#more mammals more arthropods like really get weird with it

[violetreminder]

I'm not too up to date on my monhun but man I miss Nerscylla, I don't think Capcom has come close to replicating the feeling of fighting them with any other monster.

Like most monster hunts feel, well, just like that: Monster Hunts, you're engaging a giant animal, a great beast that defends itself from challenges to its territory and physical being.

But Nerscylla was different, when you face off against it you aren't challenging some animalistic beast, you were facing another hunter.

It sets traps, it ambushes you at every turn, you both wear the skins of your former quarry, and at times it even feels like its studying you to better understand how to face such a foe.

Sure it wasn't the toughest fight but even when I knew all its moves there was still the need to be on edge bc complacency means slipping up and falling asleep

Plus the armor sets looked dope as hell.

[skeletondoggy]

The people of Grafial were of three species. The Arthopacez, the Marms, and the Orgots lived full lives together on the continent, as their differences often brought them closer together.

SPECIES SHEETS I MADE FOR AN ORIGINAL FANTASY SETTING FOR A TTRPG I'M RUNNING!!! Primarily were made to help players make their characters, show off species diversity, and sprinkle in some fun regional clothing and world lore!! Ended up getting a little carried away but really proud of how these came out!

Also a little additional info and context under the cut (so I don't have to blast the 20 page lore doc at people LOL)

Most of the species specific info on the doc is Right There but wanna get a little more in depth so gonna just do quicker run downs here you can skip the bolded points if you wanna get to just the other stuff

ARTHOPACEZ: ARTHROPOD PEOPLE BABY! Primarily based off insects and crustaceans they have the hardest shells of all species! Most Arthoacez have an extra set of arms or two but only some work! Only SOME have wings tho and even fewer have working wings!!! They usually appear as a fusion of diff arthropods but most of the examples here are a bit more subtle, oops!

MARMS: THEEEE MAMMAL STAND IN! I wanted a species that let players be "humans" but don't like humans! Or what most settings do with them!!!!! So instead you get a "human" and weird goat tapirs as the same species, isn't that nice? MARMS all have tails, they all have fur or fuzz of some sort unless they have a genetic condition, and they're pretty loose with it! As the only species with predominately Skin on their body (Arthos get shells and Orgots get scales!) they also scar easier! And wrinkle easier! Also the only species with external ears, some senses for them are a bit more sensitive for better or worse!

ORGOTS: The dear fish-bird-reptiles of our dear setting here! They usually carry a mix of these species, and will have either fins, feathers, or both along their inseam as well as arms and legs! Orgots can also glide in the air, and even breathe underwater for a very very long time too! Despite their strong bodies though, they have really shitty immune systems and can get sick easily too...Orgots are very tall and very colorful! And they'll be your best friend like any other!

The classes ascribed to each character are setting specific! In order, the first job is their "Primary"/Main one that defines a lot of their character, while the 2nd one is a "Sub" Class that influences their life in smaller ways and pursuits! Currently the system holds 30 classes that are a mix of martial, magical, and professional ideologies!

TALKING ABOUT. Each region individually would take too much time so here's a small breakdown of each Zone (note: Grafial does not have boarders so these are all loosely defined!)

All the species can reach similar heights, but usually Arthopacez skew a bit shorter and Orgots skew quite taller! Marms are in the middle of it all.....(Of this group, Djerel is probably the shortest and Ciki is the tallest!)

Region clothing is usually tailored to be worn by any and all species though many personal seamstresses will make specific specific changes or additions!! For example, Mazeph and Conque wear more species specific clothing!

this isn't anything substansial but cannot tell you how fun it is to do one off designs like these and imagine their little adventures and stories. join me its fun

ok that's all for now bye I love you

[jupiterswasphouse]

WASP REVIEW - CHARMY BEE (SONIC THE HEDGEHOG)

[Image IDs: A piece of official Charmy Bee artwork and an official 3D render of the same character /End IDs.]

Apologies in advance to fans of Charmy Bee. I will preface this review with this: I really love the designs in the Sonic franchise, and I'm perfectly fine with Charmy as a character (apart from some weird things that are supposedly in the comics), Chaotix wouldn't be the same without him! but uh... Yeah, of the characters in the main Sonic games, this is probably one of the Least Good designs. The designers of Sonic Team already don't have a perfect history of making their anthro animal designs as accurate as they could be to the real thing, which usually turns out fine, but how do they fare when making an insect in their trademark style?

Well, let's get straight to it, with this bee's physical appearance. When it comes to the aspects that are fairly acceptable to me, we got only four limbs, and the lower pair appear to technically be misplaced on the body, but that's perfectly ok, given this is an anthropomorphic design. I'm not gonna get mad over a bug with human hands either, given the fact I've done that myself, quite a bit, although I do think it would be fun if they gave him an extra set of arms just to add to the bee aspects of the design. Furthermore, I'm fine with an arthropod mouth being simplified or altered into a more cartoony and/or mammalian mouth, although they could have given him big ol' mandibles and had him be just as cute!

[Image Source: PBS, Nebraska Public Media | Image ID: An illustration of a honey bee (female, worker) showing its body parts as labelled. Mandibles, antennae, eyes, thorax, abdomen, stinger, foreleg, middle leg, forewing, hind wing, and hind leg (with labelled pollen basket) /End IDs.]

Moving on to the rest, though, it's unclear whether or not his mesosoma/thorax and metasoma/abdomen are properly segmented with the shirt on, but it appears as though they might be fused into one segment? His body doesn't seem to have much in the way of segmentation in general, which is strange. The antennae are striped all the way down, which, they should be one solid color. He has only two wings, as opposed to the four on a real bee. He also shouldn't have a stinger, only females such as the queen and the worker bee have these, as the stinger is a modified ovipositor, built to inject venom, as well as for its primary purpose, that being, to lay eggs. Oh, and his helmet would be covering up his ocelli as well!

But then, we get to the most egregious aspects, and... I mean, do I have to say it? Take away the tacked on stinger, antennae, and wings, and this is just another hedgehog. Little guy is about 80% mammal. His arms and mouth area are colored like human skin, and seem to be just as smooth, no chitin nor setae to be found. He has a nose, which, he really shouldn't! He already has antennae with which to smell things!! And the only thing about his eyes that can be called "compound" is the classic Sonic character feature of having gigantic mammalian eyes that are fused straight down the middle like a visor.

[Image Sources: Jupiter's Wasp House, ie Myself, and photomacrography.net forums, Charles Krebs | Image IDs: Two photos, one of a black, yellow, orange, and white feeding from a pink and white flower, followed by a closeup of a honey bee's head /End IDs.]

It's unfortunate, because I think they could've done something really unique, especially considering how uniquely shaped his fellow Chaotix member, Vector The Crocodile is!

Another thing I have to question is, how exactly does he age? Barring the comic canon here, and the weird and insulting brain damage storyline within, he's canonically very young in the games, roughly 16 in Chaotix according to the English manual, though in Heroes he's instead seemingly portrayed as being about 6. Which brings up the question of if he was ever a larva. My assumption, if he was more like a real bee, would be yes! If we're scaling things up, then probably from birth through toddler age. But he's not quite like a real bee, is he? Maybe he was just, essentially, a smaller version of his current self, as is the case with many other types of animal.

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, Waugsberg | Image ID: A photo showing eight bee larvae arranged in order of age as they mature and harden into their pupae /End IDs.]

