’s a pollution problem, not a conspiracy.
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Yeah, I know. I was talking about how homosexuality in frogs is a really confusing concept though.
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they still amplex, so they could do that with other males i guess.
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First world countries had a flat population that simply replaced itself. We’d be fine if it weren’t for the 500 billion third worlders burning everything down in their path.
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It’s slowly self-resolving as values adjust, third-world countries urbanize, and cheap family planning options become available.
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I haven’t done anything specoevo related in nearly a year now. I just don’t have any ideas
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anybody watching this dumb freaking netflix alien special?
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No, is it any good?
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the actual science segments are grade school tier explaining how gravity and telescopes work, and how birds fly
and the alien stuff is absolutely illogical
the first animal they show is a flying creature that doesn’t flap it’s wings to stay aloft but just rides air currents indefinitely and grazes on pollen like a sly whale and it has no limbs aside from wings, and is unable to get back into the air if it ever lands on the groundthat shit would go extinct immediately if it had to fly to stay alive and couldn’t launch itself. It would be fine if they said it rarely lands, but to say (and then show) if it ever does in fact land on the ground it just gets stuck there and dies is absolutely scrotebrained
hard pass, it’s not speculative evo, it’s creating fictional creatures that couldn’t possibly exist and giving them a back story
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Yep, pretty damn basic
Does this count? Is there more?
Indeed
https://superduque777.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/3-man-after-man.pdf
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the worst thing about it is the bait and switch, 90% of it isn’t even alien stuff, it’s random factoids about earth
the alien stuff is maybe 2-3 minutes of unique animations then just cut up into B-roll and repeated over and over again-
My main problem with it was not enough creatures (the same problem I had with extraterrestrial and future is wild)
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>here is this weird looking spider thing that lives in the desert
>here is the same species living in the arctic except its bioluminescent and furry
so why make it the same creature at all? and if the twilight zone is the most inhabitable area, why would they ever venture away from it?they also don’t seem to understand how water systems work. it doesn’t seem like water wasn’t abundant on that planet, just that it was very hot on the hot side so the water evaporated quickly. So it should be 100% humidity and perpetually raining and covered in vegetation if that’s the case
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>so why make it the same creature at all?
To show the adaptability of the species/laziness
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The thing that really made no sesne is that they kept insisting that the species was polymorphic like ants. But from what they presented, for that to be the case they’d all have to come back to the twilight zone to mate and spread the pupae, otherwise they’d just speciate
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Even if they all breed in the twilight zone speciation would occur in the unlikely event that they’re well-suited for both sides.
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The male sky grazer’s tail thing also didn’t make sense. They said that fastest male was the one that got to mate, but their large tails were a sexual display, but also hinders their speed. So wouldn’t males with small tails breed more often because of their high speed, a d eventually breed large tails out?
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yes, sexual flamboyant display is for when females choose a male
it’s a different breeding strategy than male following the female around saying lemme smash lemme smash lemme smash until she relents and gives init doesn’t seem like the female of this species cares what the male looks like, she just goes with which ever one can catch her
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Does this count? Is there more?
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Does anyone have the meme where it’s just this template, but it’s an All Tomorrow’s reference?
Post-humanity has the belt, while the Qu cower.
Can’t find that image for the life of me… -
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Just watched the first episode of Alien Worlds.
The planetology explanations aren’t great. It takes many transit observations to begin to suspect that a planet is the cause of periodic star dimming.
There are quite a few physics and terminology issues. Having denser atmosphere doesn’t mean flying animals can be twice as heavy for the same size until you get to crazy atmospheric densities. Even with a thick atmosphere, the balloon plants and animals do not work as depicted, they need much larger gas envelopes. Not every updraft is a thermal, some are caused by wind meeting rising terrain. Large animals with neither endoskeleton nor exoskeleton work better rather than worse under high gravity?
Some of the biological strategy makes no sense. The skygrazers never land even though their targets are both silent and hard to see at night, and takeoff and landing is easier than on Earth? The floating skygrazer hunter want to drag their prey to death, but they give up after five minutes despite the fact that they’re using almost no energy once they’ve latched on? The male skygrazers sacrifice flight efficiency in a sexual display but no mate selection occurs on the female end and no intraspecific competition is shown?
I’m also not crazy about how hard they’re trying to make this a human story, or how much CGI footage is reused. That kind of thing made some sense for cable, but I don’t think it works well for streaming niche programing.
Overall I give it a B- for general species design and a C- for thinking about what you’re saying, just woke af on the first episode.
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I can even give them a break and accept, ok a heavy body will make it difficult for them to take off
but they live on cliff faces and then compare it to paragliders. Know what paragliders do? they jump off of something high up to create the speed needed for liftso if they wanted to create a more realistic animal it should be something that spends most of the time up in the air but then comes to rest on the side of cliff faces
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https://i.imgur.com/YGc0woQ.gif
For the second episode:
Pentapods:
"dominant life form"
Don’t speciate to occupy radically different environments
Have a rotating gait and no hint of bilateral symmetry anywhere except for the extreme exception of the top limbs. Why not walk with the sensor limb forward? And if you’re doing that then be less radial.This episode spent so much time talking about life on Earth that there’s not much to complain about other than having heard it all before.
Episode three:
No idea why high insolation is being connected to a binary star system here. Just orbiting a bit closer to one star would have the same effect, or change the stellar output. I also have no idea how this planet is supposed to be as cool as they’re saying it is.
Grazing animals with trilobed eyes like mantis shrimp? STRETCHY BONES WITH ZERO DISCUSSION? Cocoon grappling lines with no discussion *and* that’s the easiest way for a cocoon to end up in a tree? The primary food source of the grazers is a super cordyceps?
I do like the alternation of generations in animals like plants do on Earth.
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the weird part is they didn’t even mention cordyceps in that episode, its like they tried to sell their mind control mushrooms as an OC donut steel
and I’m not sure why they even need the monkey to spawn. They’ve infected the rabbit already, there’s your biomass, just kill the rabbit
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I realized pretty quick its hard to come up with a predatory mammal with long jaws that doesn’t have some sort of passing resemblance to canids, even when all I used for references were baboons, tasmanian devils, creodonts and hyenas and no actual dogs.
The shape of the skull is largely formed by the dentation. All mammalean carnivorans have the sets of teeth we’re familiar with, incisors, canines, premolars and carnassials, and it made sense to utilize them here as well. Unless you’re a totally off the wall clade of mammal like the cetaceans, who all have a row of similar conical teeth, if not outright baleens. Which is cool to consider as well, making them landwhales, but I assumed these creatures would like the benefit of chewing, something whales can’t do.-
This should be a bit less doglike
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I like it, reminds me of a gorilla
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No clue what a giant predator would be colored like
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Well where does it live?
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It would have stripes if it lived in a dense area like a jungle and had to sneak around. A large predator like what you drew would probably roam around in savannas and grasslands, so it’d likely just be brown, gray, or black like a bear or hog
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Depends. A T rex would have plenty of room to hunt in a redwood forest, for instance.
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That’s my point though, redwood forest has a bunch of space between the trees. Stripes are only helpful in dense vegetation.
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They’re useful with semidense canopies so there’s a lot of mottled lighting, or in scrublands where scrub achieves the same effect.
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We’ll just ignore the fact that bears and hogs mostly live in forests I guess.
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I was going to use elephants or some other megafauna as an example but they’re not predators. Still a large creature usually doesnt have a complex pattern
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Megafauna means any animal over 100lb or so, not just elephants and mammoths, kek.
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Depends on usage. Peer reviewed articles will usually specify the cutoff they’re using somewhere.
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I still think it’s too conventional looking. For a mammal to reach these sizes it would have to be so modified it might not have very much in common, visually speaking, with modern mammals at all.
Might redo the whole thing at one point.
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I think it would be better if the tail was a little chunker and the head a bit smaller. Right now it looks like it would fall down face first
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Heads aren’t nearly as heavy as they look in most animals. Tons of sinus cavity.
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The way I drew that skull would definitely make it extremely heavy. This is what I mean when the heavy modification would make it unrecognizable as a standard mammal.
If you look at a theropod skull, even a robust one like that of t. rex, it’s extremely thin looking with many large holes to make it much lighter. This skull is definitely more air than it is bone. Simply scaling up a regular mammal skull, like I did here woke af off various carnivores, would make it extremely heavy, even with air pockets in the bone itself. It would probably need similar large holes to the theropod skull to prevent it from being too heavy, especially for an active predator that balances its large head on a long neck, unlike say, an elephant. -
Adjusted skull shape, made less bulky through the miracle of holes.
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I think you cut some corners on that redraw. I like where it’s going but it needs a few more adjustments, especially the canine tooth socket. I’m also a little concerned about whether there’s room for adult teeth behind the baby teeth in this skull.
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Reading up on archosaur evolution and skull shape you eventually run into the antorbital fenestra, the hole in the skulls of many dinosaurs and birds that’s right in front of the eye. The antorbital fenestra likely housed an air-filled sac which lightening the skull’s weight significantly.
Apparently, certain mammals like rabbits, deer and certain extinct horses also had small antorbital fenestrae, so it’s not impossible for mammals to develop this as a means to lighten the skull as well.
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Oh yeah, absolutely not saying you shouldn’t do things like that. It’s just that you need to makes some other adjustments to account for it. Also the head shape on the meat drawing should probably change a little to account for it.
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Yeah a redraw is in order once the skull is finished.
I freaking wish more people would post in this thread though so it wouldn’t be just about my scrotebrained little basic theropod-mammal project. I wanna see more crazy shit about life evolution on dyson spheres from you fuckers.
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That’s looking much better.
I really wish I could post stuff like you’re posting but I can’t draw and don’t have the inclination to learn, so I’m stuck providing feedback and written ideas for others.
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Understood, written ideas are still interesting though, just because I draw doesn’t mean my ideas have more merit.
Also I’m down to these two, I wonder if the teeth should be smaller. -
To answer that question I think we need a life history with emphasis on feeding strategies and parental care. Also, are we keeping the standard mammalian dental replacement scheme or doing something different?
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I just want to go for whatever makes sense. Teeth should be shaped however they would serve a giant mammalian (terrestrial) carnivore best. These guys would be chasing down prey with nothing to catch their food except their jaws, lacking longer arms. As such the jaws should be rather long, and the teeth largely designed for snatching. Big canines in the front of the jaws like a wolf’s seem to make a lot of sense in that regard, especially since the big canine teeth are something unique to modern mammals and it would be a good way to communicate that these weird dinosaur-like creatures are not actually dinosaurs, with their rows of similarly shaped teeth.
But maybe it should be different. Large cetacean carnivores like basilosaurus used to have canines and prominent carnassial teeth, but lost them all, to the point where modern variants like killer whales have only conical teeth, kind of similar to what large theropods had. I’m not sure if that’s in order here, as I assume that’s just an adaptation to hunting in the ocean as opposed to land.Also what the thinking behind the chin protrusion on the bottom right?
It’s something seen in mammals with very large canines, and mostly it was a design choice. Taken from saber toothed cats, but giganotosaurus also had kind of a chin protrusion going.
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>Teeth should be shaped however they would serve a giant mammalian (terrestrial) carnivore best.
Okay, what kind of prey is it eating? What’s the litter size? At what proportion of adult size to the young start eating meat?I do think having this extra set of canines is probably not the way to go assuming teeth are replaced exactly once in adolescence. T rex could get away with having many grab-and-hold teeth that also served other purposes because when one got pulled out or broken another would replace it soon enough. The fact that mammals don’t get multiple tooth replacement really restricts them and is a big part of why so many mammals use forelimbs for prey holding compared to other animals. If anything I’d ditch the extra canines and make the true canines shorter and stockier but keep the long tooth roots. That’s how you do teeth that will hold prey for many kills while living long enough to support large offspring with no appreciable forelimbs.
>But maybe it should be different. Large cetacean carnivores like basilosaurus used to have canines and prominent carnassial teeth, but lost them all, to the point where modern variants like killer whales have only conical teeth, kind of similar to what large theropods had. I’m not sure if that’s in order here, as I assume that’s just an adaptation to hunting in the ocean as opposed to land.
I’d agree with that. Carnassials rely strongly on opposing forces like forelimb action or gravity or preferably both to get work done. The fact that toothed whales have none of that is why they’ve got conical teeth.>It’s something seen in mammals with very large canines, and mostly it was a design choice. Taken from saber toothed cats, but giganotosaurus also had kind of a chin protrusion going.
