#alternate evolution

[nazrigar]

Beast Fables - Megafauna of the Continents Part 3

Part 3 of of jotting down the great Megafauna of my Beast Fables setting, featuring the regions of Samudria and Ifranika.

Erob is the continent of most of the major political players in Urvara, including the main POV country, Durroya. It is a heavilly agrarianised land, and a continent of ever increasing number of towns and cities, but there's still reverence for the beasts of the wilds, so wilderness is still alive here.

Walvisland and Tohoroland meanwhile, are the lands and waters of Ice and Snow, and are thus some of the most extreme environments in all Urvara. Animals had to adapt accordingly, and for many, the sea is a more plentiful place for food than land.

[jue-jack]

my humans if you even care

[he-who-needs-to-be-silenced]

BIG PROJECT TIME

Welcome to Euramerica, a spec bio project set in the late early permian, right before Olson’s extinction. Euramerica is what happens when the titular continent never collides with gondwana during the late carboniferous, never forming pangea or atleast delaying it.

Rules:

By the way, not all submissions will get in, so dont get mad if yours dont get in. Dont worry, they can be canonized later, as like bones or a corpse during the extinction and maybe lead to more clades idk.

Please use the clades on the list, if theres anything you feel should be added, lemme know.

Entries should be submitted on Discord in the event-submissions channel (duh), or on tumblr, just make sure to tag it #Euramerica or you could just @ me in the post (@he-who-needs-to-be-silenced)

A human has to make the art (no ai you will be skinned), this can be a paper drawing, a clay sculpt, play doh, digital drawing, 3d models anything. You can even make it out of carrots.

I will be making 3 separate murals for the little northern island, name of Stephania

When submitting, these thing should be either on the image or the text you send:

Species name (scientific or common)(preferably scientific tbh but both is fine)

Clade

Habitat

Size

Ecology

Any little tidbits or behaviours youd like to headcanon

Here’s the discord if you wanna help me not search the internet: https://discord.gg/mFxVZ2Ut

Edit: I realize now that i should probably but the google drive folder for those not on discord

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B391zNM2wCw-LebF09bza9dr_bvaUOJa?usp=drive_link

Edit again: prob should put th deadline

You have until October 1st 2024 **6am (or till i wake up) Eastern Daylight Saving Time**

[doritedraws]

"Flying wolf", a large mystacinid bat from an alternate Australia that actually lives up to its reputation (aka "The Hellhole Continent"). It and its relatives the flying dogs made a mess of bat taxonomy by getting misclassified as megabats when they're actually related to New Zealand short-tailed bats, rendering megabats polyphyletic in this alternate timeline. Also, it's an urban pest and an invasive species in the American South and Mexico.

Read more about it here!

[zzzleepyheadzzz]

Say hello to Tarpitch the Tar Pit Pokémon! An alternate evolution to Grimer, Tarpitch is obtained by leveling up Grimer while it's holding a fossil.

[o-craven-canto]

My reconstruction of a “realistic ;)” winged horse, after the mythical Pegasus, made in collaboration with my students at a course of Systematic Zoology, as presented during the 2023 SpecPosium (recording pending).

As the professor pointed out, a cellulose-based diet would make the Pegasus far too heavy to take flight, as it requires a large and bulky gut. We changed its diet to that of an opportunistic predator/scavenger, exploiting the fact that long-distance soaring makes it easy to find carrions (see: condors, giant Azhdarchids). Face and teeth had also to be redesigned of consequence: unlike ruminants, horses still have canines that can be repurposed for carnivory. No longer required to be long to keep the eyes above the grass while grazing, the jaws are much shorter for better leverage when biting into bones.

The loss of heavy guts also allows to move the body’s center of gravity forward, between the shoulders, where massive pectoral and dorsal muscles are attached to power the wings. Unlike birds, but as in large pterosaurs, wings have to carry much of the body weight on the ground, and provide the main force for take-off.

Since a re-evolution of bird-like feathers seems unlikely, we went for a wing surface made up of stiff hair-derived bristles with essentially the same function, each bundle controlled by skin muscles. We derived the Pegasus not by the modern horse Equus but by the earlier three-toed equids such as Hipparion, so that one toe could be repurposed into a wing finger as in pterodactyls.

[magia-region]

The first piece of fanart someone has done for one of my fakemon, namely Gardevolva

Drawn by the amazing @boxheadpaint!

[tigertaurus22]

Another Magia regional variant, this time an alternative evolution for Meowscarada. I just think they could’ve done better.

It’s called Jaguavera, the Jungle Cat Pokémon

Jaguavera are skilled predators, using the patterns on their fur to camouflage themselves among the trees when stalking their prey.

They are fierce protectors and hunters, their bite force strong enough to crack bone.

Also introducing New Hogwarts’ herbology professor, Ryan Kelly. He has a Sprigagito as his Pokémon companion.