Small side note, apparently, in the comics, he was a prince, which I suppose it's fair enough if we're translating the many social structures of other animals to something more recognizable to us humans, but if every child of the queen became a prince or princess, then every bee in the colony would be a royal, as all honey bees are the young of a queen. Also, the colony wouldn't have a king! A honey bee hive is a matriarchy through and through! If you want an insect king and queen pairing, you'll have to turn to the termites of Blattodea, as Hymenoptera tends to be a bit of a girl's club. Yet again, this is Ken Penders lore we're talking about here, so it matters not.

So, what can be said about his abilities and behaviors? We already covered that he, strangely, has a stinger, which he uses to attack as most stinging bees do, though he's not very aggressive, which is about accurate. I don't think he's ever shown making honey (like a worker bee) nor feeding on honey, or nectar, nor directly from flowers, but do correct me if I'm wrong! He has, at least, been shown to be able to mysteriously warp between flowers, which is quite odd, yet also quite cool, I would say.

He is also, or at least was originally, quite a fast flier! As the Japanese manual of Chaotix supposedly states "He was the first insect to cross the speed of sound", or alternatively that he was the first to break the sound barrier, depending on which translation you read, although this is clearly not quite the case later on. He's still fast, but not enough to break the sound barrier. Honey bees are, in fact, quite fast for their size, reaching a top flight speed of about 20mph (~32kmh), and this is a series where the fastest thing alive is a damn hedgehog, so I can let this one slide. Though, it does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity to make seemingly the fastest insect in this universe a honey bee rather than, say, a dragonfly, the fastest of which, reach about 35mph (56kmh).

All in all, though, Charmy Bee, while a charming fellow, isn't quite up to snuff when compared directly to the real thing. Understandably enough for the Sonic universe, but still kind of disappointing, taking all things into consideration, and the near complete departure from arthropodal anatomy is enough to dock a significant amount of points. So, sadly, I'll have to give him...

-

Overall: 3.5/10

-

Leave your wasp review suggestion in the replies, tags, or askbox!

[ecto-hazard]

In the Man Made Horrors, did objects just domesticate dogs like humans did (Classfied has a dog and all) and do they have other domesticated animals? Do they see mammals as weird like we see reptiles or bugs or birds? Are there any actual human-like monkeys. Alternatively, are there species of bugs that are like ancestral to objects that are like monkeys to them that are alive in their time? Just thinking about evolution and domestication in this world lol

Objects, or as more technically known Mimesites, branched off from other Arthropods a long time ago. They developed biological mimicry very early evolutionarily speaking, which is what aided in their survival and development over history. Other arthropods, though also evolutionarily successful as there’s still a fuck ton of them, didn’t get to develop in such a complex way since they survive using more of a “quantity over quality” strategy. Meanwhile, the natural adaptability of mimesites allowed them to shift towards having longer life spans and developing more complex nervous systems. So while bugs are recognized to be the closest living relatives to objects, they’re not really on the same playing field. So objects being as developed as they are is really unique in the Arthropoda phylum.

Other animals developed complex nervous systems, albeit separately. Most notable is mammals, much like mammals in the real world. Thus you still see a lot of objects domesticating mammals for the same reason humans did. Despite mammals being a lot different biologically speaking, they’re generally accepted well by modern objects.

Birds and many reptiles, on the other hand, are viewed as much more disturbing. It’s very common for objects to have fears of birds. The current consensus is that the fear is evolutionarily rooted. Before becoming more complex, mimesites had the ability to fly and it would’ve been efficient in escaping predators until reptiles and birds developed the same advantage later. Even when birds became less of a threat to them, objects saw birds as a sign of death. To this day they’re still considered bad luck and just sorta creepy.

Did humans exist? Yes. They still do. But they never evolved quite into what we recognize as humans today. They are intelligent, but not any more so than primates in our world. You can find humans in many regions of the world, mostly the tropics. They were nearly hunted to extinction by mimesites a century or so ago, so there aren’t many left. Raw human flesh is considered a delicacy in places where hunting laws aren’t so strict.

[saspitite]

Needlessly Pedantic Answers to Worldbuilding Questions that Don't Matter That Much to Begin With, Episode #1:

why is everyone in your fictional world an animal? what do they eat? are there any non-sapient animals? is it more of a "Zootopia or Beastars" type situation? how does anatomy change across certain species?

so as nobody may know, i write about a lot of fictional worlds and one of them is your standard diverse furry society. while these are quite fun to mess around with, they tend to bring up a lot of questions (that technically don't matter too much, i mean you're just telling a fictional story for god's sake) about how the world works. and there's especially a lot of questions raised in my case because my world doesn't just feature mammals, but also reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and so on, so you wonder how differently they live, if at all. i'm gonna be evil and answer all of those questions that exactly -2 people have asked today!

1: why is everyone an animal?

of course, the real reason is because it's fun to explore stories and create characters that aren't human, and it's especially a fun opportunity to experiment with character design! but for a more in-universe reason, the gods like to take inspiration from each other and will tend to build off of each other's ideas. this world was made by the wandering god Belet, who became inspired after visiting several worlds of other gods. they were curious about creating a world where multiple sapient species exist, since it was a common trend in other worlds for only one dominant species existing at a time.

2. what do they eat?

naturally, all species are vegetarian, although some areas of the world have gotten to the point of inventing artificial foods adjacent to plant-based meat. the idea of cannibalism or killing other people to eat hasn't really been explored due to being kinda... dubious. but i guess it's up in the air. although it may sound weird, the practice of selling one's own dairy products and other non-meat animal products is quite normalized. it's basically just seen as the same level of normal as selling any other food items you make.

3. are there any non-sapient animals?

so far? nope. but that might get retconned in the future, i dunno. i haven't published enough about this world so i'm still able to reconsider if i wanted to. but as of right now, basically every single organism from the animalia kingdom is anthropomorphized, with a few exceptions. (exceptions usually being organisms i have no clue how to anthropomorphize lmao)

4. is it more of a "zootopia or beastars" type situation?

to expand on this question, it's basically asking for more information on how society functions and how fucked it is, if at all. initially i said it was going to be a utopia of sorts- i retconned that, lol, because it seems like i can't ever write about a truly happy world. it's definitely one of my better worlds to live in, but it's by no means perfect. i wouldn't say it's Beastars levels of messed up (black markets selling dubious meat and carnal instincts telling you to eat your friends) but it's probably not as cutesy as, say, Zootopia is on the surface level, although i do like how it tackled systemic racism and whatnot. i guess it's somewhere in between. there isn't anything going on that's straight out of a psychological horror movie but there's definitely inequality and tension everywhere.

5. how does anatomy change across certain species?

outside of the very obvious base change of every animal becoming anthropomorphic and thus more human-like, there's a couple other changes, such as necessary internal anatomy shifting around so all creatures can live on land properly, plus the ability to be able to speak the same languages, stuff like that. arthropods are a bit trickier (like oh my god so much would have to change) but i usually just explain that they're built different and call it a day. for my sanity. cold blooded animals are able to somewhat thermoregulate on their own, but will still largely rely on their surroundings. if you're cold, they're cold. wrap your lizard girls in blankets. also, all animals are similarly sized, but some tend to be slightly larger/smaller on average depending on the species. like, an old elephant man is gonna be MUCH taller than a moth lady lol.

oh, and an extremely unnecessary addition that i only expanded on because of the fact that i had to face the logical issue of giving my reptile characters boobs: non-mammalian animals will still tend to have visible "breasts" due to having the general silhouette of a human, but they don't produce milk or function at all outside of looks. some non-mammalians prefer to get their "breast" tissue surgically removed due to the fact that it serves basically no purpose for them.

that's about where the biological similarities end, though. when it comes to reproduction, biological compatibility largely follows the same odds as it would in the real world, so you sadly won't see many wolf/komodo dragon hybrids hanging out. this also tends to be a source of interspecies-relationship discrimination, and not to mention eugenics...

some miscellaneous tidbits:

-in terms of technology and resources, i'd say this world is about as advanced, if not a little more than our own. it's no sci-fi paradise but there are some significant advancements made that definitely outdo us, such as the research and technology poured into environment conservation and space exploration (the latter of which may or may not be one of the main topics of a story i'm working on... :3)

-trans healthcare is also reasonably advanced, although that doesn't imply there's less transphobia.