See this is why it’s good to also have an isometric view. I would have gotten that with a view from a different angle. -
Well, the young are nursed, as these are still mammals. A new clade, because placentals would not be able to reach such sizes, especially considering how big some of the herbivores of this clade I made up can get. So they either give embryonic birth or they have reverted back to a quasi egg-laying by thickening the amniotic sac, so that embryonic growth can take place outside of the body. Alternatively they do it like marsupials with pouches. Either way, they have embryonic birth, and the young are nursed with milk for a very long time before they can move on to meat.
The extra set of canines you see is something I yanked off of Andrewsarchus, and are actually enlarged incisors. It has an almost crocodilian feel to it and seems perfect for "snatching" prey, with not one but two pairs of "grabber teeth" up front. Again it’s more like an informed design choice, something I felt would "look good." Sadly we have no lower jaw for Andrewsarchus so I don’t know if it had these same incisors in the lower jaw, most paleoartists draw them only in the upper.
>Carnassials rely strongly on opposing forces like forelimb action or gravity or preferably both to get work done. The fact that toothed whales have none of that is why they’ve got conical teeth.
Lacking any forelimb action here, is this an argument in favor of conical teeth like that of a toothed whale?
I eel like a lot of spec evo artists forget the phrase "more than one way to skin a cat". Convergent evolution i very much a thing of course, but a single question can have multiple solutions.
Pic related, Thylacoleo was a diprotodont that became a predator. Its once herbivorous dentition evolved into teeth made for meat eating, its molars becoming weird long sheers
I read an article on thylacoleo the other day which interestingly stated that it didn’t seem to actually kill with its teeth or jaws, and instead used them to hold prey down while using its giant thumb claws to cut prey apart. Like the reverse of what a lion does.
Either way thylacoleo was a very robust animal and would be pretty hard to scale up, considering that "fuckhuge mammal predator in the theropod niche" is what I’m going for. -
Forgot Andrewsarchus pic featuring "extra canines".
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what a chad
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I’m not clear on why you think ditching long pregnancies helps with achieving large size.
Maybe the extra canines are fine. They just make me uneasy. I’d be interesting to read interpretations of how those helped Andrewsarchus.
>Lacking any forelimb action here, is this an argument in favor of conical teeth like that of a toothed whale?
No, but it is probably a reason that we seldom see forelimb reduction in mammals. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, but it’s something to thing about. -
>but it’s something to thing about.
And by that I mean you should have a good answer for why they lost their forelimbs. -
One of the main arguments I kept seeing when discussing gigantic mammals, aside from bone structure and digestion problems, is the fact that placental mammals would face significant problems trying to give birth. Mammals of great size would struggle significantly, not just in terms of logistics, but also in the amount of energy it would take to carry an embryo through its development. Giant creatures in general already struggle with energy, basically having to feed constantly in order to sustain themselves, and carrying a large infant on top of that would not only add a large amount of weight on top of their already stressed bodies, but also put them over the limit in terms of energy. Placental mammals severely limit their maximum size this way, and since this is all an exercise in how big a mammal could possibly get on land, that’s something I had to get rid of.
The loss of the forelimbs on these predators is for the same reason: to increase their maximum attainable size. A more conventional mammalian body plan, like a bear’s or cat’s for instance, would be too massive, and a four-limbed predator the size of a t. rex would be very sluggish – indeed it wouldn’t be able to chase or hunt effectively. Every half-decent prey item would outrun it with ease. So you want a predator that’s huge, but still light and mobile enough to actively hunt prey. Bipedalism seemed like the best option to me, something that the theropods also adapted to, and has appeared in mammals before. Developing a robust tail with strong caudofemoral musculature that aids in locomotion, powering the hind legs, would allow mammals to make that switch. And when all they’re basically using is their hind limbs for locomotion and jaws to capture prey, you can evolve to lose all of that mass that goes into the forelimbs, at the cost of increased mass in the tail.
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>Placental mammals severely limit their maximum size this way, and since this is all an exercise in how big a mammal could possibly get on land, that’s something I had to get rid of.
What’s the replacement concept then? I don’t see how embryonic birth into a pouch would help, other than reducing birth canal size. Please tell me more though.>The loss of the forelimbs on these predators is for the same reason: to increase their maximum attainable size. A more conventional mammalian body plan, like a bear’s or cat’s for instance, would be too massive, and a four-limbed predator the size of a t. rex would be very sluggish – indeed it wouldn’t be able to chase or hunt effectively.
I do agree that this is why it forelimb reduction happened in theropods and their ancestors. You start by making the forelimbs shorter and more gracile with the hindlimbs doing the real work and the forelimbs just assisting with balance, prey retention, and stance adjustment. Then a very few clades reduced further from there. I just don’t see the incentive to reduce further from there (i.e. making the limbs useless for any movement, prey retention, or feeding behavior) in mammals considering how irreplaceable their teeth are. Forelimbs in something like Dilophosaurus or maybe Megalosaurus seem like the mammlian limit to me (without changing how tooth replacement works) at a stretch if you’re very careful about dentition design.
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> I just don’t see the incentive to reduce further from there (i.e. making the limbs useless for any movement, prey retention, or feeding behavior) in mammals considering how irreplaceable their teeth are.
That’s a very good point. Truth be told, they look better with forelimbs, especially since mammalian hands are so good at prey retention. I do have certain smaller versions of this animal with semiopposable thumbs that do just that, pic related. The loss of the limbs would only occur in the extreme variants that reach enormous sizes.So retaining useful forelimbs would solve the problem of tooth wear, but after some basic googling I find that tooth replacement also occurs in mammals, specifically elephants, manatees and kangaroos. From wikipedia:
>During the evolution of Therapsida, there was a period during which mammals were so small and short-lived that wear on the teeth yielded no significant selection pressure to constantly replace them.
Perhaps with the presence of such selection pressures, these mammals could "re-learn" to regrow lost teeth. It seems like there’s precedent (elephants and manatees are both Afrotheria, which bodes well for me since I imagined these creatures to be indirectly descended from tenrecs, which are also Afrotherians) – and it would seem a small feat compared to all the extreme body modifications these creatures have already undergone due to selection pressure. -
>and it would seem a small feat compared to all the extreme body modifications these creatures have already undergone due to selection pressure.
What other body modifications are there? -
>What other body modifications are there?
Reproductive and skeletal, with most of them having "hollow" bones and lots of internal air pocket to reduce their mass, similar to elephants and dinosaurs. -
Is postcranial skeletal pneumaticity a thing in elephants? If so, news to me.
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Messing with some poses and skull shapes.
I read it somewhere but now I can’t find any other references on it, seems like it was bs.
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Third skull seems a little long. Why such a low posture?
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Lower posture was mostly to make it look more mammalian and less saurian, with a high arched back and upward curving tail more like kangaroos or pic related. Despite sharing a lot of visual elements with theropod I want them to be unmistakably mammalian.
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To be fair the afrotherians are sorta cheating they just stagger molar development so the come in sequentially.
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Also what the thinking behind the chin protrusion on the bottom right?
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I bet this will also look considerably less dog-like once it has flesh on it.
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Episode four:
Now this is breaking some ground as far as these series go, and that deserves praise. I do have to wonder why the robots are flying rather than using tracks, but maybe it’s clarketech.
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>I’m also not crazy about how hard they’re trying to make this a human story
It needs to be a human story to appeal to the normos
>It’s getting another season
What do you think they’ll cover next?
If the sophont species of Terra is so smart, how come they didn’t make a giant spaceship to live on?
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Yeah, I wasn’t too impressed either. Apart from the problems you pointed out, I kept getting the feeling that I was being talked down to.
>Hey guys, did you know the dinosaurs *weren’t* the first complex, multicellular life!?!?!
Were they? Really? Wow! I honestly thought we went straight from algae or whatever to fukken Stegosaurus you condescending donkey bollock.
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I’ve thought about this situation in which animals in the future may evolve to feed directly off of electricity
in the past there wouldn’t ever be a consistent source but now humans have made it so it’s everywhere
I imagine birds perched on power lines feeding off of the electricity through specialized organs in their feet-
I see something like that making sense on a gas giant planet where creatures float among eternal storms.
When mankind kicks the bucket, our electric grids will follow.-
A gas giant is the last place you want floaters. The low molecular weight atmosphere is a killer for buoyancy.
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I think there was a Timothy Zahn novel along those lines. Manta’s Gift.
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I would think fungi would be the most likely candidates for this.
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Why is fur color so limited compared to scales and feathers?
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There are two main reasons animals evolve vibrant colours – sexual selection and aposematism.
Mammals generally have worse colour vision than other animals. Most humans have 3 cones in our eyes which gives us our standard colour range, colourblind humans and most other mammals have 2 so colours like red and green or blue and yellow appear the same, and most non-mammals have 4 so they can see things like ultraviolet or infrared. This means having vibrant colours for sexual display would be pretty pointless since a prospective mate wouldn’t be able to notice them. It’s worth noting that primates are one of the few mammal groups with good colour vision, and primates are also the most colourful mammals (e.g mandrills).
Aposematism is when an animal is brightly coloured as a way to warn predators that it’s poisonous. There are very few poisonous mammals so it’d be pretty pointless.
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Even primates have a very limited range of fur colors compared to feathers and scales, and tons of mammals have to deal with reptiles and bird as predators or prey.
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I wonder if mammalian coloration is so simple because we all descended from burrowers who thrived in low light conditions and had no need for flashy colors, and that our eyesight adjusted accordingly so that all we could really see well was varying shades of green and brown.
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>most non-mammals have 4 so they can see things like ultraviolet or infrared
makes me wonder, they make glasses for color blind people and the lens fills the deficit in their eyes
think they could make lenses that allow you to see the full spectrum in the way the world is meant to be seen?-
Probably not, I’m guessing your brain wouldn’t properly process the information since we’re only meant to have 3 cones.
But I don’t really know exactly how sight/color is translated in the brain.-
have you ever seen the forbidden color? the color that exists between yellow and blue. No not green
it’s a color that doesn’t exist naturally because under normal circumstances yellow and blue will turn green when together, but you can trick your brain by putting yellow into one eye and blue into the other your brain will combine them and it wont be green but rather a yellowish blue or in my case I see more of a bluish yellow
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This is probably done to death, but what will mankind look like in a million years? Considering creatures often evolve to adapt to their environment and mankind is skilled at altering their environment to suit their needs instead, has human evolution hit a kind of plateau? Or are we still evolving at a fast rate
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we will be heavily cybernetic by that point. why evolve when you can just engineer?
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Huge numbers of people are likely to dramatically self-modify over that timespan, to the point that some of them may have difficulty telling that the other is human
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we will be heavily cybernetic by that point. why evolve when you can just engineer?
I’m not sure human beings will have access to advanced technology for more than 1000 years.
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Woke af on what?
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I’m pessimistic about the course of human civilization.
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Sure, but it would be pretty hard to wipe out everything. Only a small region needs to keep it up.
Also, we could get blown back to the Paleolithic, 100% forget everything, and be left with only ten thousand survivors, and still reinvent what’s necessary to accomplish stuff like that within a million years.
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that’s the fault of globalism. There is no way humans can survive with this globalist mind set that we need to protect and care for every other human on earth. It’s ironically a determent of the collective to act like we are a collective
if technologically and socially advanced societies stopped letting the slackers pull them down there’s nothing we couldn’t accomplish. but the dead weight needs to be cut off because it’s only doomed to rot usfictional country A has 1,000,000 people and cares about education, peaceful discourse, and family planning
fictional country B has 25,000,000 people that have room temperature IQs, believe in honor killings, and have men fathering dozens of children out of wedlock with multiple women
fictional country As only choice is to just ignore B and cut them off. But it wont, it will open it’s arms and welcome them in, become overwhelmed, the well will be poisoned, everyone gets bonked in the end-
>There is no way humans can survive with this globalist mind set that we need to protect and care for every other human on earth.
That’s really only an idea that people keep as long as they themselves are doing okay. I can’t see it causing the entire world to collapse, though large portions of it collapsing would obviously entail big economic setbacks for the remainder. But that’s due to global trade, not a desire to help others. -
>Implying immigrants don’t mostly integrate within a single generation
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don’t give me that, we’re all fully aware of immigrants that have lived in the US for 30 years and still don’t speak a word of english
NYs china town is a perfect example of this, it’s just expanding and absorbing the things around it. Little italy doesn’t even exist anymore because it got assimilated
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>we’re all fully aware of immigrants that have lived in the US for 30 years and still don’t speak a word of english
First off, flat bullshit. They may not speak good english but the only people who don’t learn any were already retirees when they arrived.Second, that’s not the next generation, is it? Their children speak the local predominant language fluently and are well-versed in local culture.
