#oxyaenid

[impishdullahan]

What can you tell us about this conworld that your conlangs are spoken in?

Where do I start? There's been a lot of iterations.

At present, it's a very hand-wavy spec-evo eocene Earth analog. There's the one major continent about the size of North America, I think, and it's populated by maybe 10 sapient species, all of which have been ascribed a conlang or have plans for one. In the west on islands and coastal plains, and in temperate rainforests, as well as further North in the tundra, there're derived oxyaenids which speak Tokétok. In the mountains that help form these temperate rainforests is a group of derived early ungulates which speak Varamm. East still in a massive river basin a group of derived testudines speak a sign language still in it's infancy. On the drier east coast there's both a group of derived neornithischians, for which I have a 9yo sketch I'll someday revisit, and a group of derived early carnivorans that speak my current speedlang project Viverraviss. In the south there's highlands with a group of derived scansoriopterygians, which I have 2 old sketches and plans to derive a daughter from N!odzäsä for. With a more global distribution, I have Agyharo for the derived azhdarchids that form insular communities across the continent, and in the surrounding seas ATxK0PT is spoken by derived tunicates. From across the sea comes Tsantuk for the token humanoids, and they have a robust coastal trade network across the continent, though their largest port of call is in the Southern Tokétok lands. There's also an island far to the Northwest where I might put some temnospondyl dragons or something; I have friend who wants to build such a language with me.

I'd share a map, but the only one I have thus far outside my head is in the margins of some old math homework and it's difficult to read.

Techwise the speakers of Tsantuk are somewhere in the age of exploration, and everyone else is very where the rest of the non-European world was at the time varying from loose fission-fusion hunter-gatherer societies to robust civilizations. There's also a touch of magic, but it's still very loose. The spark notes are that climatic events and other natural disasters, whether ephemeral or persistent, have at their core a rift in space. This rift leads to a sort of void filled with unformed energy, kinda like the stem cells of force and matter, that fuels these climatic events. If someone encounters such a rift, they may gain the power to open and close rifts themselves and use that formless energy to power magic that reflects the original rift they encountered. For instance, sailing into and surviving a hurricane might grant storm magic.

It's been a while since I've written anything set in this world, but it's all centred on a presumably Tsantuk speaking fire mage (I'll leave it to your imagine how she came about that) lost in Tokétok lands with no memory how she got there.

[tlaquetzqui]

Czech has a colloquial word for creodonts (probably also oxyaenids). Namely, prašelma, literally meaning something like “proto-predator”. Interestingly, the Spanish word that translates Czech (and Slovak) šelma, fiera, is from the Latin word ferus—whence also Ferae, the name of the clade that contains the Carnivora, Pholidota (pangolins)…and creodonts and oxyaenids.

[alphynix]

It Came From The Wastebasket #08: Stem-Carnivoramorphs Do What Creodon't

Creodonts were some of the earliest predatory placental mammals to evolve after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, first appearing in the mid-Paleocene about 60 million years ago. Represented by two main lineages – the oxyaenids and the hyaenodonts – they ranged across North America, Eurasia, and Africa, and were the dominant large carnivorous mammals until the end of the Eocene (~34 million years ago), with forms like Sarkastodon being some of the biggest mammalian land predators of all time.

After that point they started to decline over most of their range, gradually being replaced by early carnivorans – but the hyaenodonts retained their dominance for a while longer in Africa, diversifying during the Oligocene and early Miocene and producing more giant apex predators. The last known representatives of these animals survived in Asia until the late Miocene, just 9 million years ago, ending an impressive run that had lasted for most of the Cenozoic.

This grouping was originally named in the 1870s to encompass just the oxyaenids and Didymictis (a genus now considered to be a viverravid). Just a few years later hyaenodonts, miacids, arctocyonids, leptictids, and mesonychids were all lumped in, too – and at one point creodonts were even a part of the massive insectivoran mess before instead being classified as ancestors of the carnivorans.

During the first half of the 20th century creodonts were recognized as actually being a loose collection of mostly-unrelated mammals, and over the next few decades various groups were gradually removed and reassigned to other parts of the mammal family tree. Towards the end of the century most of the creodont wastebasket had been cleared, and just the oxyaenids and the hyaenodonts were left as two branches of one seemingly distinct creodont lineage.

The cougar-sized oxyaenid Patriofelis ferox (left) & the bear-sized hyaenodont Hyaenodon gigas (right)

…But their evolutionary relationships were still a problem.