-yes, there's probably some unique version of veganism in this world, but instead of not eating animals it'd be like... fungi. or certain types of plants. or maybe even animal products anyways, despite the fact that they're normalized, for one reason or another.

-ohhhh clothes work so differently depending on what kind of animal you are. but i cannot get into that here. not without going insane. just know that i have been thinking about it a lot. there are entire different kinds of clothing for certain body types, just not the definition of body type you'd initially think of. there's specific clothing for the winged. the tailed and the non-tailed. the quilled. the feathered. the slimed. its insane

[heyclickadee]

There’s this binary set of attitudes I occasionally come across when talking to people who rarely come across wild animals any bigger or more varied than a robin or a squirrel.

On the one end, you’ll get people who think any carnivorous animal bigger than a fox is just itching to murder every living thing that comes across its path—especially the humans. I beta-read a story written by this guy who had grown up in suburban England. He had one chapter where his protagonist had to fight lions, another where he had to fight wolves, another where he had to fight a bear. And each time the animals really were just out to kill because the writer saw “kill” as an automatic action these animals would take; they came at this guy’s protagonist in CoD-esque waves just because.

I actually came across the same thing a lot while working at a state park; people would come up to me incensed that we allowed bobcats (yes, they would complain about the bobcats) and rattlesnakes in the park. Didn’t we know those things attacked people?

Pushing the idea that the state park staff needed to make sure *checks notes* animals were not present in their natural habitat in what was basically a nature preserve…well, yes, animal attacks do happen, and they can be dangerous or even deadly, but they usually happen for a specific reason. Humans are big, kinda weird animals, and there are not that many predators left that see us as prey (though they do exist). Hiking in some (some) parts of North America you’re a lot more likely to be attacked by a large herbivore like a moose than a large predator like a mountain lion (it’s still not that likely, but even so). Something like a rattlesnake isn’t going to going to attack you because it’s wired to kill.

The other side of this I’ll come across sometimes is that all animals are harmless, misunderstood puppies who want scritches. It’s maybe more common in the internet, but it bleeds over into real life sometimes. You get people trying to pet bears and bison. And I get it—we’re just human. We try to pack bond with everything and bears and the like really are just so damn fluffy.

But that’s really just the opposite end of the same misunderstanding. Barring an outlier in personality, wild animals aren’t murder machines, but they aren’t harmless, either. They’re just animals trying to live. Many animals—from insects and arthropods to big mammals—will attack if pressed by the right circumstances.

A prairie rattlesnake, for example, is rarely be actively aggressive. They’re shy, we’re large and more or less impossible for them to eat, biting us for no reason is a waste of energy—they rattle to get predators and larger animals to back off before they have to—and they’d just as soon leave us alone. That’s not the same thing as saying a prairie rattlesnake poses no danger; they do. Get in a rattlesnake’s face or step on it by accident, and it will bite you, because you’re a threat and it’s trying to stay alive.

I don’t know. Something something about not replacing the idea that wildlife is out for murder with the idea that wildlife is fully domesticated. Something about understanding, distance, and respect.

[weirdmarioenemies]

This post made me start thinking about Pokemon shape icons again. They’re funny! I like to think about them! And you know what? We’ve never done a Pokemon post before. So here we go! It’s time to cover every Pokemon that exists, all in one post, by exclusively talking about vague approximations of their shape! I will also be pointing out which I think is most significant of the group, whether funniest, weirdest, or whatever! This will be a very long post.

First we have Just A Head. Just A Head is as simple as it gets, but it proves that sometimes, Just A Head is all you need! Maybe it could bounce about, maybe it could roll, maybe it could even float. It doesn’t even need to be round, necessarily. Lots of possibilities, for Just A Head!

MOST NOTABLE: Polteageist is in here. What are you doing here? You have an entire body! You have limbs!

Head With Legs is much more straightforward. You know what this one is all about, and that is walking, waddling, wandering. It may sometimes have some little arms, but we’re not talking about those. It also doesn’t need to be just a head! Sometimes there is a body, even a neck, but as long as there are not potent enough arms, it is Head With Legs.

MOST NOTABLE: Dracovish being here is very funny to me, because it so WOULD have been in Bipedal Tailed, but then its tail had to go and be its body! So it’s not technically Tailless, either!

There is something fishy about With Fins! It looks like absolute fish, but there are some sea mammals and reptiles included, too! Be careful if you ever wear flippers while swimming, because if this is to be trusted, you will be very easy to confuse for a Cartoon Fish.

MOST NOTABLE: Does Luvdisc REALLY have fins? I guess this is confirmation that it technically does, they are just not really visible with the stylization. Lore!

Next is Insectoid Body! Hooray! This one is very much like the Cootie toy, and interesting for representing insects that specifically do NOT have wings, while most insects Do. However, to make up for this, any arthropod is welcome to Insectoid Body, including spiders, crabs and anomalocarids! Also Shuckle, because they keep trying to insist it’s a bug! But do you know the truth?

MOST NOTABLE: Shuckle is surprisingly NOT the most notable, because CORSOLA is here! The CORAL! And even weirder is... it makes sense, kind of! It has nubs and horns that make it vaguely this shape! Wow!

Quadruped Body is a Dog, and it is a nice little dog. I would pet this dog! Of course, there are a LOT of different kinds of dogs, like horses and turtles and mudskippers, so Quadruped Body is a very crowded category. More dogs than insectoid bodies! That’s not right.

MOST NOTABLE: There is not much weird here, really. I’m going to go with Shelgon, though, because a vertebrate quadruped pupa is always very very funny.

Thank goodness, though, there is room for more bugs! Two Or More Pairs Of Wings is not EXCLUSIVE to flying insects, but there are only two non-insects in here, so it might as well be. I think it is funny that the icon doesn’t seem intended to be an insect, with its four legs and snout, but is vague enough.

MOST NOTABLE: Masquerain is always much weirder than I give it credit for. I keep forgetting its “legs” became wings!

And now let’s get a Hell Yeah for Multiple Bodies! The wackiest shape of all! If more than one part of it has a face, then here it will be! It can be multiple separate things acting as one, one thing with multiple faces, or anything in between! I also really love that it looks so celestial! It could be a solar system, or a planet with a bunch of moons! All of whom are little guys! Or incredibly massive guys, if they are celestial bodies!

MOST NOTABLE: I will use two here, because I just love Vanilluxe and Klinklang both being in this category. They are friends, always have been, always will be!

The hits keep coming with Tentacled Body! This includes anyone with not only tentacles, but also multiple pairs of legs, or even roots (or roots that act as legs)! Cnidarians, cephalopods, plant creatures, rock monsters, and more can be united, a seemingly ragtag bunch of misfits that have more in common than they may think!