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disagree
and as a side note if you have the flag of any other nation hanging anywhere in your house you need to fuck right off. ONE NATION -
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I’ve been brainstorming an idea for an unusual specbio project.
Essentially an massive self-sustaining aquarium inside an enormous O’neill cylinder of ayy lmao construction in orbit around Saturn. The cylinder measures 1200km long by 400km in diameter, but because it is mostly hollow it only has the mass of a large asteroid. It’s rotation produces exactly 1G on its inner surface, and a light fixture in the center mimics sunlight.
The ayys visited Earth during the late Devonian era 360 million years ago and stocked the cylinder with assorted marine fauna including Trilobites, shelled Cephalopods, Placoderm fish, and others. Human astronauts discover the still-functioning habitat in the near future and encounter descendants of the original Devonian fauna brought aboard which had 360 million years to adapt to life in space.
Y/N?
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Sounds cool, it’s more scifi than specevo but maybe that makes it all the more interesting.
Did you have any ideas about the way the life onboard would have evolved
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Tell me about the biomes
Also you’re gonna use ayy magic to explain some incostincencies or you have thought out them already?-
I imagined mostly shallow (200 meters or less) tropical and subtropical marine environment with scattered islands up to about the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Substrate may accumulate to form new islands, and erosion would submerge old ones, in a manner similar to on Earth.
Just to make things easier, basically anything that existed in warm marine environments on Earth 360 million years ago could end up in the cylinder. More importantly, I’d like to imagine what they’d turn into if left alone for eons, and not subjected to the mass extinctions that wiped out their brethren on Earth.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fish#Devonian:_Age_of_fishes
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod#TaxonomyCurrently dredging up some references.
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What’s your stance on the Aptychus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptychus-
a most unusual cephalopod
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No, I mean people disagree on whether ammonoids used them to seal off their shells or not. You’ll need to have a stance on that.
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For all we know those shells could be its vagina.
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That’s like saying "For all we know it was actually T rex’s legs that were tiny with two toes and it had huge arms"
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Sounds really really interesting, post updates as the project moves along
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How deep is the water? Is there also land (would be handy for replicating coastal marine habitats)? Why not make it bigger? Why no mention of cartilaginous fish? What’s the water temperature?
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I’m suddenly imagine jawless lancelet-like fish growing into enormous 20m filter feeders and it’s freaking woke af.
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I was planning to do that for my project (giant filter feeders and other things evolved from lancelets) but I haven’t worked on it since February
I really gotta start again -
I mean, this happened on Earth
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It’s a neat idea but don’t go crazy with megafauna, especially on an aquarium in a freaking space station of all places.
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It’s all relative. Cambrian megafauna is 1-2 meter anomalocaridids.
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Why did this make me laugh?
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If your aquarium is an O’neill Cylinder 1200km x 400km you’ll have plenty of room for megafauna.
I can easily see placoderm fishes growing to 15m or more.
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Could they have sufficient population though?
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That’s slightly larger than Hudson Bay.
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I imagined mostly shallow (200 meters or less) tropical and subtropical marine environment with scattered islands up to about the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Substrate may accumulate to form new islands, and erosion would submerge old ones, in a manner similar to on Earth.
Just to make things easier, basically anything that existed in warm marine environments on Earth 360 million years ago could end up in the cylinder. More importantly, I’d like to imagine what they’d turn into if left alone for eons, and not subjected to the mass extinctions that wiped out their brethren on Earth.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fish#Devonian:_Age_of_fishes
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod#TaxonomyCurrently dredging up some references.
I like your idea. How would islands and recycling of organic remains work in this setting? Wouldn’t entire cylinder turn into one great fossil made from oil and limestone after so many years? And if there is something that cleans ocean floor how it interacts with local ecosystem? I am not any kind of the specialist on marine environments, so this problem might take care of itself. Also, you should consider life trying to adapt to inner space of cylinder and creating unique ecosystems near the walls. Development of flight and flying predators may be another interesting route to explore
It’s a dual project idea where it talks about the development of life on a livable Mars, and also the Martian human observations of a humanless Earth as it loses 70% of all life and then recovers from the calamity in the millions of years to come, and how life evolves to fill the ecological vacancies left after the mass-extinction.
I just wonder what kind of a disaster would be bad enough to wipe out 70% of all life while allowing a 10.000 people to escape via interplanetary passenger ships. I can’t find a lot of concrete evidence of what a gamma ray burst would do to Earth if one did hit in the vicinity. A meteor or asteroid feels trite.
Look here for inspiration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
Volcanoes and Ice ages are always good idea.-
>Wouldn’t entire cylinder turn into one great fossil made from oil and limestone after so many years?
Well oil definitely wouldn’t form. -
One of the big reasons that so much turnover happens on Earth is that so much erosion happens. Put in some wind and current baffles to keep that under control, make the starting islands out of solid rock, take into account how small islands can’t form major rivers, and not much is getting buried, so all your nutrients can cycle way faster. Decreased water pH would get rid of the limestone and diatom problems with interesting evolutionary consequences. Oil only forms under very high pressures. Maybe you could also put in some self-repairing machines that dredge up sediment and pile it in the center of islands. I’ll put some more thought into this.
I want a carcinized mollusc.
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I’m trying to think of an "after man" type thing where a mass extinction event forces the few (10.000 or so) survivors of the human race to abandon Earth and move to a recently terraformed Mars, where they undertake a thousand year project to shape the planet into a new Earth and make it home.
It’s a dual project idea where it talks about the development of life on a livable Mars, and also the Martian human observations of a humanless Earth as it loses 70% of all life and then recovers from the calamity in the millions of years to come, and how life evolves to fill the ecological vacancies left after the mass-extinction.
I just wonder what kind of a disaster would be bad enough to wipe out 70% of all life while allowing a 10.000 people to escape via interplanetary passenger ships. I can’t find a lot of concrete evidence of what a gamma ray burst would do to Earth if one did hit in the vicinity. A meteor or asteroid feels trite.
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anyone have those pics of dolphins re-evolving into land mammals, and they become a bunch of tripods? that was neat
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Tripods are sorely lacking in nature.
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the closest thing we have are kangaroos.
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Kangaroos use quadrupedal, pentapedal, or bipedal gaits. Never tripedal.
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I eel like a lot of spec evo artists forget the phrase "more than one way to skin a cat". Convergent evolution i very much a thing of course, but a single question can have multiple solutions.
Pic related, Thylacoleo was a diprotodont that became a predator. Its once herbivorous dentition evolved into teeth made for meat eating, its molars becoming weird long sheers
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Anyone remember that one show they did where it was like futuristic evolution woke af on different "natural endings of the world." One animal i remember and really liked was the shark that was see through and could shock you like an eel. I forgot what show it was
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I’m hoing soon to try to make a sort of remake project of after man, lots of crappy drawings but i want to keep it creative adding more to the ecology and behaviours while trying to fix some incostincencies, but i’ll try to keep faithful to the original animal’s biology thought.
For example, i could add to the reedstilt something like a skin flap similiar to cobras that he can use both as a hunting device and to intimidate predators. If you wish, let me know what do ypu think of this and what could you see being changed for reasons. -
I’m not really in these threads often but I thought it might be interesting to share something I’ve been thinking about.
Let’s take a world that is mostly earthlike, but it has a lower average temperature. Think like Wales in a large part of this world, so quite moist as well as cool. It has humans, whether they evolved the same as us is besides the point. Consider the humans as being on an ancient level of tech if anything For whatever reason grasses never evolved on this world. The predominant ground cover is varieties of moss rather than grasses. That’s not to say that other plants wouldn’t exist. What I’m wondering is how would animals evolve. Small snakes and mammals might have a whole ecosystem in thick mosses. Amphibians might even live in very moist layers of moss. Would megafauna be common due to the cold? Would moss and any other plants be enough to sustain them?
As for humans, obviously there would not be much in the way of grain. At best something like buckwheat which is not a grass. So the primary plant foods would have to be things like tubers or vine crops. A dense and rich gourd might be a staple crop. That has its benefits, it’s easier to harvest than grains and gourds tend to store well. Certain mosses might also grow well underneath the vines of gourd plants and serve as a ground cover.
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With such a limited ability to build agriculture, would most of human society still focus on hunting-gathering?
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I don’t know. I suppose the trouble comes from the jump to agriculture. Presumably it’s a less natural jump without grains. But then their are South Americans who primarily grew potatoes. I guess it comes down to necessity forcing people to move away from hunting and gathering.
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The other thing I was thinking about was how a winged creature that actually has forelimbs as well as wings and legs, unlike bird or bats. I’m under the impression that it would be necessary to have a very specific ecosystem. Let’s take a planet that has lower gravity (ignoring problems like losing the atmosphere, let’s just say the star is weak and the planet has a strong magnetic field). It would probably be reasonable to think that the planet could have large areas of thin and very steep mountains which go very high. Maybe due stronger rocks formed in something resembling columns and the rock between them wore away. Thus, leaving a large area of column like mountains with too much space to jump between. The plant life would not necessarily be barren. Maybe lots of vines and mosses. It would be common in an environment like this to have wings in order to get from mountain to mountain. Small animals might live in crags in the rocks. For the sake of being able to hold onto the sides of these mountains it might be necessary to have forelimbs. It could also be necessary to have long dexterous fingers for pulling bugs and things out from the cracks. Larger animals, like those with wings and forelimbs would probably just nest on high ledges. The lower gravity would help with the weight issue in having that extra set of limbs. Is this sort of thing plausible?
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Okay I don’t know if this is a scrotebrained question or not but is it practical for a marine animal to absorb hydrogen from water and then store it in swim bladders to control buoyancy?
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Yes, it would be pretty impractical. Fish already control buoyancy just fine without generating and storing hydrogen.
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I havent done any spec in a while, give me a good request and i might do it
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A fish that went terrestrial sea robin style
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Aquatic filter feeding crocodile
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomatosuchus
That was easy
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Giraffe but carnivorous
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Probably wouldn’t be shaped like a giraffe anymore.
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herp version of a hermit crab. maybe a salamander or lizard with a suction cup tail for anchoring within a shell
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Mammalian version of the turtles, particularly sea turtles
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Rock climbing turtles that are a greenish black and have wide shells and flexible skin flaps to absorb the sunlight
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Softshell turtles in Texas and California are gradually becoming more terrestrial due to competition with introduced and fast spreading red eared sliders.
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How do they benefit from this?
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They’re lightweight so they’re able to climb out onto high rocks. They’re also carnivorous as opposed to the sliders so they’d be able to find food on land while the sliders would have to stay in rivers and lakes where enough edible vegetation grows.
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Wouldn’t being on land make them more vulnerable to predators and put them in competition with lizards?
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The only thing that eats big softshell turtles are alligators and the lizards down there are small enough that they would not eat the same things as the turtles. Hatchlings would definitely compete with lizards though
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You’re telling me that a coyote wouldn’t eat a softshell?
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A big female softshell turtle could bite your finger in half
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So grab it by the tail and rip from there. Coyotes are smart. Plus, any softshell that big isn’t competing with sliders anyway. I’m curious to know how you propose that a softshell would compete with land predators though.
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not either of you but maybe the soft shell could develop good digging claws which it could use to dart into the sand to evade predators? It could probably stay under the sand during times when its not feeding anyhow
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Not them either but I like that. If they also manage to become fast runners on top of good burrowers they could live like aardvarks.
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https://i.4cdn.org/an/1608048338222.jpg
What are some annoying as fuck stereotypes in specbio projects that piss you off?
>totally unnecessary bioluminescence or bright colors that would probably give creatures zero camouflage
>absurd megafauna for shock value
>predators implied to be super-duper deadly on the off chance it encounters a human
>freshwater or air-breathing cephalopods-
Air breathing octopi make me happy tho
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>tetrapods will go extinct
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Who did that one?
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future is wild
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Wasn’t that just mammals?
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Birds, reptiles and amphibians went extinct at some point before 200 million A.D. too.
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They will.
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What’s wrong with freshwater cephs?
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Not him, and not sure why it bothers him, but it’s interesting to note that there is zero evidence of cephalopods ever having adapted to fresh water or even brackish water. None are even known from the eastern Baltic sea. Meanwhile gastropods, bivalves, cnidarians, crustaceans, most large groups of worms, most major groupings of fish, and even sponges have radiated into fresh water environments. Echinoderms have never adapted to fresh water but there are some brackish species.
