#Speculative Biology

[valdevia]

The Pygmy Tearbird (Mellisuga ophthanthus) is the only animal known to feed on the fluids inside the vertebrate eye.

Staying on its target's peripheral vision with its high speed and maneuverability, this hummingbird pierces the sclera to access the sugars and proteins found within the vitreous body.

[drferox]

So for ‘reasons’ (speculative biology) in your opinion:

[filurig]

soo this little silly is kind of a thing i made cuz of a class in uni. but yes a silly lindwurm but they have been Realed... head and feet are 3d printed/painted with acrylics while the body is needle felted!

theyre not a super solid character or anything but actually they sort of are bcs they are a minor character in pareidolia. But i just thought it would be funny to make a lindwurm model especially with their weird long face

[copperpipes]

Is that an original copperpipes character??? Real not clickbait1!1!

Yeah not typical for me, Pshicha wasn't planned so it doesn't count.

Anyway meet Geha :)

as you can see Geha is a juvenile, and lived 260 years before the first coast. I'm not sure about pronouns for the entire species yet so they would be a placeholder for now. Geha will help me explore dysphia, I hope you like them as much as I do :D

[wanderingokali]

In the mountains surrounding the Goddess' Passage, these large kullau roam the skies, looking and smelling for one thing: cadavers. They hang out in bands of five or six individuals, sometimes a little more. Every year, there's large congregations of dozens of these creatures. They'll breed, and then take one egg each to raise in solitude for about two months before regrouping.

While most burial customs include returning the body to the sea, due to the presence of the deity of death in the abyss, the people living in the mountains often don't have the means to do this directly. So, instead, they leave the deceased's body out in the open, often quite far out from any town, with nothing but a single object that represented them in life. The vulture-like kullau and other scavengers will devour the body, even the bones eventually, but leave the object behind, for it's often a piece of jewelry, ceramic, or something else inedible. This object is then sent to the sea itself as soon as possible, sometimes even given to a passing traveler who'll take on the responsibility.

[bedrockfactory]

Hi sorry for neglecting this blog a little bit

[nimbosaur]

Very glad some people like him!

I also drew his livestock . theyre curious like emus but easy to herd like sheep.

My dinosauroid son.

His name is Kietwukǂ (kǂ spelled as a click from the roof of the mouth) and he's a herdsman of a small village.

[legendguard]

I'm doing it! I'm finally doing it! I'm uploading to Tumblr like I said I would fifty-bazillion times but never did! I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm doing it!!

I'm a long time user of DeviantArt, trying to escape its bullshittery and find a new home for my art. If you've ever seen that "Arceus Gospel Form" or "Eowenah Enraged Form", "Shadogaire Omega Form", or "Yinyanro Pondora form", that was me. I'll probably be re-uploading my gallery here, or at least plan on it, along with gradually switching away from DeviantArt for good. For a while at least, I will probably submit to both until I wean myself off.

I do have a lot to learn, though... It's going to be hard because I've been using Deviantart almost exclusively since I first joined back in 2009, so learning an entirely new format is really daunting. Probably why I've been avoiding the switch for so long. But my despise for DeviantArt and its shitty Eclipse update is far greater than my fear of trying something new, so here we are.

Fair warning for all future posts; I am a terrible writer. Be prepared for text that looks like it was written by a middle schooler who just discovered a thesaurus and wants to sound smarter than they actually are

--

This is the latest iteration of the head and corresponding skull of my long-time sona/Pokesona Eowenah, and the character for which I derive my username (She is the "Legendguard" Pok��mon, or Legendary Guardian). Since I'm new here and y'all haven't been exposed to my shenanigans for the last sixteen years, I remake her. A lot. I'm not even sure what "version" this redesign is at this point. I will probably do it again. No I'm not sorry. I will say I am quite happy with this version, at least for now, so maybe it will be a few years before that happens. You can see the previous version here: https://www.deviantart.com/legendguard/art/Anatomy-The-Head-of-Eowenah-2022-905702058

Eowenah is a light/psychic* type legendary Fakemon and the mascot of my fake Pokémon version, Pokémon Celestine. She is a chimeric clone of many, many different Pokémon, created by Mewtwo very early on as a test of how to mix various Pokémon genes more efficiently, who then became "possessed" and enhanced by the legendary Fakemon Haliapio to transform her into the Legendguard to take on the Evil legendary Fakemon Shadogaire. If that sounds like a bunch a' cringe... it is... but goddammit it's my cringe.

*Flying/Psychic if the Light type is repressed by certain attacks

Being a chimera, Eowenah possesses traits from many different Pokémon families, especially from avian, felid, and pterosaurian lines. This can easily be seen in her skull, which looks a bit like a mammal skull with avian parts glued on. But there is a method to the madness. Being arguably one of the most powerful Pokemon ever, and having the best attributes picked out by Mewtwo during her initial creation, all of these parts meld together into a surprisingly cohesive structure, even if it looks a bit odd.