MOST NOTABLE: Ferrothorn is the only one here whose tendrils are upside down! So it wins.

There is a LOT going on in A Head And Base! Honestly, kind of TOO much. There are a lot that I think fit better in other shape categories, but I’m not complaining, because I like to think that all of these can be friends!

MOST NOTABLE: Would you expect this to be the section that literally every seahorse Pokemon is in? Because it is. Seahorses are weird, but are they really so weird that it overwrites them being With Fins?

We now settle down with the weirdness a bit with Bipedal Tailed. This category is MASSIVE! And very self-explanatory, you can easily imagine what would be here. Not much Funny to say about it.

MOST NOTABLE: Snover! Both because I love Snover dearly, and because I love that a tree is in this VERY animal-dominated category!

Bipedal Tailless! The most scrimblo of categories! The very icon could be its own scrimblo! There IS a whole lot of diversity here, and a whole lot of spherical bodies with limbs, which is fun!

MOST NOTABLE: Musharna is here, while Munna is quadrupedal! What’s the deal with that! I don’t want Musharna to Stand.

Single Pair Of Wings is funny. That icon is clearly some kind of dragon, but this is far and away a Bird category, so why not make the icon a bird? I don’t know! There are actually far fewer dragons here than I would expect, too, so there is really no excuse. A pair of wings and a pair of feet would also represent bats!

MOST NOTABLE: Mantine and Mantyke are here! Those flappers are more wing than fin! It makes sense with their typing, but it is nice whenever it gets emphasized.

Serpentine Body is here to wiggle! Obviously there are snakes in here, but there are some very interesting choices, too! Like pupae and a sea cucumber! And one shrimp, but only one of the shrimp.

MOST NOTABLE: There are two different ones this time. First, Sandygast??? Huh??? I don’t know! Also Mimikyu is here! Does this imply things about its True Form?

Last but certainly not least, Head And Arms! Another with a lot of diversity, since it doesn’t much matter what the body is shaped like, as long as there are arms and not quite legs. It is kind of interesting to see what they consider to not truly be legs, here!

MOST NOTABLE: Magnemite and Magnezone are here, but poor Magneton is separated, far off in Multiple Bodies! Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s Magnezone’s older child, Magenemite’s older sibling, grown up and living on its own.

So that is every Pokemon that exists, and ever will exists! Unless they make new shape categories, which I would not complain about. Which is YOUR favorite category? Mine is Multiple Bodies!

[lorenfangor]

Are there any places you think the books have aged poorly? You’ve defended the Auxiliaries and #40; where do you think the flaws are, if there are any?

ooh, interesting question

the obvious answer is the Civil War book, but at the same time that book was clunky and bad even when it was published. the Addy books from Pleasant Company/American Girl, and the Dear America diaries, were just some of the middle-grade and kid literature written about the Civil War and slavery that was available by the year 2000; I'm not going to give this book credit for being fair for its day when Meet Addy or Color Me Dark existed contemporaneously.

with that out of the running, I'm honestly going to talk about the animals, but not in the Science Marches On sense (I do have to accept that Animorphs takes place in a universe where dolphins are basically good, but that's beside the point)

I was a kid in the 90s and I could read in the 90s and I wanted to be a marine biologist growing up, so I devoured Zoobooks and My Big Backyard/Ranger Rick and the stuff the Kratt brothers put out, and I read every animal book at the library I could find, checked out The Crocodile Hunter on VHS, and watched nature documentaries as often as I could. We had a zoo membership so I could go see the animals there, and I played all the animal-focused Magic Schoolbus computer games. All this is to say that was pretty decently aware of how the pop science ecosystem treated animals and animal facts, and Animorphs is very of-its-time, and I don't think that's aged well for one main reason.

We're aware now of the focus on charismatic megafauna and other similar animals that dominated zoos and popular awareness for decades, and how that focus can prioritize conservation efforts for a small number of "famous" species (like koalas and giant pandas) while erasing or overshadowing work on insects and other invertebrates and "ugly" or "weird" vertebrates like Hellbenders or poison dart frogs. There was also a lot of moralizing in how animals were presented - mammals and birds good, amphibians and fish good, arthropods and reptiles and non-cephalopod invertebrates bad. A lot of animals were sensationalized and presented as disgusting or shocking or extreme, in part to incentivize kids to read about them, but that did contribute to a frightening public image.

This is why sharks are mindless killing machines, why Spawn the cobra doesn't get the same love as Fluffer the cat, and why Yeerks and Taxxons are terrifying and gross by sole virtue of how they look. There's a level of cultural context that's predicated on the assumption that you know how you're "supposed" to feel about different types of animals. It's easy for me because I grew up in that era, so I can understand what's being implied, but wondering things like "what cartilaginous fish hurt you, Applegrant" is a perennial frustration among new readers.

Plus, if you find termites or slugs or ants genuinely cute, or if you (like me) think sharks are sweet little babies who need to be loved, especially if you're relatively up to date on the scientific literature, it's frustrating to see these books rely on outdated widely-agreed-upon stereotypes and misconceptions (the wolf pack dynamics is one I'll let slide because it wasn't widely known yet that wolf packs didn't have strict dominance hierarchy) that only become more glaring the further away 1996 gets.

this is something I've seen first-time readers get upset by, particularly scientifically-minded ones, and it's another aspect of the era of publication that I really think deserves more context. nobody was trying to say certain animals were Truly Evil for no reason! we just... all kind of collectively agreed that if a species Felt Scary it Was Scary, which is being corrected now, but wasn't purposeful malice.

[evolutionsvoid]