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The current consensus that there’s a biochemical barrier (that we don’t fully understand) that prevents cephalopods from colonizing freshwater, as they had 400 million years to do so and never once took the chance.
It’s strange though, because other mollusk classes are not subject to whatever it is; bivalves (clams, mussels, scallops) are widespread in freshwater as well as saltwater, and gastropods (slugs and snails) are even more robust in that a few families have adapted to live completely on land by breathing air.
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Neat! Thanks, I didn’t know that.
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It could jut be as simple as "it never happened just because"
evolution is just "whatever is working", doesn’t have a goal in mind.
there are plenty of things that never evolved on earth that are fully possible, but just haven’t.I mean shit, look how long it took for sapient life to evolve. as far as we know, anyway.
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Aren’t cephalopods believed to have evolved from a snail-like ancestor?
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gigantic arthropods
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How gigantic? Remember; in a higher oxygen environment they can get pretty big.
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Oxygen barely has anything to do with it. What’s more important is enough moisture to allow them to breathe at such a large size and also a lack of competition. That’s why all the big bugs are in the rainforest
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T-rex size or bigger.
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Oh. Yes that’s just silly.
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>multiple eyes and limbs for no reason other than "it looks more alien"
>sapient cephalopods
>spec bio applied to fantasy creatures like elves, goblins, werewolves, dragons, etc.
>alien culture is a copy paste of human culture, following the same evolutionary trajectory and having all the same aspects like art, religion, clothing, guns, vehicles etc.
>alien language is just nonsense words pasted onto human language
>mouths with multiple mandibles like the Predator
>sky-whalesI could go on, but these are the main ones that come to mind — and they drive me insane. The spec bio community is mostly children and unintelligent autists, so the majority of content is either naive, scrotebrained, or derivative of popular projects.
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>sapient cephalopods
why’s this annoying? i think their intelligence is radically different from our more centralized brains but still, cool thing to think about-
It’s way overdone, rarely original, and almost always a carbon copy of ideas from "The Future is Wild".
Yeah, it’s cool to think about. But there’s like a dozen animals as smart or smarter than cephalopods. How about sapient elephants? Or sapient pigs? Fuck it, sapient dogs would be more interesting than yet another Squibbon or Mega Squid rehash.
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>sapient pigs
Has anyone done this yet?
I was at a farm a few months ago and the pigs were really fun to watch and interact with. Way more smart than people think they are. Might draw something of them.-
I’ve never seen anyone do a sapient pig, it could be really cool.
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Highly unlikely to happen to anything with hooves. Maybe if they grow trunks.
The most likely future pig is even dumber, possibly so dumb it’s koala tier.
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Highly unlikely to happen to anything with hooves. Maybe if they grow trunks.
The most likely future pig is even dumber, possibly so dumb it’s koala tier.
I was thinking it could be kinda like an elephant. They wouldn’t have a trunk, but instead a couple developed fingers with which they could pick things up and manipulate them.
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I’ve never seen anyone do a sapient pig, it could be really cool.
You could go really freaking wild with sapient pigs/elephants and give them the equivalent of opposable thumbs and dexterous hands by giving them some star-nosed mole tendrils at the ends of their noses. Would look pretty freaky, AND be practical.
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Not exactly an original idea but I was thinking about a flower for my DnD campaign that’s pollen would act as a muscle relaxant and progressively make you sleepier until a high enough dose that you fall asleep and your diaphragm stops contracting thus making you food for the plant.
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If the effects are slow then what stops you from walking away from the plant?
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Honestly still in the home-brewing portion right now so I’d be grateful for suggestions but I’ve been thinking the effects could be progressive with the first stage being minor fatigue to the second, extreme fatigue and finally exhaustion and collapsing. They’d grow in large swatches.
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I mean it’s D&D so whatever. You’re already putting in way more thought than you have to in terms of it making sense.
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I like trying to make my ecology as fleshed out and realistic as I possibly can.
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sounds interesting but make it rare, probably apart of a rain forest environment since if it were common there would be significant pressure for animals to become immune to it or avoid it, also it would need to not do that to bees otherwise it cant effectively pollinate. Maybe a specific predator could be immune to it, and it would make its nest around and with this kind of flower so that other animals will avoid it. If its just by itself it might just die out because thats a big resource sink at high potencies and any animal with a brain would learn to avoid the sleepy smell like the plague, unless its *just that rare*
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They’d get out-competed by quadrupedals so fast they wouldn’t ever have a chance to develop this way unless literally all large land animals are wiped out at this point.
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It does mention that they first emerged on islands, so perhaps there are no large quadrupeds to compete with them?
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I just don’t really see the added benefit of tripedalism. Maybe as long as these animals keep living in an isolated environment they could manage, but even so, I can’t really imagine them moving around very efficiently. They would probably be better off in the water hunting for fish than on land awkwardly hopping after small prey.
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I agree that tripedalism like that is pretty unlikely, but that’s not how evolution works. Something has to stop a path from perpetuating, be it competition from other species for the same resources, overpredation, or resource scarcity. Being ‘worse’ than another isn’t enough.
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>Being ‘worse’ than another isn’t enough.
It actually is. Evolution follows the path of least resistance. Animals will only take on extreme forms if there is strong selection pressure.If the choice is between comfortably living in the ocean where there is ample food to be found, or putting themselves out of their element to adapt to a hostile environment, then the latter seems like the worse choice: a steep mountain to climb with little reward. But it is a mountain they might attempt if they have a reason to. If perhaps their food source dies out, which would potentially drive them onto land, they would instead be more likely to adapt to a different diet. If they are outcompeted by other marine life, they’re more likely to just go extinct like most species.
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>If the choice is between comfortably living in the ocean where there is ample food to be found
But there’s freaking not. The ocean is an extremely competitive environment. Dolphins aren’t what I expect to work their way onto land but something would if nothing else was taking those resources. -
I think the implication here is that most if not all large terrestrial life has gone extinct, allowing dolphins to take to the land. Why else would they start becoming gazelle and horse-like?
It’s not just "path of least resistance", if there’s a niche open, something will eventually move into it.-
Okay, but how is the tripedal land dolphin going to outcompete a crab or an overgrown mouse?
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maybe all life was wiped out at the centerpoint of the extinction, say australia or a rouge continent. Then over the next many million years small mammals still recovering on other continents gives dolphins time to evolve into landgoing creatures after a few million years of high selection pressures. Then if the continents reconnect or something the tripod dolphins could be well adapted enough to be competitive
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Why aren’t dolphins extinct in this scenario? And what about birds?
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I honestly can’t imagine a situation wherein all large land mammals die out but cetaceans do not. Ocean life is fragile and easily goes extinct when food chains collapse.
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Isn’t it more likely that the tail would diverge into two legs than it is that it evolves into one?
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It’s more likely that cetaceans would go extinct before they’d get back on land.
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lol
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Source?
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That’s a male you scrote. That’s a penis sheath. Females have teats beside their delicious pussies.
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Found the scrotebrain
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Imagine if one of those fuckers went back to water again. That’d be some funny shit.
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Only exists because of sheer hatred of the shitty "Future Is Wild" VR Game/10
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Samescroteging to say: I’m being serious.
Look up the Future is Wild VR, look up the "Titan Dolphin" and read about when the game is "set" in the FIW Posthistory.
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I haven’t done spec evo stuff in ages. It used to be one of my favorite hobbies until depression hit me several years back and I started spending less and less time working on things. Now I just lost all motivation to do anything and my imagination isn’t what it used to be. I also lost touch with so many people, and it’d be weird to get back to it as if nothing had happened.
What do you guys think? Should I even try?-
Go for it anon, I believe in you. Share something you’ve done previously!
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Has anyone done stuff involving creatures that are "living metal" or have metal as a major part of their body while still being biological?
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IIRC there’s a RL snail that has iron deposits on it.
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Some parasitic wasps have high concentrations of zinc in their stinger tips to deposit eggs in trees.
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Some scorpions accumulate the trace amounts of heavy metals in their diets at the tips of their claws and stingers.
Also
is the Scaly-foot snail: – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaly-foot_snail
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I’m very interested in Thalattosuchians. These were crocodylomorphs who adapted to ocean life, lost their osteoderms and developed tail flukes, kinda like mosasaurs.
With some modern crocodiles adapting to salt water living, I wonder if they could become oceanic apex predators if cetaceans ever go extinct in the distant future. -
Could reptiles ever conceivably adapt to colder, ice-age tier climates?
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Well we’ve had plenty of ice ages and they aren’t extinct yet
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Im designing a snail like creature, a bit bigger than the average head in size which rolls around caves, spreading a kind of natural sulphuric liquid around so that fungi which are not able to cope with higher sulphur concentrations can be able to grow using it as a source of energy within caves.
While this idea is silly its not for something set in real life, so I can take my liberties.What are some good cephalopods (early ones?) that I could take inspiration from when making them? I want them to be alien looking, also their main predator is a juvenile kind of pterosaur with a long beak and reasonably good intelligence, what adaptions in its armor design and protection techniques might it employ in order to avoid getting killed by such a predator?
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>good cephalopods
Argonaut-
>Loses shell, has to evolve one again
what is it with mollusks and shells?-
Sometimes you need to be able to fit into cracks for a few million years.
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Give me a speculative biology idea and I will sketch it for you (if it’s not a dumb idea).
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obligate carnivore hominid species
or obligate herbivore hominid specieswithin the homo genus, if possible
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Here you go.
Humans are the most boring animal, and also hard to draw. So I did a carnivorous baboon instead. Not really what you asked for, sorry, but the gist is the same.
I imagine them as burly ambush predators, wrestling prey to the ground and going for the neck. Their tails have shrunk down to little bobs — less likely to get torn off during a fight.
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neat
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>Humans are the most boring animal
goo pic tho.
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They are tho. Humans are the most familiar to us, and anthropocentrism is the scourge of speculative biology.
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modern humans are, we have an entire family tree of extinct ancestors and cousins that’s shrouded in mystery, the genus homo was once as varied as any other mammal species. If you don’t find that fascinating, you’re just being a contrarian.
My prompt wasn’t meant to imply "modern humans becoming herbivorous or carnivorous", but rather an earlier branch of our evolutionary tree.-
>poor little white boy 5
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>genus homo was once as varied as any other mammal species
It still is.
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he cute <3
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A derived snail like cephalopod, it lives underground in a massive cave system that spans an area the size of france. Its life involves going between scattered "vents" which spew out sulphur bearing substances. It then collects these substances so that it it can fertilise a kind of fungus (which cannot thrive near the vents) thus forming the basis of a large part of the underground ecosystem. Its about .4m in diameter and has evolved to be able to resist getting killed by its greatest predator (through releasing sulphuric clouds and hiding in its shell), a toxin resistant kind of flightless bird which kills using its long beak and is itself the size of a wolf
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Gonna skip this one, sorry.
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A frog capable of powered flight
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Here you go.
Frog skeletons are very fragile and bizarre. This fellow is clumsy in the air, and even clumsier on land. I imagine they evolved on a heavily forested island with very few natural predators.
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Nice art, would you mind having a crack at the mammal theropod thing?
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Why wouldn’t it have an actual tail?
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Because there’s literally nothing to work with down there except a little nub of pelvic bone. Like I said, frog skeletons are weird.
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Does anyone actually think these creatures are real?
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How would a worm like larva best go about travelling relatively long, fairly vertical distances? (its adult form is immobile) It needs to be able to traverse up steep inclines but must still be worm like, how might a creature of that body type do such a thing?
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Symbiotic relationship with birds.
Climbs into featers, it’s exterior repells parasites, and the bird flys. -
A suction cup on both ends like a leech
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that sounds funny and makes sense, i think ill use it
thats a creative and interesting idea, that could be cool. Although id imagine it wouldnt take long for once species to ditch symbiosis and become a neotonous blood sucking parasite itself. Although without the steady supply of new babbies from non-neotonous forms they could just be added to the list of parasites the symbiotic ones ward off
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scroll up sis
but fuck yea, monkey spiders
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Honestly I was half-expecting them to develop a second set of Pedipalps from the other pair of Skull-Legs.
Also I agree with the Youtube comment that maybe the Chromatophytes should have been a different colour. Cyan does make them stand out against the Reddery of TIRA 292b’s Rainforests…but it also makes them look like Toxic Malacoformes.