Here we will solely be focusing on Eowenah's head and skull, minus the hyoid apparatus (for now). (Cont in comments(?))

[toad-in-a-trenchcoat]

Time passing with the lack of factory conditions and a full “sobering period” without brew resulting in a gradual, if minimal, increase in health among the escaped Mudokons, an odd example being the occasional feather growth

[adragonsoulart-blog]

2025 - Weird Mammal

[keresacheron]

Land Octopi, one of the constants of spec evo. Also once again is the Spider niche re-evolved on this world.

The Middle Temperocene: 150 million years post-establishment

Skwoid Game: Skwoids of the Middle Temperocene

Among the various and diverse of the marine life populating the seas of HP-02017, few are as intriguing and peculiar as the skwoids: a clade of predominantly-carnivorous mollusks that are a stark example of how everything in this world is not always what it seems.

At first glance, they resemble squids: tentacled, marine swimmers with muscular grasping arms, undulating membranes that propel them through the water, and a distasteful defense mechanism squirted at attackers when harassed. Yet this is where the similarities end, as the skwoids seem not quite right: for one, they have but six tentacles, with a single row of suckers each, their eyes are mounted upon stalks that can swivel and move independently of their bodies, and instead of a snapping avian-esque beak with two hinged parts, prey is instead captured with the aid of a harpoon-like radula, with a barbed tip for spearing its quarry and and a serrated edge to cut up its meal into pieces small enough to swallow. These distinctive traits mark the skwoids as an entirely separate kind of mollusk: for despite appearances, they are actually snails.

Skwoids descended from a group of sea snails called the notiluses: an earlier form, still extant, that developed six muscular extensions of the foot that allowed it to clamber about the sea floor and probe for food on the bottom sediment. Eventually, some of the notiluses began to specialize for speed, agility, and the ability to squeeze into small openings to pursue their prey, and thus abandoned their shells: or rather, internalized them, turning them into a rigid internal rod that supports and gives shape to their soft and elongated bodies.

The majority of skwoid species are oceanic and live out in the opens sea, hunting small crustaceans, shrish and pescopods in the open sea. The epiplagic blue skwoid (Ceruleoteuthis epipelagicus), measuring about a foot in length, is one such typical species, frequenting warmer tropical seas where it frequently occupies the topmost level near the surface. Other skwoids are filter-feeders, and eat mostly plankton, both zooplankton and phytoplankton, such as the broadfin skwish (Pescoteuthis balaenocephalus), a two-foot species with tentacles that clasp together to trap food with pumps of its siphon and small ridges on the edges of its tentacles that act as strainers to filter out the food. Unusually for gastropods, members of the skwish family have surprisingly large and well-developed eyes, as they often gather in deeper, darker waters and thus need better vision to keep watch for predators.

These forms are the most common and abundant of skwoid body plans, but they are far from being the only ones. A vast diversity of them have evolved in the Temperocene, as a warm, flooded world with expanded seas and plenty of new opportunities for marine life proved conducive to their evolution. In the shallow reefs, both coral ones and quillnob ones, prowls a tiny but peculiar clade of hunters: the skwiders. Skwoids, in defense when threatened, secrete threads of stringy mucous secretions to entangle a would-be attacker in a distasteful slimy net while they make their escape. The skwiders, however, found a new use for this defense mechanism: as a trap for catching food. Attaching their mucous threads to gaps and openings in the reefs, skwiders then wait for food to be captured in their gooey webs: typically drifting zooplankton or floating debris. The brown reef skwider (Arachnoteuthis mucodomus), however, targets bigger game: shrish, pescopods, and even other skwoids its size or larger. Drawing in its prey with wiggling motions of its tentacles or side fins, its duped victims soon find themselves ensnared in the sticky net, at which point the skwider delivers a dose of paralyzing digestive enzyme using its spearlike radula to immobilize its prey, before cocooning it in more mucous threads to save for later.

Others frequent the deep regions of the ocean floor, where all surface detritus settles to be consumed by waiting scavengers of all clades and species, typically organic debris and waste but occasionally the bounty of cricetacean carcasses that sink to the depths after death. Here is the domain of the great abyssal skwoid (Megalocochleoteuthis gigas): at nearly four meters long, it is the largest living skwoid species, and not a very picky eater. Large bottom-dwelling shrish, even the predatory shrarks, are easily felled by its harpoon radula, and it does not hesitate to scavenge the debris that sink in from above, or prey upon the scavengers themselves that gather for the feast, only to become a meal themselves. Its undulating membranes are partly subdivided into a set of powerful pseudo-flippers, making this species a strong, if somewhat slow, swimmer, capable of traversing large distances in search of concentrations of prey.