I find the Underworld to be an incredible place, despite how it baffles me so. Many of my expeditions have the goal of answering certain questions and obtaining new knowledge, but there are times I come back still confused or with even more questions. The Underworld is one of those places, but it is one of the special few where I am actually thrilled to be so lost. Every tunnel leads to some new oddity, every creature studied and explored creates new thoughts and theories! Then you take what you learn and compare it to the surface world, which leads to a whole slew of questions! There is truly no end to my work, and a part of that excites me. What will I find next? What epiphany will come from this journey? Nobody knows, but the only way to get a hint is to charge out into that wilderness and find it yourself! I am rambling again, so lets go back to the Underworld. What I was getting at is that....well....there's some weird stuff down there. Biomes that seem impossible in such confined spaces, creatures whose anatomy and lifestyle challenges my theories on how life functions. There are indeed strange things upon the surface, but down here it seems all the oddity has been compacted into these tight tunnels and secluded caverns. Since there is less space, it means there is no room for filler, so only the weird get to survive! Well, that is what it seems. A good example can be found in the species I aim to talk about: The Vetulyk. What is a Vetulyk? They are a species found down in the Underworld, who live and feed in the many tunnels and caverns. They have four pairs of boneless limbs, which help them walk over uneven ground and scale rocky slopes. Their body is covered in thick plating, which sprouts some serious pointy bits! This spike studded armor allows them to survive some serious damage, be it by predator or falling rocks. If an attacker is their current problem, they deal with them by using a club tipped tail that can crack bone and shatter skulls. This is a decent explanation of their appearance, but does it really answer what they are? Not really, and the reason is because I really have no clue what they are. Normally I could tell you if they are mammals, fish, reptiles, arthropods and the sort, but I have come to no real conclusion on what these things are even related to. You may say that their boneless limbs and armored hides seem to point at some kind of insect or crustacean, but it isn't that easy! Dissections have found a strange flexible structure along its back that some have compared to a spinal column, which would mean it isn't some insect. But this bizarre thing hasn't really been figured out or classified, so is it really related to the spine? No clue! And even if it was some relative to this structure, then what? What do we compare it to then? It ain't a mammal, I will tell you that! This is the confusion we have to deal with here, and why figuring how everything fits together can be a real pain. For now, the Vetulyk are their own weird little thing (I guess "little" might not be the best word)! So this armored "thing" lives in the Underworld, and can be found in a variety of ecosystems. Their more widespread population is possible because Vetulyk eat one thing and one thing only: rocks. The species has been nicknamed "Rock-Eaters" by the locals, which is in no way clever. Watch one in action and you will see how obvious this name is, as Vetulyk spend a whole lot of time just gnawing on rocks, boulders and the occasional wall. Their mandibles are like a series of beaks that chip and scrape away at the hard surface, breaking it down bit by bit. Smaller rocks are taken into the mouth and crushed, and all manners of stone, ore and mineral wind up as dust and shard within its throat. As it carves and crushes, the dusty mixture is swallowed and fed into its incredibly intricate digestive system. It appears that feeding off of rock is a difficult process, and you can see that with the amount of organs and parts needed for this creature to survive. These things are bigger than cows, and yet most of the space inside that armor is taken up by its digestive system! All the other organs are practically shoved aside to make room for it! Another part of this complex system is the row of "eyes" that run down its body. In truth, these are all orifices used to excrete and expel waste, spitting out the junk as it breaks down its meal. Think of it like how miners collect and refine ore: first you have to dig through a ton of rock to find the right stuff, then you take it out in chunks, then break that down and break it down again. It takes so much to get so little and that is how their body works! Along each stage of digestion, they spit out the worthless stuff as dust and chalky gobs, and then send the goods to the next part for further refinement. It is a long process, and one that doesn't get much out of it. It is said that they are called "Rock-Eaters" because they devour stone, but the name is also given to them because they do nothing else. This system is very inefficient and the food is very lacking, so they need to eat a ton of it to properly feed themselves. As a result, they just constantly eat. All day and every day! It is believed that they don't even sleep, instead switching into a slower behavior that allows them to rest and chew at the same time! Thinking about how these creatures are geophages brings to mind Rock-Eaters of the surface: Trolls! Those brutes feed exclusively on rock, but they appear to have a more active lifestyle. How can this be? Looking at the two digestive systems shows that both are quite different from one another. The troll's system has complexities but not near the level of the Vetulyk, and it doesn't take up as much of the body. Some may immediately suggest the two are related, but there is no real link, save for the fact they eat rock. Guessing relations by diet is a foolish idea, as dryads, humans and giant ants are omnivores but I certainly wouldn't say we are all related! I think instead it is a converging of designs, and the trolls have found a more simple and efficient system. Perhaps the Vetulyk are much older and have to work with more primordial parts. It is hard to say, but it is interesting to ponder. With their diet being nothing but rock and mineral, the Vetulyk have received the interesting side effect of being pretty much inedible. Their meat is poisonous to many and worthless to others, causing them to have very few predators. For the rare beast that can eat them, they will find it difficult to obtain with that thick armor and hefty club. Honestly, this weaponry and nasty flesh is probably the reason these creatures have lived for so long with such a lacking diet. With no pressure from other animals and their world being literally made out of food, they can easily prosper. Even demons have no use for their meat, though they have a liking for that armor. When Vetulyk is hunted, it is solely for those plates of theirs. The flesh is either ground up to be used for fertilizing crops or taken as an offering to Alauticus. Due to their diet and similarities to the Core Dwellers, it is believed that these creatures have a connection to the God of Stone. Some suggest they are the offspring of the Core Dwellers, left behind after these great carvers were taken back to the realm of the Gods Below.

These offerings of flesh are what allowed me to get an in depth look of their anatomy! I got to see a group of hunters bring one down and harvest the plates, leaving the exposed flesh and organs. Before they carted the useless meat to the nearest temple, I got a chance to cut it open and see this complex digestive system myself! It was thrilling to see! I even got a sketch of the whole layout, with incredible detail! My guides helped me fill in any gaps, despite their confusion over my excitement. I am so proud of that drawing that I wanted to put it in my book, but Eucella refuses! She won't even look at it! Unbelievable! I am pretty sure it is because she doesn't fully understand its sheer complexity and purpose, so she hides her ignorance by burying my genius! I have tried to explain all this to her in full detail, to really hammer home how incredible this all is but she won't hear it! She just starts retching and gagging when I talk about it! I don't understand it! Even when I go and buy her dinner to butter her up, she gets angry when I bring up the bile ducts and digestive discharges! It is all important to the big picture! How am I supposed to fully explain this intricate system without mentioning the mucous sheath?! Chlora Myron

Dryad Natural Historian ----------------------------------------------------------------- Lets take a quick trip to the Underworld and mash some prehistoric creatures together! As usual!

[bisquid]

It's particularly exasperating because just extending the seasons wouldn't be much of an issue - having six months of every season would probably look a lot like our three-month seasons, and the ecology would probably look similar, although I would imagine things - particularly photosynthetic vascular plants - would be bigger, since they'd have twice as long to grow in the spring/summer. Also it would have interesting effects on pregnancy, somehow, I think, because the trade-offs between 'time pregnancy in relation to when there's Most Food' (which is most annually breeding species' method) and 'amount of time it takes to Make Offspring' and 'how much development can happen in utero before birth becomes too dangerous' would be different. Maybe multiples are more common? Maybe a lot more large mammals have two pregnancies a year? Maybe things would be very similar to earth except Bigger? Who knows!

As long as the climatic variation is regular you'd probably be able to get away with ecology not unlike earth's, more or less.

But when you take that regularity away, and have erratic and seemingly unpredictable warm-cold cycles, over evolutionary timescales...? Weird evolutionary trends would happen. You might well see life histories much more like certain arthropods have, where they undergo metamorphosis in response to environmental changes, and/or produce offspring with a phenotype more adapted to the changing climate... I would imagine phenotypic plasticity (.... essentially, how 'easy' it is to have physically and/or behaviourally different traits from the same basic genotype) to be extremely evolutionarily valuable. And I'd expect to see waaaay more hibernation, too, honestly.

There's also things like, if the Long Night is literal (global darkness for at least one human generation)... That is going to be ecologically apocalyptic if it only happens once every, what, 8-10 thousand years? Yeah. That's incredibly strong selection pressure, but also incredibly rare selection pressure. Sort of like trying to evolve resistance to meteor strikes.

And given that canon implies that there's been at least one such time...westerosi - indeed, planetary - ecology, bizarre and lopsided though it is, should be way less coherent than it is. You're telling me that following the absence of any sunlight for at least fifteen years, there's still a fairly intact community not only of photosynthetic organisms but also everything that relies on them??? I could just about believe that a sufficiently robust seedbank could theoretically repopulate an area with a fairly intact floral community, but I'm sorry I just cannot accept that everything from aurochs to elephants to fucking giant elk managed to cling on in the face of no new vegetative growth for getting on for two decades?? No.

And if it's not a global phenomenon.... Frankly at that point I have other questions. What the fuck does the rest of the planet think about that one continent of weirdos with the incredibly fucked up weather? How the fuck would things evolve with that kind of climatic fuckery?