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>creatures are already flying like birds and swinging from trees like monkeys
>still look like something that came from a cambrian sea-
I mean look at earth. All vertebrtes here are just weird looking fish.
On this planet, they’re all weird looking spiders.-
>On this planet, they’re all weird looking spiders.
Most of them are weird-looking Spiders, some are Squid with delusions of grandeur. -
I just don’t buy creatures so far advanced that still have 8 legs and 6 eyes. Reduction and simplification of body plans is something that has happened on earths history over and over again.
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Why would the number of legs or eyes decrease?
Some aspects of morphology are very deeply "coded" into organisms and changing that shit via mutations etc can dramatically hamper the overall development of the individual.Evolution isn’t a process that can just go back and "re-design" the earlier evolutionary steps and adaptations that species has taken.
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Also we have to remind that evolution is just random and doesn’t just work to perfect a species. We could gladly make use of a slower methabolism at this point of time, but we just didn’t evolve it.
Also i can’t wait for the next episode, i really want to see how can bib handle a mass extinction, even if minor
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4 legs should be enough for any bilaterally symmetrical creature. Ignore arthropods, they don’t count.
Also i can’t wait for the next episode, i really want to see how can bib handle a mass extinction, even if minor
Evolution is not random, mutations are. Many characteristics have convergently evolved on different cratures with similar lifestyles. There is a "pattern" to life, a small number of solutions for the same problems.
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Yeah, sorry for that. Mutations still guide the course of evolution thought. It’s why placoderms didn’t become the first terrestrial vertebrates for example
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https://i.imgur.com/YiJoERQ.gif
>4 legs should be enough for any bilaterally symmetrical creature
enough doesn’t mean it’s obligated to happen. Like this anon pointed outI mean look at earth. All vertebrtes here are just weird looking fish.
On this planet, they’re all weird looking spiders.we have a planet populated by four limbed creatures because their basal ancestor had four limbs.
In their case, it has eight.
Plus the planet has lower gravity than earth, so the limbs aren’t gonna need as much energy to do things like stand and walk-
This.
Almost every primary aspect of our biology, including the number of our limbs, were determined by evolutionary steps that occurred in our ancestors way before they became terrestrial. It is facetious to assume that 4 limbs is some sort of optimal configuration for large land animals when the only sample for large animals we have derive from a 4 limbed ancestral form. -
https://youtu.be/_y4DbZivHCY
Zefrank is one of guys LULZ doesn’t hate too much, right?
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The vast majority of land animals don’t count?
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I’m taking illustration requests. Will repost some of the ones I did in the old thread. I’m only sketching ideas I’m keen on, so don’t be mad if I skip you, just a matter of personal interests.
First off is a carnivorous baboon. It’s a burly ambush predator which wrestles medium sized prey to the ground and goes for the throat. Its tail has reduced down to a small bob — less likely to get torn off during a fight.
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Why no claws?
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Baboons already have nails. The carnivorous baboon’s fingers and toes have become short and blunt for more efficient sprinting. Their powerful bite is their main weapon. Not every predatory species needs huge talons.
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A flying frog, evolved on a heavily forested island with few natural predators. It is a clumsy flier, and even clumsier on land. This species mainly eats butterflies.
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My take on the mammalian theropod concept from the old thread. I wanted to incorporate the slouched posture of retro theropod reconstructions.
This species is slow moving, but extremely powerful. Their diet consists mainly of gigantic elephant-sized herbivores and their young, so they do not need to be swift hunters. Scavenged carcasses make up a large portion of their sustenance as well.
I imagine them shambling about the forest on huge flat feet, snuffling and sniffing loudly as they search for meat.
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>https://www.deviantart.com/biofauna25/gallery/43433793/odin
I’ve just started reading this one. Enjoyable so far, but I’d like to point out an error. The author uses reduced surface gravity to help justify floaters. That’s not how buoyancy works. If you want balloon animals then high gravity is actually the way to go. High average molecular weight for the atmosphere is also important though, so Jovians are out. Furahan Biology and Allied Matters by Gert van Dijk has a great serious of posts on the concept he calls ballonts.Do you have a deviantart page or something like that?
Yeah but even small claws help a lot with holding prey. The tibia/femur and ulna/humerus length ratio looks great for an ambush predator, though you might have made it a little low to be calling it a sprinter depending on what you mean by that, and with a plantigrade posture that’s probably a lost cause. It screams bush/forest predator to me.
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Some decisions I make about spec illustrations are woke af on subverting typical expectations (while remaining within the realm of plausibility). Not including big claws on the baboon was one of these decisions. Claws would make sense, but felt a little cliche imo so I left them out. I didn’t want it to look too much like a werewolf lol.
I didn’t put a ton of thought into the details of the anatomy besides wanting to convey a sense of burly, explosive power; fast over short distances but not designed to chase anything down long range. I imagined them hiding in bushes and waiting for something palatable to pass by. Bush/forest is exactly the environment I imagined for that.
I do have a DA page, but I would rather not dox myself on here lol — although I think my style is recognizable enough that a few people may figure out who I am anyways.
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>I do have a DA page, but I would rather not dox myself on here lol — although I think my style is recognizable enough that a few people may figure out who I am anyways.
Yeah I saw your stuff on there before but I can’t remember the name off the top of my head-
Part of LULZ’s charm is the anonymity 😉
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I’m really digging this mammal theropod concept, so I did another one from the same clade.
This species is bigger and burlier. Its jaws are better adapted for crushing bone, and as a result the arms have become better equip for doing the killing. He also smells really awful. A big stinky ogre mammal-dino.
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Looks good. It’s probably even slower than the last one, which makes sense if it’s a bone-crusher. Perfect for scavenging, and a corpse isn’t gonna try to run away.
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Bonecrushers are usually considerably smaller than the biggest animals in the ecosystem
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Weird, this one is considerably bigger.
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What about t. rexes?
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Their teeth are very sturdy but not specialized for crushing. Also I was talking about mammals, who need to be much more careful with their teeth.
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>literally just a mandrill
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Yep, basically.
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U-social insects which have become intelligent (either individually or as a hive).
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>U-social
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Well, however it’s spelled. I’ve only ever heard it spoken aloud on documentaries and such.
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eusocial anon
eusocial
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A vermin species which has evolved to be very cute as a defence against humans harming them.
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I love the Ricky Gervais Show, patrician taste anon.
After listening to all the episodes you realize Ricky isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, Karl isn’t as stupid as Ricky thinks he is, and Steve is more intelligent than he lets on.
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I absolutely love this concept. Fantastic idea.
Here’s what I came up with:
In the far future, feral cat populations living in metropolitan areas have adapted to exploit humans for food. They come up to people sitting in parks or outdoor restaurant tables and beg for scraps, vocalizing, standing up on two legs, and making cute facial expressions till they get what they want.
The adorable illusion falls apart when one observes them fighting over food or turf. Extremely territorial, they can inflict vicious bite wounds on unwary rivals — or overly curious children.
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Would be a neat touch if they learned to mimic human infant noises.
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that would just make them scary
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Good idea. I imagined them making high pitched little mewing sounds while they wiggle their eyebrows and wobble around in circles on two feet.
Yeah, would be quite creepy lol. But that’s kinda why I love this concept so much: the contrast between our warm romantic notion of cute cuddly furry creatures, and the cold reality of natural selection exploiting any possible niche in the struggle for survival.
I love the peripheral world building that emerges from this one simple concept. People would have to warn their kids not to touch the feral cuties. Maybe the city exterminates them when populations grow too large. There would be signs in parks telling people not to feed them. But of course, there are always gullible morons and unwary tourists who will fall for their song-and-dance routine.
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awesome. reminds me of stuff like ragdoll cats. are there any spec evo animals thats idea is genetically engineered pets ?
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Sheather has a really cool concept similar to this genetic engineering idea:
https://www.deviantart.com/sheather888/art/Future-Zoo-The-Exhibition-Tiger-772667718
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kinda the premise of all tomorrows, almost but not really
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why do you save them as jpegs? youre cucking yourself out of a cleaner image
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PNG is that much clearer? I have the drawings saved as PSDs, but export to JPG for posting.
This sounds ridiculous, but I kind of like the jankiness of the JPG format. It adds an interesting fuzzy-scratchy effect to the lines and colors.
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The original illustrations are done at 5,000 x 5,000 pixels, which I resize to ~1,000 pixels wide for posting. That may be what lowers the quality.
I just did a quick test, and there is no perceivable difference between downsized JPG and PNG versions of this illustration.
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>This sounds ridiculous, but I kind of like the jankiness of the JPG format. It adds an interesting fuzzy-scratchy effect to the lines and colors
It really gets bad with more transfers. JPG is a shit format for community-woke af sharing.-
So PNG is better?
Sorry dude, metal concept but that is too freaking disgusting for me to touch lol
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Don’t sweat it, I can’t imagine it turning into anything other than naked mole rats anyway.
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Yes, PNG uses lossless compression.
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The simple answer is that you should use PNG. The simple explanation is that every time a JPG is saved, the quality of the copy is reduced, so spreading around artwork on a platform with an image-sharing culture is a job better suited to PNG.
Thanks for posting cool shit.
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That would make people want to kill them.
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It has the potential to be creepy, but imagine it starts crying like a baby if you threaten it, it would make you think twice before hurting it at least.
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That would just make them legal pedo bait
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Since when is zoophilia legal
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>He doesn’t know about the maple menace
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That’s what cats do already. Apparently their mewing is in the same key or something as human infant noises.
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How do you draw stuff so quickly?
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Well, it did take like an hour lol so idk if that counts as quick . But it’s just a sketch so there’s not a ton of detail or time consuming work involved
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but that’s called a regular cat
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Would this really work? Nothing about rodents or roaches is particularly unsettling but people find them disgusting because they were taught to.
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Some people have the same phobic reaction to rodents which others have to spiders or snakes. My grandma couldn’t touch the hamster I had when I was young, and she didn’t even like looking directly at him. As for roaches; many people are terrified of creepy-crawlies of all kinds.
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Try showing things like spiders, snakes and rodents to a group of 6 year old girls vs 16 year old girls. See how the reactions differ. This stuff is largely learned.
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I am arachnophobic but my parents attest that I didn’t fear big spiders as a toddler. It’s something that came later in my development. Even so, nobody told me to fear spiders, none of my parents do, and I was only vaguely aware of other people being afraid of them. Nobody told me to fear spiders any more than they told me to fear snakes, and I don’t fear snakes at all.
It’s entirely possible that this fear is still innate even though it doesn’t activate until later into a person’s emotional development.-
Well infants can barely see so that might be what’s going on there.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/10/infant-fear-phobia-science-snakes-video-spd/
It’s a bit of both. Humans are hardwired from birth to recognize the shapes of spiders and snakes, and pay more attention to them — but aren’t necessarily terrified. A component of the fear response is socially learned (and counter-conditioning can extinguish the fear entirely).
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This supports the evidence of evolutionary behavior. What our ancestors had to deal with, we remember to some degree. This results in us being laser-focused on certain things even as infants. Maybe if you let this inborn focus on the shapes of potentially dangerous animals take its course throughout the emotional development of a child, the logical conclusion is a phobia that takes shape in adolescence. Which isn’t to say that media and culture don’t play a role in awakening said feelings, but they don’t plant those ideas. The idea is already there. And it’s true that counter-conditioning can negate it. Focused counter-conditioning can suppress much of human nature (though never all of it).
But if you really think about it, it’s all learned behavior, though ancestral experience, even the inborn wariness of certain animals. It’s like a mental memo left to you by your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
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Yep. What’s really trippy is language falls into a similar innate category as well. All human languages are woke af on an identical computational structure, which is hardwired into our brains. Although languages sound very different, the differences turn out to be superficial. Internally, their structures are identical. In other words, there is only one "human grammar".
It sounds counterintuitive, because we tend to think language is invented. But it’s not. Language is a unique system of categorical logic that humans evolved. The words we invent to externalize this system are made up, but the structural components upon which languages are woke af are encoded in our brain and genome.
Homo sapiens’ language faculty may be totally unique in the animal kingdom. It first appeared around 50,000 years ago. It’s not even clear if Neanderthals had language.
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You are stating this as though this is a fact, which it is not. It is certainly a valid theory as there is quite some evidence pointing to the innateness of language, but there is just as much evidence and arguments against this view from a typological, neurological and psychological perspective.
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The notion that human language was invented from scratch without intrinsic innate structure is not a tenable hypothesis.