In Magia, Sprigatito are known for the pleasant grassy scent they give off. It can be extracted to create a variety of relaxing scented candles.

Ryan is also the Head of Slytherin House.

As such, he’s taken the liberty of decorating the Slytherin Common Room with plants that prefer shade over direct sunlight. I just think it would look cool.

[o-craven-canto]

That doesn’t work, for better or worse. As I touched in another reblog chain, the Earth-Moon distance is not constant -- the Moon is slowly slipping away, a few cm per year. In several million years, exact solar eclipses will no longer be possible. It really does seem to be sheer coincidence! Unless the exact size/distance ratio is required not for the existence of life in general, but of sapient life in particular...

fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely

The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this

[brodacea]

Did you know that during the early stages of tetrapod evolution, a certain species of insect laid eggs onto said tetrapods’ limbs. In turn, the tetrapod host would a sac of skin around it, like a fleshy “cradle” of some sorts, akin to a wasp gall. This is why we have fingers.

[zzzleepyheadzzz]

What are the rules for requests?

Are they for mutuals only or are they For everyone

Do you also do commisoons

How complicated can the requests be

Any Major DNI(fo not interacts)

Any other accounts your willing to share

Can it be Pokemon fusions or Just reginal variants, If only stuff for Reginal Variants Can it be based off our own regions with input

After one request is drawn will we be allowed to request another

And Remember Have fun and Take care of yourself!

Hi! Requests are open to any and everyone, so don't hesitate to send something my way.

I'm currently not doing comms, just requests.

Three Pokemon per line at max sounds reasonable, I've designed split lines and g o d they take a while.

None that I can think of.

My main account for spriting is Cubeboyo on Pixilart.com that's where I actually make my stuff.

I prefer doing regional variants and other adjacent forms and evolutions. I used to do fusions until maybe two years ago I think? They were all I did for a long time so I'm branching out.

If you have specific details you want included don't be afraid to tell me. I'd love to make something like a Snorlax that adapted to Alola's warmer climate or a Kingdra that's native to deep trenches.

If you send me another request after I complete the initial one, I will slate it for later and continue with the numerical order in which I received the requests.

If you yourself have something you'd like to ask, shoot!

[o-craven-canto]

Hmm.

I suspect OP was thinking of tiny elephants puncturing and sucking fluids from other animals with a sharpened trunk, but such a lifestyle doesn't work so well with elephant architecture -- either they need to move quickly from host to host, vampire bat-style, or hunker down and hide on one with a very inconspicuous body and minimal metabolism. But I don't think there is any plausible path for elephants to evolve like that, and either way, the result wouldn't be very recognizable as an elephant.

However, I can think of two paths to make a parasitic elephant, for a reasonably generous definition of "elephant". The first is to go back to early Proboscideans like Moeritherium and Eritherium. These are stem-elephants (i.e., they're more closely related to elephants than to any other modern animal), and probably at least somewhat omnivorous. I don't think it's a huge stretch to have them evolve into a carnivore. Granted, they also wouldn't look all that much like elephants, either; they certainly wouldn't have trunks if they didn't feed from trees. But tusks and prehensile lips wouldn't be out of the question. When grasslands replaced forests in the Miocene, and were peopled by a radiation of carnivorans and ungulates, a group of carnivorous, cursorial elephantoids could have followed. And it's not a stretch that at some stouter species would behave as kleptoparasites, forcing weaker predators from the carcasses to feed. Lions do that all the time, and our ancestors in the savanna probably did too, and this would make our carnivorous elephantoids, technically, parasites.

The second route is even more of a technicality. Tasmanian devils can suffer from a nasty cancer transmitted by bites. The cancer is highly mutated tasmanian devil tissue that became able to spread from host to host. I see no particular reason the same couldn't happen among elephants; they don't bite each other, but a transmissible cancer could still spread sexually, through the placenta or nursing, by skin contact, etc. Such a cancer would be genetically elephantine, but with heavy mutations most likely including an anomalous number of chromosomes that would make it distinct from regular elephants, whose body it would inhabit as a parasite.

there should be an elephant species that's parasitic

[meonea]

I happen to see many redesigns and reimaginations of star trek aliens, but very few about humans if any.

WE ARE ALIENS TOO

[tigertaurus22]

Gwyllnark and Pawmoon

The Magivolution for Zoroark and alternate evolution to Pawmot respectively

Shiny forms on the right

Gwyllnark, the Vengeful Fox Pokémon

The latent energy of the Magia region gave this Pokémon the firepower it needed to exact revenge on those who wronged it, but also to protect others from falling victim. 

It can switch between a quadrupedal and bipedal form at will.

Pawmoon, the Harlequin Pokémon

Pawmoon uses its sharp flint-like tail to make sparks and as an effective weapon against predators. It is a trickster by nature, using its electricity like a joy buzzer when people try to touch it. It thinks electrocuting things is fun.

[front-facing-pokemon]