I've seen suggestions that the fucked up weather is a comparatively new phenomenon - it's caused by the night's king and has only been around for like 8k years - and that's why westeros has normal years and harvests and whatnot, it's just the new weirdness has been imposed upon them, which. It's a cool idea but there's some, uh, well. As we are becoming increasingly aware, globally, 'organisms adapted for these seasons in these temperature ranges begin to experience Different climatic/weather behaviour' tends not to go... spectacularly. Is 8k years enough for some microevolution to mitigate the worst of this? Difficult to say, but not impossible. Is it likely to have all gone smoothly with few to no ecologically significant extinctions? ....I doubt it. I really really doubt it.

(also, pet peeve: if it is global, the long winters should absolutely have an effect on sea level. One hundred percent. A decade plus of little to no glacial melt and a great deal of snow boosting albedo? There should be so much arctic ice. I would not be surprised if the 'drowning of the neck' and the 'breaking of the arm of dorne' were actually the result of sea levels rising following a particularly long/cold winter. There has probably been an ice bridge between parts of the Far North and the continent of Essos. The Night's King doesn't need to break the wall, he just needs to freeze the bay of seals and walk around it )

In the version of westeros I have in my head, that makes some vague kind of ecological sense, planetos has normal seasons - although generally to a lesser extent than on earth, with a smaller difference between winter and summer - which themselves exist in the context of essentially incredibly variable miniature glacial and interglacial periods; apparently random mini ice ages, basically. That way you still get a recognisable ecological rhythm and a valid reason for humans to give a shit about solar years, without breaking the importance and urgency of 'Winter is coming', and without running into the ridiculousness of 'no harvests for multi year winters'. You do need to store up food and firewood and warm clothes, because you've effectively just moved a long way north and now are living in an arctic or subarctic environment, with the issues that brings. (There is probably, particularly in the North, an entirely separate set of food crop and possibly livestock breeds preferentially used in metawinters and metasummers)

Seriously though, trying to figure out how much herbivore biomass the Kingswood could conceivably support when questions like 'is it winter or summer? Are they laying down autumn fat reserves to deal with winter? Is it a mast year?' are either impossible to answer or not applicable? Exhausting

Similarly trying to figure out population dynamics when shit like 'winter die-offs' and 'migration times' and 'breeding seasons' aren't really calculable is. Well. Attempts Are Being Made

How it started:

How it's going:

@systlin made the mistake of adding a couple of quick lines about overpopulation in the King's Landing Kingswood to A Crossing of Fires and then I compounded the issue by doing maths about it and now the entire rest of the fic has been derailed

[i-am-a-meat-popcicle]

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

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

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

Quick list of the main taxonomy ranks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Aves (birds): Wings

Class Reptilian: Stalkers

I have no idea where the fuck to put rakks.

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

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

The simple stuff ends here

Phylum Arthropoda: Spiderants, Scaylions, Drifters, and Varkids

Class insecta:

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

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

Class Arachnida:

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

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

Phylum Annelida (basically worms): Sandworms and Crabworms

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

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

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

Special cases:

Sycthids:

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

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

Spores:

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

Rakks:

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

Crystalisks:

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

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

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

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

[animalids]

Do you have a favorite animal? Or a few absolute favorites?

Oh boy, get ready, this is gonna be long! Thanks for giving me a reason to just list my favorites! Also, just assume any domestic breed/species is on the list, I love them all, I’ve just highlighted a few that I love a bit more than the rest

Arthropods:

Solifuges - I love all solifuges, but if I had to pick a favorite species it would probably be Metasolpuga picta. They’re big and colorful and day-active. Also really fond of Rhagodidae because they’re just so distinctive!

Tarantulas - Same deal, I love them all (though Poecilotheria scares me a little ;n;). Some of my favorites are Hapalopus and Ceratogyrus, both of which I personally own right now.

Huntsman spiders - My dream pet is Heteropoda lunula and it will probably be the death of me haha

Ticks - If I see people hating an entire species for just living, I immediately fall in love with that species and will defend it till I die. Hate the tick’s bite, don’t hate the tick itself - it’s just an animal surviving the only way it knows how to.

Mosquitoes - Same deal. They’re also exceptionally beautiful.

Serolid isopods - Just... just look them up. Trust me, they won’t disappoint.

Tachinid flies - Especially the spiky ‘hedgehog’ flies and especially Tachina grossa whose Danish name is ‘Harald the Giant Fly’ after zoologist Harald Thamdrup whose student was studying them.

Mammals:

Horses - I’ve never seen a horse I didn’t love. Some of my favorite breeds are Welsh Mountain Ponies, Jutland Horses, Frederiksborgers, Kladrubers,  

Painted wolf - They’re just so photogenic and charismatic

Cats - Have you ever seen a cat? They’re so full of love

Bactrian camels - All camels are great but domestic Bactrians are just so cute and fluffy. They’re honestly my dream pet, and I’m already reading up on their husbandry all the time.

Bovines - All of them. Bison, cattle, gaur, buffalo, yak... Also non-bovines that look like bovines, such as muskoxen and wildebeest.

Moose - They’re so beautiful and look like something straight out of the ice age.

Pigs - They’re so beautiful! Domestic pigs and wild pigs alike. Especially babirusas.

Honestly just artiodactyls in general - Off the top of my pinterest head, these are some of my faves: Takin, serows, tahr, bharal, domestic goats and sheep, okapis, saolas, reindeer, roe deer, marsh deer, Père David’s deer, saiga, lechwe, nilgai, eland, oryx

Baboons - They scare me but I also think they’re beautiful. I can see why early travellers described them as a mix of monkey and dog.

Cuscus - yeah, they look like that

Tree shrew - Grandpa

Birds:

Pheasants - Especially ring-necks. They were everywhere around my childhood home and just make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Turkeys - They’re just beautiful

Peacocks - Chaos incarnate

Chickens - They’re so diverse and good pets! Can you tell by now I love galliform birds?

Pigeons - All of them, but especially feral pigeons and collared doves.

Reptiles:

Slow worms - I have very fond memories of catching these deceptively fast lizards as a kid :’)

Corn snakes - Yet another one of my dream pets. Those morphs!! And they have such a sweet temperament

Phrynocephalus mystaceus - It’s just a really cool agama

Xenodermus javanicus - It’s just a really cool snake

Dwarf caimans - they are baby

Amphibians:

Caecilians - I’m honestly not that interested in amphibians, but caecilians are the exception. They’re so weird, their taxonomy is messy, they look like earthworms but have a skeleton, and their life cycle is a mystery!

Fish:

Sunfish - I don’t like the post that was going around a year or two back about how sunfish have survived by being useless - they’re amazing animals and surprisingly intelligent

Koi fish - Pretty, intelligent, lots of colors, domestic. What’s not to love?

Danish golden trout (guldørred) - A cross between two trout subspecies that was first developed in Denmark. Obligated to mention it because it’s the only fish breed my country has created :’)

Eels - All of them. I’ve never seen an eel I didn’t like.

Non-arthropod invertebrates:

Worms - Annelids are so fascinating! Earthworms, marine worms, parasites, free-living species... they’re so diverse! I have no idea how worm scientists tell species apart. Nematodes (which are actually ecdysozoans, not annelids) are especially mysterious to me. Scale worms are really cool.

Snails and slugs - They’re so cute with their little eye stalks and cute defenseless bodies. I want to protect them all. I have a bunch of Achatina fulica and I love them.

Clams - The most overlooked molluscs and least respected animals we use.

Tardigrades - They look like the love child of a bear and a velvet worm, with a vacuum cleaner for a face.