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So is the notion that there is an underlying grammar common to all human language.
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Many characteristics of the universal grammar have already been identified, such as recursion and common parts of speech. Human languages do not vary arbitrarily over an infinite number of characteristics — as one would expect if language was invented whole-cloth by various cultures:
Genetic components are the foundation of every system of animal behavior and communication. Why should human language be any different?
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Literally any turing-complete language, human or otherwise, most include recursion. Squirrel communication has parts of speech.
>Human languages do not vary arbitrarily over an infinite number of characteristics — as one would expect if language was invented whole-cloth by various cultures:
Languages interact with and descend from each other.>Genetic components are the foundation of every system of animal behavior and communication. Why should human language be any different?
It shouldn’t be any different. And it clearly isn’t as there are many heritable conditions that can affect comprehension and production of speech. That doesn’t mean it works the way you say it does with a particular inbuilt grammar.>universal grammar
This would be far more impressive if anyone demonstrated that it was possible for a hypothetically usable language to exist without the properties described as innate. -
Taking this straight from the Wikipedia page:
"The theory of universal grammar proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words). The theory proposes that there is an innate, genetically determined language faculty that knows these rules, making it easier and faster for children to learn to speak than it otherwise would be. This faculty does not know the vocabulary of any particular language (so words and their meanings must be learned), and there remain several parameters which can vary freely among languages (such as whether adjectives come before or after nouns) which must also be learned. Evidence in favor of this idea can be found in studies like Valian (1986), which show that children of surprisingly young ages understand syntactic categories and their distribution before this knowledge shows up in production."
This is the hypothesis I am proposing.
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>Languages interact with and descend from each other.
And yet somehow, after tens of thousands of years of development — sometimes in isolation — no human language has ever evolved to violate the basic principles of universal grammar.Your point about squirrels and turing machines does not refute the idea that human language has an innate structure. In fact, it supports the idea.
>It shouldn’t be any different. And it clearly isn’t as there are many heritable conditions that can affect comprehension and production of speech. That doesn’t mean it works the way you say it does with a particular inbuilt grammar.
There is considerable evidence that many structural properties of human language are innate.>This would be far more impressive if anyone demonstrated that it was possible for a hypothetically usable language to exist without the properties described as innate.
There are many such hypothetical languages. In fact, creating an impossible language is quite trivial, since you already intuitively know the rules of natural language. Scientists call them "impossible languages", and they are often used in linguistic experiments. You can read more here: https://taalenhersenen.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/do-impossible-languages-exist/ -
>And yet somehow, after tens of thousands of years of development — sometimes in isolation — no human language has ever evolved to violate the basic principles of universal grammar.
Counterexample:
The Dewey Decimal System is a language with only nouns, no verbs. -
That is not a counterexample. The DDS is not a natural human language, it is an invented system for organizing libraries. You may as well have cited Soduku.
We are discussing the properties of natural human languages. The fact that our brains are capable of non-linguistic computations does not imply that there is no genetic component determining the features of human language.
And as I already mentioned, impossible languages do exist — "impossible" meaning lacking the features of human language. That isn’t the point. The point is that natural human languages all share certain universal properties.
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The DDS also doesn’t meet the definition of a language. Linguists define natural languages as "[those having] evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation".
DDS clearly doesn’t meet that criteria.
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Face it, Chomsky is six inches deep in your bum and you’re sobbing with every thrust.
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I challenge you to present a single coherent explanation for the development of human language in the absence of innate structure.
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*in the absence of an innate genetic component dictating linguistic structure.
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Alternative hypothesis:
Humans have an innate tendency to collaboratively associate sounds with meaning without there being a particular built-in structure to it. -
"Humans have an innate tendency to collaboratively associate sounds with meaning without there being a particular built-in structure to it."
You just described one of the properties of human language as being innate. Your own argument argues in favor of a genetic component to language.
Your hypothesis raises some questions. How do children know to assign certain sounds with meaning, and not others? If language structures are arbitrary, how do children instinctively learn the rules of their native language without ever being formally taught? If language structures are arbitrary, why are all human languages computationally identical?
MRI studies have shown that when presented with two made up languages, one which follows the rules of universal grammar and one that does not, the regions of the brain activated in subjects learning the two languages were totally different. The fake language that conformed to universal linguistic rules activated a specific part of the brain. The fake language that did not adhere to these universal rules activated diffuse problem solving areas. This is evidence that our brains are structured to recognize certain patterns as being language, and not others: an innate universal grammar.
A school of deaf children in Nicaragua were able to develop their own symbolic language without access to any evidence about language. Their system coheres perfectly with the known universal properties of language. Is it a coincidence that these children’s made up language has all the properties of human language? Is the simplest explanation not that structural elements of human language are innate?
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Genetic components are the foundation of every system of animal behavior and communication. Why should human language be any different?
The wiki page you linked to provides several alternatives and also points out the Chomsky’s idea is not even falsifiable.
We are discussing the properties of natural human languages. The fact that our brains are capable of non-linguistic computations does not imply that there is no genetic component determining the features of human language.
And as I already mentioned, impossible languages do exist — "impossible" meaning lacking the features of human language. That isn’t the point. The point is that natural human languages all share certain universal properties.
>And as I already mentioned, impossible languages do exist — "impossible" meaning lacking the features of human language. That isn’t the point. The point is that natural human languages all share certain universal properties.
Yes, and you supported it by providing a source with an example of a language which includes a feature which is anti-useful and so would obviously go away. It is possible to start from many different possibilities and modify them toward a more similar optimum without initially programming in what that optimum is. Simple convergence.We are discussing the properties of natural human languages. The fact that our brains are capable of non-linguistic computations does not imply that there is no genetic component determining the features of human language.
And as I already mentioned, impossible languages do exist — "impossible" meaning lacking the features of human language. That isn’t the point. The point is that natural human languages all share certain universal properties.
Well of course it’s true that all languages follow these rules if you define anything that doesn’t follow them as not being a language.
DDS clearly doesn’t meet that criteria.
Plenty of filing systems do meet those criteria though.
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Yes, there are alternatives to Universal Grammar. None of them are well supported by existing evidence. There is a reason the theory of Universal Grammar has stuck around for nearly 100 years now.
>includes a feature which is anti-useful and so would obviously go away
Linear order is not anti-useful, in fact it is a simpler and more efficient computation than the structure-dependency grammar human languages use.Additionally, human language is far from optimized. This is because language did not evolve for communication, its primary purpose is organizing and generating our capacity for thoughts. Externalized communicative language is a side effect, not the main purpose.
>Well of course it’s true that all languages follow these rules if you define anything that doesn’t follow them as not being a language.
What is your point? We have to define the concept of language in order to talk about language. Linguists define natural languages as "[those having] evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation". The DDS does not fit that criteria. Therefore it cannot be considered a natural language.Do you have a different definition of natural language? Can you articulate and defend your alternative definition? What is your reasoning for going against the definitional conventions of modern Linguistics?
Your contention also begs the question: why does every system considered a natural human language follow these same rules?
>Plenty of filing systems do meet those criteria though.
Plenty of filing systems have evolved naturally in humans without conscious planning or premeditation? Are you trolling? -
What’s funny is that the very reason you immedietly feel that linear order is anti-useful is precisely because you already have an intuitive notion for what constitutes a human language.
From a mathematical perspective, linear order is the simplest system. But you instinctively know it is not language. Even a newborn child would instinctively know it is not language.
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>Yes, there are alternatives to Universal Grammar. None of them are well supported by existing evidence. There is a reason the theory of Universal Grammar has stuck around for nearly 100 years now.
Observing that something has a feature isn’t evidence that your reason for why it has that feature is true. And Chomsky was born in 1928.>What is your point? We have to define the concept of language in order to talk about language.
My point is that if I say "all lizards have tails" and you show me an example of something that by all rights should be considered a lizard but it has lost its tail through evolution and I say "that doesn’t count as a lizard because it has no tail, therefore my lizards have tails theory is correct" then I’m a moron. Now this language issue is nowhere near as extreme but the point still stands. There are many forms of human communication that don’t fit these rules.>Therefore it cannot be considered a natural language.
I never said it was a natural language and that was never important to my argument. I brought it up as an example of why the features included in this universal grammar are features that you want to add. I can’t convey arbitrary ideas to you using only DDS because DDS doesn’t have the necessary features to do so.>why does every system considered a natural human language follow these same rules?
Because they are the bare minimum of features necessary for a language to be able to convey just about any idea, so people will develop these features out of necessity. Look up Turing completeness. There are number of features which are strictly necessary for a machine to perform certain functions which are fundamental to the nature of reality. Would argue that humans are genetically predisposed to put handles on hand tools or is it just an obviously good idea?Ignoring whether or not it’s mathematically simplest, linear order doesn’t violate the "rules" of Universal Grammar so I’m not sure what your point is.
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>linear order doesn’t violate the "rules" of Universal Grammar
Linear order DOES violate the rules of UG. That’s the point. No human language uses linear order to convey semantic meaning. Human languages are parsed according to specific hierarchies of structure dependency, which are identical in every language: https://www.thoughtco.com/structure-dependency-grammar-1691997"All speakers of English know structure-dependency without having given it a moment’s thought; they automatically reject *Is Sam is the the cat that black? even if they have never encountered its like before. How do they have this instant response? They would accept many sentences that they have never previously encountered, so it is not just that they have never heard it before. Nor is structure-dependency transparent from the normal language they have encountered–only by concocting sentences that deliberately breach it can linguists show its very existence. Structure-dependency is, then, a principle of language knowledge built-in to the human mind. It becomes part of any language that is learned, not just of English."
>you show me an example of something that by all rights should be considered a lizard but it has lost its tail through evolution
You cited the Dewey Decimal System. There is no rational definition by which the Dewey Decimal System could be considered a natural human language, just as there is no rational definition for a viviparous fur bearing organism that feeds its young milk to be considered a lizard (in the conventional sense of the term, I know in a sense we are all "lizards").Just because there are forms of human communication that don’t fit these rules (like the DDS), that does not imply that natural human languages have no genetic basis.
You are comparing apples to oranges when you bring up "filing systems" as counterexamples to universal grammar. It’s beyond comical.
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>Turing completeness
This has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether humans have an innate, genetically determined language faculty.>Because they are the bare minimum of features necessary for a language to be able to convey just about any idea, so people will develop these features out of necessity.
If language is artificially invented to meet certain external parameters of necessity, like a "tool with a handle", with no genetic basis, then why do human children have an incredible instinctive ability to identify language in their environment and learn its rules far faster than they learn any other mental computation? Additionally, there are multiple ways to construct languages, some of them are even more efficient than human languages. Why then do human languages all converge on the same inefficient solution if there is no innate foundation? Where does semantic meaning come from, and how are humans able to instinctively parse it from linguistic structures?To be honest, as soon as you mentioned the Dewey Decimal System as a "counterexample" I knew I was either arguing with a child or a moron. I’m tired of your semantic games, and nothing you have said directly refutes or provides evidence against the main point:
"If human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words). The theory proposes that there is an innate, genetically determined language faculty that knows these rules, making it easier and faster for children to learn to speak than it otherwise would be."
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I’m done. It’s pointless to talk to you. You won’t even distinguish between language faculty and preprogrammed grammatical rules. You don’t understand the concept of falsifiability. You don’t understand what does and does not constitute evidence for a claim. Take this somewhere more relevant to the discussion.
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Anyone can read the conversation and see who was bringing scholarly evidence to their side of the argument, and who was claiming the Dewey Decimal System had something to do with the possible genetic characteristics of evolved human languages.
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Anyone can read and see that you’re both scrotebrains who are freaking up the thread with off topic posts.
A giant flightless fruit bat the size of a deer that walks on all fours.
Here you go anon. It was hard to figure out what to do with the wings. I like this concept, terrestrial bats are neat.
These elk-sized herbivores are gentle and shy. Their ancestral wings have reduced into club-like front legs, tipped with fatty pads for absorbing the impact of walking.
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there should be at least some sort of calcification or sheath on the front feet, even if its just clearly very thick and rough skin
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I guess they rear up and use those thumb-hooks to grab branches and bring them down to their mouths?
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That’s what I figured.
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Here’s the thing though. Rodents weren’t a major threat to our ancestors until extremely recently, and people culturally treat rodents more as something to be reviled than feared.
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Plus if you look at historical accounts from before people became aware of rodents as disease carriers there’s a lot less fear than there is for snakes.