While most species of skwoids live in the sea, a few have colonized freshwater environments as well: swimming up rivers and into lakes where they adjusted to life in the murky shallows full of sediment and water plants, and new sources of food unlike the ones out in the sea. Some, such as the green reedeye (Potamoteuthis esoxmimus) have become medium-sized freshwater predators built for speed, with reduced internal rods and more flexible bodies to undulate their bodies in a more piscine manner to pursue freshwater shrish and pescopods and even small, semi-aquatic hamsters they can catch. Other species, like the marsh croctopus (Suchoteuthis macrops), are ambush hunters in murky waters with abundant vegetation for cover. With mottled markings for camouflage and well-developed eyes that can extend above the water and watch for movement above the surface, the croctopus lies in wait, for any small creature to move within striking distance, often shrish or pescopods, but also basal pondrats, distant kin of the cricetaceans filling niches of the likes of otters and beavers, and at times even small terrestrial animals that come near the water to drink.

But perhaps the most remarkable in the entire skwoid family are those within the freshwater clades that have made a further step into a new frontier: onto land. This was encouraged by a vacancy of amphibian niches with all fauna being either terrestrial, secondarily-aquatic, or fully marine. The transitional, no-mans land between water and land remained mostly empty, and so some opportunistic skwoids, escaping the water to flee predators including other, larger skwoids, made their first tentative steps to an amphibious lifestyle: the squoads.

Squoads, such as the littoral squoad (Bufoteuthis amphibius) are still heavily tied to water: their bodies need to remain moist, and their eggs need to be laid in water. However, they can survive on land for days at a time, able to breathe using a highly-vascularized chamber of their mantle cavity that functions much like a primitive lung of sorts. Their tentacles have shortened and thickened into spring-like limb-analogues, allowing them to ambulate by hopping, and their spear-like radula proves quite useful at flicking out to catch small invertebrates. Their primary constraint, however, is their lack of internal support: their modified tentacles lack bones, and thus are unable to support greater weight, while their lung-analogue is only sufficient to sustain smaller bodies. As such, squoads find greater success being very small, with the largest species weighing no more than 400 grams in weight.

While not quite the land's new pioneers, with their physical constraints and abundant vertebrate competition, the squoads are still an evolutionary success, gradually growing in prominence in areas where water meets land, in damp, moist regions where few other animals are vying for niches. In the Middle Temperocene, where diversity is abound and change is constant, an unusual family of snails, oddly but the second to dominate the land, has found a stable little place for itself in a transitional space, where nature abhors a vaccuum: and something always evolves to fill it.

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[iamthekaijuking]

Uth duna is an incredible fight and a blast with great sword. Her gunlance design among my favorites in the series.

Something odd about her is that underneath her water veil is a bunch of hairs, but carves call these cilia. They might be specialized organs dedicated to the production of mucus for her veil and acting as structural support, like how you can bridge snot or spit between two fingers.

Her head is very fishy and even has gills and protrusible jaws! She might use suction feeding for a lot of prey, basically using negative pressure generated by flaring her jaws out to suck in prey, but her jaws are still rather robust so she can probably deliver a powerful bite as well.

[iris-of-the-lambs]

what if instead of horses we domesticated porcines... i think that could be cool

[yupmabel]

i think creepers are herbivores who get their chloroplasts by eating plants and then photosynthesize by themselves. like sea slugs

[rttnmeat]

sooo i talked to one of my profs and im actually going to do a small animation about it!! ill most likely post the full thing somewhere around june but expect some wips here and there :3

i think no matter how much info about microplastics i read, i just cant grasp the severity of the situation. like my mind cant comprehend the fact that this new unbreakable material is everywhere, EVERYWHERE!! in food, toys, plants, animals, ground, organs, brains, in the air????? the fact that a compound that we dont know anything about and could be potentially detrimental to not only us but also the planet has so easily leaked into literally all there is and we cant do shit about it!!!

so now im wondering what will it be like in a few thousand, few hundred thousand years,, will the earth adapt? idk like organisms actually finding use for plastic, hell, actual plastic species being born. imagine cockroaches who have plastic exoskeletons that help them through difficult environments, plastic-laced fur being the norm for better insulation or a legit thinking humanoid made from plastic whose entire existence is a grim reminder, a premonition even, for what is to come, since history will always repeat itself

life built from plastic. human built from plastic. thought built from plastic. and subsequently a plastic god, worshipped by the plastic people for gifting them bodies made of glitter and epoxy resin. idk somebody should write a book about that