[approximateknowledge]

@amrtiamat "arthropod. :) possibly a beetle of some kind, the first thing that came to mind specifically was a click beetle"

ok so im gonna make *2* timelines for this one because there's been a bit of confusion i think: "beetle" is a clade, "click beetle" is a species; a click beetle's niche is "small nocturnal leaf-litter herbivore/detrivore"

both paths are gonna end up in that niche, but ill make it so the second one ends up having a bodyplan that also *looks* like a beetle

here goes!

version uno (tiny recognisable mammal version):

-step 1: bat gets smaller to eke out a niche on smaller insect prey

-step 2: bat starts preying on aphids, becoming a kind of peripheral ant-parasite in the process; crucially though, they also become mostly flightless around this time, because aphids don't really fly either

-step 3: as the aphid-hunting becomes more intense and the ant retaliation becomes more severe, they teeny-tiny bats respond by evolving to jump away explosively out of danger

-step 4: the little flightless aphid-eaters specialise further into ant-parasitism and learn to eat from their fungus-gardens too

-step 5: turns out there's a lot of fungus outside the colonies too, and they begin to diversify as fungus-eating little jumpy carnivores

-step 6: it's not a big step from fungus to lichen, and from lichen to moss and other soft plants

-step 7: congratulations, you now have tiny jumpy herbivorous bats crawling through the leaflitter

and now for

version dos (shit gets weird!):

-step 1: huge bat colony roosts at the mouth of a massive cave system

-step 2: the guano-ecology that accumulates underneath the colony can sustain a large enough arthropod population to allow some bats to never leave the cave at all

-step 3: the cave-dwelling bats split off as a separate species from the main colony, and their flight becomes increasingly less developed; some venture deeper into the cave

-step 4: the ones venturing deeper undergo gradual adaptations for caverns life; the become albino, blind, completely flightless (but they *don't* lose their long flight-fingers, instead using them as "antennae" for better touch-navigation)

-step 5: caves are carved out by water, and it's in the water you have the best chance to find food; our weird cave-bat now lives like an olm: extremely slow metabolism, almost completely absent eyes, gets oxygen mostly through the skin; the bat now uses its 4 pairs of flight-fingers as "legs" to hold on, it's thumb-claws as a set of extra jaws, while the hind legs are flippers for the rare movement through open water

normally this would be the end, except in a very specific situation: mass-extinction

-step 6: return to the surface: all life in a cave depends on nutrients from the surface; an ecological collapse of said surface means a gradually dwindling supply of food in the cave; so the hungering cavespider-bat climbs back to the mouth of the cave, to feast in its shallow pools, with little competition after the recent mass extinction

-step 7: the comparatively empty surface leaves our little weirdo as a perfect disaster taxon; it regains pigment on its completely hairless skin, as well as keratin outer armour for protection as the ecological arm's race picks back up in the new world. the buried eye-gene also re-emerges after millions of years of disuse, though it's notably still a bit rough

-step 8: the bug-bats are growing in diversity of shape and diet, with one clade respecialising the "flippers" (ancestrally hind legs) for flight; they're wings now! also the second pair of legs specialises into antennae

(so the bugbat now has thumbs for mandibles, second digits for antennae, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th digits as "legs", and the hind legs for wings)

-step 9: one of these specialises into a nocturnal herbivore/detrivore, with a distinctive quirk to its keratin exoskeleton; it can fold 2 of its backplates like a spring, which if released launched the batbug in the air with a distinctive *click*

there you go!

that took a while

fun though

bats are the ultimated spec-evo animal

bodyplan so flexible it feels like cheating

[agatharights]

Animals are easier to draw than Robots SO I wound up drawing a bunch of weird alien/specbio/something critters based off Transformers characters! Some of them may be obvious, some might not, or might be based off specific versions of characters. Either way...try to guess who’s who!

Characters, information, and more sketches below

Optimus and Megatron Sort of feline-ape mixes, these prideful predators have large territories and close-knit social groups. Optimus would be from warmer climates, and has a fantastic mane for showiness. Megatron is from cooler mountains, and thus has the denser fur and the thicker build. I waffled on how colorful to make them...

Ironhide Suggested as a “Rhino-turtle” by a good friend, @omnitheleader, Ironhide is a huge, hefty mountain of armored plates. While they show the damage of his tanklike behavior readily, the outermost surface is actually keratenous scutes, so over the course of time they repair themselves and re-grow, layer by layer, shedding. Of course, even where he’s not armored, his hide is thick and layered and damn defensive, so even if you could get at his belly, you might not be able to do much.

Moonracer For @snowylittlebastard, whose love of Moonracer is downright infectious! I wanted to do something that looked cute and compact, but was still ridiculously fast and at least a little strange, so I thought a lot about wildcats and ungulates, settling on a small sort of hooved cat of sorts, with coloration inspired by snowy leopards and chinchilla.

Soundwave (+Buzzsaw, Laserbeak, Rumble, Frenzy...) I was trying to break the mold of mammals by this point, instead going for a sort of “marsupial” eusocial bird. Soundwave is the larger, and their wings are fused with the flesh of their front to create a “pouch” that the smaller can hide in, and a long prehensile tail. Buzzsaw and Laserbeak are a small flighted caste, with wings like yi-qi because I wanted them to be a little unearthly. Rumble and Frenzy are flightless, but also smaller castes as well, being gatherers and diggers. They develop colorful patterns on their beaks that help with individual recognition. Ravage is also here but is a different species, that got adopted by Soundwave.

Minimus Ambus FINALLY something satisfyingly weird, I really wasn’t sure where to go with Minimus for the first like...five sketches. Mouselike? A tiny lizard? A lamprey? One of those tongue-eating louses? Once I settled on a long slender shape, with mustache-like projections of the front, the idea of some sort of long-legged semi-parasitic arthropod fell into place. It’s oddly long, upright legs mean that it moves rather like a mammal does, which is very unsettling, but also make for quick climbing and clinging.

Starscream Obviously based off the beastformer Starscream from my TF setting, TF: Paradise, where he has the beastmode of a vampire bat, I have to admit that like any good specbio nerd I LOVE a big bat. I heckin love em. Bats have always been among my favorite creatures and I love bats so dang much...some bats have noses shaped to help them focus in on sounds, and extending the nose and ears out into one single shape, eliminating eyes altogether, was very interesting and appealing.

Mirage A chameleon? A small horse? A wolf? A cobra? Mirage is a mystery of chromatophores (you can see his little guide to color capabilities there) and glamour. The interior of Mirage’s hood is a glistening, iridescent blue to show off and challenge rivals, but can also droop to close against the neck. Of course I had to find something just as oddly sleek as his usual altmode...

Cliffjumper What if a goat that was also a goddamn rhinocerous? What if that? I actually wound up designing this creature with the idea that it’s in the same family of species as the Ironhide rhinoturtle above- smaller and shaggier, and the armor plating forming heavy “horns” on the head while being absent from the rest of the body.

Sketches and alternates- starting with the first sketch of Optimus...

And a toned-down color scheme for the both of them

Figuring out the shape of Ironhide

He looks so naked without wings, but I wanted to figure out his body....

It ain’t Starscream if it don’t SCREAM. The lips pull back from the front of the jaws to expose SO much teeth.

A mammalian Mirage- which I still love the design of but it didn’t quite sit with me.

Starscream I cannot stress how much you need to not threaten to eat your coworkers even if they ARE small enough for your altmode to swallow whole

[tyrantisterror]

Hey TT, what do you think of Mortasheen's Ectosaurs as far as retrosaurs go? Tho I do know that their designs show more of the Ghostbusters/Pre-cambrian side of their aesthetic influences, I wonder what you think of the other side.