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Same. My arachnophobia began after watching lotr and the chamber of secrets with my family as a child.
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>lotr and the chamber of secrets
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Aragog and shelob scared the shit out of 5 year old me
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Aragog was the scariest thing in the world and I am still too scared to ever watch that scene again
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Woke af
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In loved the part when Dumbledore fought the Balrog.
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Dumbledalf the Gay
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Here’s an idea I had a long time ago but never got around to drawing: rodent parasites that burrow into the skin of large animals like botfly larvae.
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Could you draw a mole adapted for a fully aquatic lifestyle?
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A giant flightless fruit bat the size of a deer that walks on all fours.
Both of these sound cool. I will get to them today or tomorrow.
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Here you go.
Mole shark! A swift hunter of fish. Ladies love his toothy grin.
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Cool idea, the body plan is reminiscent of a penguin.
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Looks like a seal, I like it
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How about a frog or toad that has fully adapted to live in the ocean?
Or maybe a great ape that has evolved to primarily live in subterranean burrows? -
I have a similar idea
The Shrales
>Fully Aquatic insectivores
>The majority of species live in rivers
>Their diet consists of anything they can catch (mainly aquatic invertebrates and small fish)
>The largest species would only be around a foot long
>Pic related a good starting point design wise (only Shrales have similar front flippers)-
A few more ideas for their world (a generic greenhouse world with lots of water)
>Endeavour: An aquatic pig that fills the ecological niche of seals in the southern seas
>Wingwalkers: Flightless Island birds with a strange way of getting around
>Giant neotenic marine Dragonflies
>Treever: Arboreal rodents that make lodges in trees
>Seaver: Marine rodents that make lodges-
>>Giant neotenic marine Dragonflies
Pelagic or demersal?-
Why not both (there would be a least a dozen different species)
>Jellyfish have become more numerous/diverse
>A giant Siphonophore that lets seabirds nest on it (the seabirds are no longer reliant on the shore to raise their chicks and the Siphonophore gets nutrients from their guano)
>The majority of large land animals are reptiles (though large land mammals are still quite common)-
Well I don’t see how they could possibly be competitive pelagically unless we’re positing tremendous amounts of intervening evolution which really need to be explained.
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Are you the same guy who posted some art of non mammalian synapsis that could’ve evolved if the Permian mass extinction a few months back?
Remember one was called like "the Permian dragon" or something.
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Desmans are that already
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A giant flightless fruit bat the size of a deer that walks on all fours.
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Modular ants.
>Carriers tend to be bigger than the rest, and are capable of holding the queen
>The Queen gets up to 4 inches long
>Various types of smaller members have many types of heads and abdominal weapons, but all have strong gripping legs that interlock with the Carriers’ "horns" along their body
>A few can spit glue like substances while others have gripping jaws to aid in constructing advanced nests-
Muscular ants
>huge
>eat whey powder
>carry many times their body weight, but also mog other ants
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An orangutan descended ape that’s 25 feet tall standing upright. I’d imagine it would have more shorter and broader feet and hands throb arboreal apes, more like a gorilla.
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>throb
*than -
Here you go.
25 feet is crazy big lol. I think 15 would be more reasonable. At this size, every part of the orangadong’s anatomy is necessarily adapted for carrying its enormous weight: from its stocky legs to its huge gut.
Slow moving, nearly hairless, and constantly eating, these aloof giants have nothing to fear from predators and can live upwards of 80 years.
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Hypercarnivorous xenarthran that’s adapted to for the Amazon rainforest
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I wanna see this things skeleton
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I, too, would appreciate an x-ray view. How much of its head is just flesh?
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I, too, would appreciate an x-ray view. How much of its head is just flesh?
Anatomy isn’t my strong suit, but I tried putting this together in Photoshop.
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Thanks, I like him too. Maybe I will do a proper illustration of this fella sometime.
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How do you draw these? Do you use a drawing tablet or just the mouse?
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I have a drawing tablet (Wacom Intuos Pro, medium). I use Photoshop to draw. There are a lot of drawing software programs out there, but at the end of the day Photoshop is the most powerful imo (and the one I am most familiar with).
These sketches take about an hour to draw and color. I try to keep them fast and loose — they’re just for fun and I want to deliver multiple requests per evening. For more detailed illustrations I sometimes spend 5-6 hours.
I have a short attention span, and over the years I’ve developed a pretty fast method for illustrating creature concepts. Using reference photos is crucial. Doing requests from this thread has been a great way to practice.
I attached a drawing I did recently of the Nildoror alien race, which are featured in Robert Silverberg’s excellent sci-fi novel "Downward to the Earth".
Lol, that’s a funny image. Catastrophosaurus dung is probably as big as an elephant. Probably enough biomass there to power entire ecosystems of coprophages and primary producers.
Maybe collecting the dung would be a job for the lowest class people in that society. It would probably be dangerous: the dung would attract swarms of insects, which would attract birds and insectivores, which in turn would attract predators, and so on. I’m imagining people wearing bee-keeper suits shoveling shit into wheelbarrows while guards keep watch for raptors.
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>tfw you’re in the army and it’s time for dung duty
I wonder if it would be best to try to tarp it up and transport whole chunks (assuming they come out in chunks like a cow or something) or to break it up and transport it in smaller sizes? The actual collecting might be a job for prisoners. Maybe prisoners get loaned out to dung merchants. Actually it might be fairly lucrative considering the danger and general distaste for that kind of work.
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The largest possible land animal by mass.
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Here you go.
I reckon sauropod dinosaurs just about saturated the terrestrial size limit. An animal that big has to be simple and sturdy.
Behold the Catastrophosaurus, a sauropod of mind-boggling dimensions. Over 200 feet in length and weighing in at a whopping 90 tons, the Catastrophosaurus is by far the largest animal to ever walk the earth.
The Catastrophosaurus is essentially one gigantic stomach, a vast fermentation chamber capable of processing thousands of pounds of vegetation a day. Four columnar legs — bolstered with fatty shock-absorbing pads thicker than tractor tires — support its unimaginable weight. Its backbone is fused, and structurally reminiscent of a bridge girder.
Their bodies are host to an island’s worth of insects, birds, pterosaurs, and parasites, some of which spend the entirety of their life cycle living on one Catastrophosaurus.
These behemoths live solitary lives, roaming the landscape at a snails pace while constantly vacuuming up vegetation. Their metabolisms are absurdly slow. The very largest among them can be over 300 years old.
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Imagine the manure.
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It’s cataclysmically large lol. Probably excellent for the surrounding plant-life and insects though.
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If there were humans around when that thing would have been then I imagine gangs of manure harvesters following the things with carts that they sell the manure to farmers from.
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So it kind of wanders around in a huge circle, eating all the plants that first sprouted from its poop?
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What about some sort of giant slime-mould (or similar organism) spread over acres?
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Yeah, if you want to really maximize biomass that’s probably the way to go. But I can’t imagine something more boring to draw than slime mold lol
I don’t think they do. Mating is done within the first ~50 years of life while they are still relatively small. Their long lives are an accident of metabolism rather than a feature of natural selection. I imagine they live well past their sexual prime.
Alternatively, really really big flexible dicks.
That’s a cool idea. Not sure the thermodynamics quite works out, but they are definitely significant contributors to the next generation of vegetation in their territories.
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How do they mate?!
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prehensile benis
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Makes sense. Imagine the sheer volume!
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That’s only 90 tons?
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How heavy should it be?
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I don’t know but that’s at the high end of weight estimates for Argentinosaurus, which is dramatically smaller. Also, sauropods do not reduce neck length with increasing body size. They really need long necks to be able to eat a lot without walking around much. Also this is overdoing the gut size.
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The area the proportionally reduced neck is able to cover while feeding is enough given the dramatically slower metabolism. No serious person believes Argentinosaurus weighed 100 tons. I’m interested in seeing the metabolic analysis you calculated to justify your opinion about the gut size.
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Reducing metabolic rate is irrelevant. It still takes just as many calories to walk.
Even if Argentinosaurus was only 60 tons the animal drawn is way more than 50% bigger.
If we look at scaling in real sauropods their necks get proportionally longer and their guts get proportionally smaller as they increase in size.
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Reducing metabolic rate is relevant, because it means a very large animal moving and living very slowly can use the same amount of energy as a smaller animal that is more active. Despite being twice as large as the biggest sauropods, this animal only needs about twice as much energy (instead of the expected 4x increase) because of significant metabolic cutbacks — no need for temperature regulation for example.
The animal drawn is just about exactly twice as long as Argentinosaurus. Significant internal adaptations to the skeletal system and anatomy reduce the weight even further.
Scaling patterns don’t hold forever. After a certain size the physical demands on the body change, physiological limits are reached, and different adaptations become necessary.
A herbivore this size is an indiscriminate eater that requires a big gut to digest large volumes of low quality food.
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Do you even have a clue what sauropod metabolism was like in the first place?
You’ve made it twice as long as Argentinosaurus but an Argentinosaurus could easily fit curled up in its gut. Sauropod guts are already big enough to do the job.
Yes, clearly height at the shoulder should be multiplied by six to achieve double the length.
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Let’s do the math.
Metabolic rate can be calculated by multiplying a constant "a" (different for mammals, reptiles, and insects) by the animal’s mass taken to the 0.75 power. So:
MR = a(mass)^0.75
Let’s assume this 90 ton super sauropod has a metabolism more similar to reptiles than mammals. Thus we substitute 0.68 for "a", and 90,000 kg for mass:
MR = 0.68(90,000 kg)^0.75 = 3,533
A 6,300 kg elephant’s MR (mammals use a=3.3) is:
MR = 3.3(6,300 kg)^0.75 = 2,333
Thus this gigantic super sauropod, despite being fifteen times heaver than an elephant, only needs a little more energy per day. If you have a problem with sauropods using the reptile value for "a", notice that even if we make a=2 (an overestimate) the result is still the energetic equivalent of only four elephants.
The point is that an animal this size with a low metabolism would only need to eat as much as two or three elephants per day. Thus I think the neck is sufficiently long for the animal to get enough food.
The Furaha blog has a nice writeup about where these metabolism equations come from: https://planetfuraha.blogspot.com/2020/05/its-plant-its-animal-its-bitroph.html
And this paper has some information about how the different metabolic coefficients are derived: https://www.pnas.org/content/105/44/16994
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The pictured animal would be way more than 90 tons though
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Not necessarily. I’ve already mentioned weight reducing adaptations like the proportionally reduced neck and tail. Not to mention sauropods have hollow bones anyway.
If we assume Argentinosaurus weighed 60 tons at 100 ft long, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a 200 ft sauropod with significant weight reducing adaptations would only weigh a little more.
If every proportion was kept equal, you would expect an eight-fold increase in mass given double the size. I don’t think a 500 ton land animal is reasonable, so I decided to give the super sauropod significant weight reducing adaptations to keep its mass around 100 tons.
Even if we assume it weighs 110 tons, a slow metabolism would still easily keep it within the energetic needs of more conventionally sized sauropods, and thus not necessitate a proportionally longer neck.
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The torso of Argentinosaurus is maybe 10% the size of the Catastrophosaurus torso as currently drawn.
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So I’d put Catastrophosaurus at easily 300 to 400 tons.
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I linearly scaled an Argentinosaurus up to 200 ft long, as you suggested. Does this body plan make physical sense to you at this size?
Your claim that the torso of Argentinosaurus is only a tenth of the size of the Catastrophosaurus torso is obviously false. The Catastrophosaurus torso is barely twice the size of Argentinosaurus — if that.
I also included outlines of the stomach and intestines: again, about twice as large. This makes sense when we consider that the animal has to digest higher volumes of low quality plant material than a typical sauropod.
Look at the silhouettes. Do you see how I reduced mass by making the neck and tail proportionately smaller, thus decreasing necessary muscle mass? Did you notice how I thickened the legs to support the new center of mass and account for the larger torso? It’s obvious that linearly scaling an Argentinosaurus is not a plausible solution for an animal this large. That’s because biology and physics don’t work in a linear way.
Your style of nitpicking pseudo-scientific pedantry is exactly what makes the spec bio community so toxic and unpleasant.
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Are both elephants 1.5 m tall or only the one next to Argentinosaurus?
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The Argentinosaurus in the image has been scaled up to 200 ft long. Both sauropods in the image are scaled to 200 ft. Both elephants are normal elephant size.
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First off, you’ve scaled the argentinosaurus up to considerably more than 200 ft since length is measured from nose to tail tip. Even still, the torso of Catastrophosaurus has about twice the area in the image, which would put it at 2.8x the volume volume. The Argentinosaurus has ~2.5x linear scaling, which gives us an additional weight multiplier of ~15, for a total of 42 times the torso volume of an unscaled Argentinosaurus.
Now for your weight savings. Woke af on estimates by Matt Wedel the head, neck and tail constitute about 20% of the mass of Dreadnoughtus (a close relative of Argentinosaurus and similarly shaped). Supposing you’ve cut three quarters of that mass, that’s a 15% savings. But the legs make up about 15% of the mass of dreadnoughtus), and you’ve made the legs proportionally much larger, so let’s just say the extra leg mass and the lost neck and tail mass cancel out.
So my revised mass estimate for Catastrophosaurus comes out to 2500 tons.
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Absurd
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Where’s the math error?
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The 2,500 ton figure makes zero sense.
All else being equal, mass increases as the cube of the scale multiplier. Thus an animal twice as large as Argentinosaurus would weigh eight times as much: around 500 tons.
This is the simplest calculation, which does not factor in possible weight saving adaptations.
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Let me try explaining this a little differently. Say I start with a sauropod that has a very long neck and tail, and I reduce the size of the neck and tail so that it’s half the original length. This saves a little mass. Then you scale the whole thing up to twice the original length, which means you’re scaling the reduced length sauropod by a factor of 4, which multiplies mass by 64.
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You are not scaling the reduced length sauropod by a factor of 4, you are scaling it up by a factor of 2. That’s what "twice the original length" means. When you scale something by twice its original size, you multiply the mass by 8, not 64.
If you were quadrupling the thing, then you would multiply mass by 4^3=64. But you are doubling, not quadrupling. Twice the size, not four times the size.
You aren’t supposed to factor in the original proportions before you reduced the length of the neck and tail into the new calculation. That’s where your mistake is.
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I understand what you are saying about the shorter sauropod being half the original length, and thus ending up four times as long, but we aren’t starting with a halfed sauropod here. We are extrapolating mass from Argentinosaurus as-is, and thus doubling in size and increasing mas eight-fold.
Their shapes aren’t similar, but a 100 ft long Catastropho weighs the same as a 100 ft long Argentino, which is all that matters. The distribution of that mass does not matter to the scale calculation.
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My guess is 900 tons woke af on how many mammoths it looks like would fit in a catastophosaurus.
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That’s a good guess
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If you lower the 2.8 to a a 2 (in which case the Catastrophosaurus would have strange lateral flattening) and keep the 15% discount while ignoring extra leg mass, it instead works out to 1500 tons.
My guess is 900 tons woke af on how many mammoths it looks like would fit in a catastophosaurus.
I strongly disagree with that method and we can’t check your work, but even that is much more than 8 times as much as the figure we’re using for Argentinosaurus.
The 2,500 ton figure makes zero sense.
All else being equal, mass increases as the cube of the scale multiplier. Thus an animal twice as large as Argentinosaurus would weigh eight times as much: around 500 tons.
This is the simplest calculation, which does not factor in possible weight saving adaptations.
That would work great if they were shaped similarly, but by doubling the length with the neck and tail proportionally much shorter you end up with the torso having a linear scaling multiplier much higher than 2.
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So thirty four mammoths fit over the dinosaur and accounting for how many would fill the volume of the body and other legs it’s probably close to ninety. And mammoths weigh like ten tons or something so it’s probably around nine hundred tons.
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This makes a lot of sense, the visual really helps explain it, cheers anon
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That’s still leaving a lot of space uncovered and it’s looking at area, not volume.
Their shapes aren’t similar, but a 100 ft long Catastropho weighs the same as a 100 ft long Argentino, which is all that matters. The distribution of that mass does not matter to the scale calculation.
>a 100 ft long Catastropho weighs the same as a 100 ft long Argentino, which is all that matters
Let’s check that out then. In the scaled image the Argentinosaurus is about 25% longer than the Catastrophosaurus, so we’ll correct the Argentinosaurus mass from 60 to 60*1.25^3=117 tons for this comparison to reflect its 125 foot length.
The limbs and torso of the Catastrophosaurus are still massive compared to this Argentinosaurus. Easily twice the area is covered for the torso, and even more for the limbs, working out to 3x the mass. But the neck and tail probably weigh a little less, so let’s call it an even 2.8x the mass, which comes out to 117*2.8=327 tons. Now we scale the 100 foot long Catastrophosaurus up to 200 feet long, for a mass of 327*2.8=2616 tons. -
>Let’s check that out then. In the scaled image the Argentinosaurus is about 25% longer than the Catastrophosaurus, so we’ll correct the Argentinosaurus mass from 60 to 60*1.25^3=117 tons for this comparison to reflect its 125 foot length. The limbs and torso of the Catastrophosaurus are still massive compared to this Argentinosaurus. Easily twice the area is covered for the torso, and even more for the limbs, working out to 3x the mass. But the neck and tail probably weigh a little less, so let’s call it an even 2.8x the mass, which comes out to 117*2.8=327 tons. Now we scale the 100 foot long Catastrophosaurus up to 200 feet long, for a mass of 327*2.8=2616 tons.
You are pulling scale factors out of your ass, ignoring the assumptions made by the mass calculation, and STILL using a scale factor of 4 even after being told why it’s wrong.I already told you to ignore the scaled image, because it is clearly confusing you. We are not scaling the animal’s mass using the scaled image.
We begin with two animals of equal mass and length, though different mass distribution and shape. We scale both animals by a scale factor of 2, which increases their mass by a factor of 8. The resulting animals are of equal mass and length.
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>327*2.8=2616 tons
Anon, 327 times 2.8 doesn’t equal 2,616 -
makes a lot more sense than the bullshit the other schitzos are spewing
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It completely ignores the square-cube law, dumbass.
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no it doesn’t, for the same volume of mammoths with being equal the weights would add up the same, You can see how the mammoths fill out the dinosaurs outline almost perfectly.
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scrotebrain alert
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>That would work great if they were shaped similarly, but by doubling the length with the neck and tail proportionally much shorter you end up with the torso having a linear scaling multiplier much higher than 2.
This is your mistake. There is only one linear scaling multiplier. There are not separate ones for different parts of the body. We are doubling every dimension of the animal.It doesn’t matter if the weight is in its neck, tail, torso, ass, whatever. All that matters is the scale factor (and the animal’s density but that’s beside the point).
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To clarify:
We start with an Argentinosaurus and a Catastrophosaurus. Both are 100 ft long, and weight 60 tons. We double their size, so that they are now 200 ft long. Mass/volume increases with the cube of the scale factor, thus their weight increases by a factor of 8, giving us 60*8 = 480 tons. It doesn’t matter that the animals are different shapes, or how the weight is distributed along the body: they have the same mass.
And this is before we factor in extra specialized weight saving adaptations the Catastrophosaurus may have to reduce its weight even further.
Your calculation was woke af on quadrupling a regular sized Argentinosaurus, which would give you a 400 ft animal weighing 3,000 tons.
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If you do the calculation backwards maybe it will help you see why the math is wrong.
According to your math, an animal half the length of Catastrophosaurus (100 ft) would weigh over 300 tons. That’s twice as heavy per foot as a blue whale.
Assuming the two animals have equal volume, would it make sense for a sauropod to be twice as dense as a whale?
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>That’s twice as heavy per foot as a blue whale.
Well it’s more than twice as fat per foot as a blue whale, so that makes sense. -
It is not more than twice as fat. Whales have a dense layer of blubber, which is very heavy. Sauropods are full of air sacs and hollow bones.
If you take a whale and a sauropod with equal volume, the whale will be far denser.
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Whales have considerable air volume and much less bone volume. Sauropod expert Matt Wedel estimates overall density for Dreadnoughtus at ~80% that of water. There are a few air sacs in the chest associated with the lungs.
The picture does not show the same volume of mammoths. It shows the same area of mammoths (actually even less than that since there’s a good amount of space showing through between the mammoths).
I already told you to ignore the scaled image, because it is clearly confusing you. We are not scaling the animal’s mass using the scaled image.
We begin with two animals of equal mass and length, though different mass distribution and shape. We scale both animals by a scale factor of 2, which increases their mass by a factor of 8. The resulting animals are of equal mass and length.
>You are pulling scale factors out of your ass
I explained my justifications. Please explain where I went wrong.>ignoring the assumptions made by the mass calculation
The assumptions used by your mass calculation are way off. Just looking at the picture the scaled to allegedly the same length it’s obvious that Argentinosaurus is a dramatically slimmer animal, before even noticing that they aren’t actually the same length. This is why I did a very rough allometric estimate of its mass when scaled down to 100 feet.Whoops, that should say 327*8, not 327*2.8. The final figure is still correct. Everything up to there was just guessing how much the 100 foot long Catastrophosaurus would actually weigh.
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You are saying the blue animal in this picture weighs 60 tons, and the red animal weighs 327 tons. They are of the same clade and have equal densities.
Is this really the hill you want to die on?
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No, I’m saying the blue one weighs 117 tons and the red one weighs 327 tons. A 60 ton Argentinosaurus would be 100 feet long with its neck held straight out.
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I measured both dinosaurs as 100 ft long with their necks stretched out, tip to tail as you explained before.
Earlier it was established that a 100 ft long Argentinosaurus would weigh around 60 tons. So by your own admission, the blue animal weighs 60 tons while the red one weighs 327 tons. This estimate makes no sense.
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Okay then. Just did some measuring and they are about the same. My bad there. With that adjustment my estimate comes out to 168 tons for the 100 foot one and 1344 when scaled to 200 feet.
I was doing an allometric estimate from the beginning.
This doesn’t matter, because I specified the volumes of the whale and the sauropod are identical.
Again, you seem to have trouble understanding that the particular dimensions of the animal’s features do not matter. All that matters is volume, mass, and density.
I didn’t make any claims about the case where the volumes are identical.
>All that matters is volume, mass, and density.
And I’m estimating the mass by estimating the volume and assuming the same density as Dreadnoughtus. The 100 foot Catastrophosaurus has much higher volume than the 100 foot Argentinosaurus.>the particular dimensions of the animal’s features do not matter
Matt Wedel pays close attention to it in his allometric estimates because the different parts of the body have different densities.Anon, this unpleasantness about mass is putting a downer on the thread.
Would you accept a concession? I am willing to publicly declare that the mass of the 200 ft long Catastrophosaurus is 220 tons. Extreme adaptations including air sacks, strategically reduced bone density, and a narrow overall body shape all contribute to this perhaps unexpectedly low weight.
That’s fine. It can be 90% air by volume. I hope it doesn’t pop.
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>Sauropod expert Matt Wedel estimates overall density for Dreadnoughtus at ~80% that of water
And whales are denser than water, on average about 105% water density. Thus a whale with equal volume as a sauropod would weigh significantly more than the dinosaur. You’ve just proven yourself wrong. -
I didn’t say it wouldn’t I said blue whales are actually pretty thin compared to their length.
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This doesn’t matter, because I specified the volumes of the whale and the sauropod are identical.
Again, you seem to have trouble understanding that the particular dimensions of the animal’s features do not matter. All that matters is volume, mass, and density.
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Argentinosaurus is practically a snake with hollow vertebrae. You’ve adjusted the proportions so that it would weigh dramatically more than what you would get from linear scaling to twice the length.
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I don’t know what your point is about Argentinosaurus curling up in its gut. Are you a vore fetishist?
I don’t think the Catastrophosaurus gut looks even 30% larger proportionally than a typical sauropod, so I’m not sure what your issue is. It is a little bit larger than one would expect for a sauropod.
That being said, the Catastrophosaurus browses indiscriminately, taking in significant amounts of tough fibrous materials like wood in every bite. It’s literally eating trees. It doesn’t have the dexterity to take more selective bites like other sauropods — thus it needs a larger gut to facilitate digestion of all that roughage. Keep in mind there is also a gigantic heart, lungs, and intestines inside the animal.
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>more selective bites like other sauropods
Where are you getting these ideas about sauropods? -
Sauropods don’t bite trees in half. Most of them stripped leaves and branches with their teeth. The Catastrophosaurus diet has significantly more wood and fiber in it than an average sauropod, thus it needs a larger gut.
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I think you are underestimating the physiological challenges that being twice as large as the largest sauropods presents. It wouldn’t make sense to just linearly scale up an Argentinosaurus to 200 feet long without thinking about how that massively increased size would impact the animal’s anatomy.
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Sauropods had hollow bones
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