Ectosaurs are about as far from being retrosaurs as scientifically accurate dinosaurs are.  Maybe farther, even.  Like, both monster groups are definitely going for a “prehistoric monster” vibe, and both are obviously influenced by prehistoric life, but they go in very different directions.

Retrosaurs are definitively reptilian.  Like, they’re big weird lizards (crocodiles to be technical in my specific fictional universe, but no one who makes their own retrosaurs has to stick to my mythos).  Being a classically defined reptile is possibly the most important trait of a retrosaur.

Ectosaurs, by contrast, are not very reptilian.  Some of them are maybe vaguely reptilian in an abstract sense - like, a good number of them have long, lizardy tails, sure, and maybe a couple of them have vaguely lizard-like body proportions, but that’s about the extent of it.  They take much more from worms, leeches, hairless mammals, and arthropods than they do from reptiles - which makes sense, because that’s where the aesthetics of Mortasheen thrive. 

Mortasheen’s all about tumors, warts, stray patches of thinning hairs, and chitinous plates - scales don’t work very well with that.  There are very few reptiles in Mortasheen, and much fewer that actually look like reptiles instead of, like, something vaguely snake-like wearing human skin - and the few that do look like reptiles are notably also really old drawings that aren’t particularly iconic.

You know how there was that one post that was going around talking about how anyone who likes reptiles as “gross” animals was a poser because reptiles aren’t very gross, and how mammals and birds are much grosser, and eventually one person reblogged it with “reptiles are pointless the only reptiles that are even remotely interesting are birds” and I bled from my eyes a bit?  Maybe you don’t, but, uh, it’s basically a good summation of why reptiles don’t work well with Mortasheen - the “gross” sides of mammals and birds work much better with Mortasheen than those of reptiles do, because reptiles are ultimately very pretty and clean little creatures.

Where was I going with this?  Oh right - so yeah, retrosaurs and ectosaurs are the results of very different artists with very different aesthetic tastes taking the prehistoric monster trope in different directions.  Retrosaurs are the product of someone who really loves lizards and crocodiles and snakes and shit, and as such are very explicitly reptilian.  Ectosaurs are the product of a person who loves hairless mammals, featherless birds, worms, leeches, snails, squids, arthropods, slime, tumors, and other “gross” things, so they look like all of those things.

I don’t want to assume too much about bogleech here, but I kinda get the sense that reptiles do for him what most birds and mammals do for me - which is to say, not much.  Considering how big he is into non-reptilian dragons, and, say, how often the more reptilian pokemon get an average “not my bag” score in his pokemon ratings, I’d say it’s a safe bet.  So it makes sense his prehistoric monsters would avoid the reptilian aspects of dinosaurs for the most part, just as my take on prehistoric monsters avoid mammalian and avian features - I mean, it was more than a bit of a struggle to keep Mastemuth from looking like another big lizard, and I’m not sure I was successful.  Different artists have different tastes and different inclinations.  It’s all subjective.

[bogleech]

I really don’t talk a lot about this setting, do I? I’ve done it so long I kinda take it for granted and let it plug along in the background, but now I’m getting a lot of new questions about it, and some people who follow me still didn’t know it existed.

I’m just gonna dump a bunch of generalized information that maybe some people will think is interesting:

“Mortasheen” itself is the name of a city where the buildings are so huge, they have their own biomes and the upper floors can be perpetually frozen.

The entire planet is affected by the weird pollution of the city.

Nobody knows how the city started but it has existed for thousands of years and at this point is builds and expands itself. Nobody runs it.

Monster trainers are also basically monsters, but monsters more closely descended from humans.

Knowing some sort of bio-engineering science is more common than knowing how to cook or clean or drive a car in our world.

Real humans survive only outside the city in various ways. To them it’s a monster-ridden wasteland, but it’s still not a bleak existence. There’s more of a Fallout + Addams Family vibe where death isn’t a real big deal.

Even the metahumans can’t really get by without some monsters on their side though. It’s like if Pokemon world were thousands of times more dangerous.

Basically all monsters are also sapient characters unless otherwise specified, so in this sense more like Digimon or Yo-Kai Watch than Pokemon, but even though they might eat you they’re still not “evil.”

Before I felt they were terribly overplayed, I also established that all normal humans get back up as zombies when they die. They’re considered almost totally harmless though, kind of just an environmental feature.

Regular animal life still exists but is based primarily around everything our world considers pests and weeds. Almost all birds and mammals are just different kinds of crows and rats now; like pelican crows and badger rats and stuff. The surface of the ocean is a solid mat of jellyfish.

I’m gonna go over the monster classes here but I’ll put it under a cut:

Bioconstructs are the majority of monsters, organic or technorganic things designed for combat or for practical, everyday functions like doing laundry or advertising snack foods which also end up having offensive and defensive applications.

Arthropoids are human-arthropod hybrids and among the monsters most prone to establishing “feral” populations.

Vampires in this world are almost all derived from sea creatures. There’s no magic, so these are “mutagenic virus” type vampires. Specifically it’s a space virus that guides rapid evolution over many generations. They all suck blood and have mental domination powers.

Biomecha are a small and actually pretty unpopular (in universe) category, seen as antiquated and mostly lost in comparison to fully organic monsters, though despite how they look they’re still very much alive and can reproduce themselves.

Fectoids are intelligent diseases that can pull their microbial bodies together to build one giant one, which keeps growing and growing until it collapses back into microbes, their life cycle shifting between epidemic and kaiju.

Zombie Spawn are born from zombies, but never develop into anything remotely human. They’re unstable and always in a cycle of decay but are virtually unkillable. There’s an implication that the zombie infection itself was just supposed to incubate whatever Zombie Spawn really are, and like vampires it may have originated from another world.

Jokers are mostly hollow, rubbery creatures whose minds are partially a toxic gas they’re filled with, and have impenetrably chaotic thought processes. A lot of them live in underground hives and the first one may have hatched from a meteorite.

Unknown are monsters pulled out of another reality, and still don’t interact quite right with conventional physics. I feel like someday I want to change their name and rework their concept a little bit so they feel more like a proper class of their own.

Botanicals are hybrids of plant, animal and fungus, though there’s a fungus-themed subcategory where the plant aspect is vestigial. This was inspired by a theory I had about grass Pokemon :)

Ectosaurs are semicorporeal monsters who can slumber for millions of years in a mineralized form, in other words they’re “haunted fossils.” They are much older than the Pokemon Dreepy.

Wormbrains are monsters created by a type of intelligent parasitic worm. They usually have a vertebrate-derived body with giant parasites for appendages but even those parasites are under control of the true, tiny worms which constitute the monster’s entire consciousness.

Devil birds (I’ve never done any of them in color yet) are psychic ancient weapons that manipulate emotion and the one monster class with a more “magical” feel, though it’s still officially just really messed up biotechnology.

Finally there’s Garbage. Garbage class monsters developed spontaneously from the semiliving waste runoff of the city and most of them are harmlessly weak rejects of nature, but they can be modified to be more formidable and a few species have “evolutions,” unlike any other class in the setting.

What is a mortasheen?

It’s the name of a fiction setting I made up almost 20 years ago, which is like Pokemon or Digimon but more “morbid.” It’s not really a dark or scary setting though, I think of it as goofy and upbeat. I used to draw the monsters all in pencil:

But nowadays I’ve tried to practice digital color:

(This monster is Nemateuthis, a creature with giant parasitic worms that it uses as tentacles)