They'd been traditionally considered to be early carnivorans, but although they had flesh-slicing carnassials the creodonts' versions of these teeth weren't quite right. Different teeth in their jaws had been specialized for this function compared to those of true carnivorans – with oxyaenids and hyaenodonts having slightly different arrangements compared to each other, too – suggesting a lot of convergent evolution rather than shared ancestry.

By the 1990s it wasn't clear anymore if the oxyaenids and hyaenodonts were even closely related to each other, or what type of mammal they actually were.

But over the last couple of decades the consensus seems to have become that creodonts weren't a single natural group, but that they were still related to carnivorans – oxyaenids and hyaenodonts were actually two separate offshoots of the Ferae, forming an evolutionary grade of stem lineages between pangolins and the carnivoramorphs.

———

Nix Illustration | Tumblr | Twitter | Patreon

[flaviastrani]

A quick reconstruction of Patriofelis, a cougar-sized oxyaenid that lived in North America during the Eocene.  

ArtStation / Twitter

[synapsid-taxonomy]

Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae Zack et al. 2022

Just published today, Diegoaelurus is the name given to this oxyaenid mandible found in middle Eocene sediments of southern California.

What's interesting about it is that it is a member of the clade Machaeroidinae, a clade of oxyaenids. Machaeroidines are noteworthy for being the first Cenozoic saber-toothed mammals, beating nimravids by about 15 million years. It's also neat because that individual is missing its last premolar; it may have had the jaw injured when it was young and it completely healed over by the time it died. The genus name references San Diego County, and the species name honors mammal paleontologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh.

Its name probably has nothing to do with him, even though Ice Age was released exactly 20 years ago today

[wiccasaraus]

A concept sketch in the works for a personal project of mine. Not sure to finish this sketch or start a new based on this doodle. This superficial feline-like creature is actually one just one such speculative descendent of a group of archaic mammals called a Oxyaenids belonging to the superorder creodonta. Much of the world building elements of my project involve such speculative evolution concepts. Don't have a name for this little bigger at the moment, however; I do know much of its biology is comparable to a modern day Jaguar.

[flaviastrani]

Sarkastodon mongoliensis (a big oxyaenid from the Eocene) based on the remains described by Granger (1938).

ArtStation / Twitter

[synapsid-taxonomy]

Malfelis Stucky and Hardy 2007

This middle Eocene oxyaenid's name literally means bad cat

BAD CAT

BAD CAT

[tlaquetzqui]

Actually hyena-mounted soldiers should probably be “ienry”, since these words should be from Italian, not direct from Latin, and the Italian word for hyena is iena. (It apparently used to be hiena, but I don’t know how recently.)

The Latin word canarius descends to Italian as the word canaio, but it means “dog breeder”. (But “canary” actually does have to do with dogs, because the place’s name is “island of dogs”.) I think the word you actually want, for dog-mounted soldiers, is brackry, which comes from bracco “hound”, and then from bracchiere (same -iere as in cavaliere “horseman, knight”), which means “whipper-in, person who keeps hunting-dogs in line”. From which you can then construct *braccheria, which in the real world probably means something like “dog management” (both the endeavor itself and those engaged in it, as cavalleria means both the horsemen of a military force and the virtues they are expected to exhibit), but which would, in a world where people can ride dogs, refer to them.

This leads me to think my goblins, whose talking oxyaenids are known as “grim-hounds”, also have a brackry, same as the halflings (theirs is even also light, though it can talk). My elves, who ride a larger, talking version of Homotherium that I call “panthers” in the narrative, would presumably be described as having “panthry”; except for the dark elves, whose talking hyaenodont mounts are called “brutes”, and I will call their mounted soldiery “belvry”. Belbus, one of the other Latin words for “hyena”, probably comes from the same root as belua, meaning “brute”, and that is belva in Italian.

Then my dwarves, who ride giant talking wolverines (based on Megalictis but with a very generous interpretation of “as big as a black bear”) that I refer to as “martens”, have “martory”, because the Italian word for “marten” is martora. The orcs and ogres ride giant talking swine, the one the size of cattle and the other the size of the giant European hippopotamus H. major, which would presumably be “porcry” (maybe “porkry”?), from porcheria, but that’s the Italian for “pigsty”. Nevertheless—Italian uses the same word for “mounted soldiers” as for “code of honor of knights” (where English uses the Italian form for the first one and the French form for the latter, which is admittedly cheating).

Of course, because coming up with a “-ry” term for every weird thing your setting’s inhabitants might ride is probably annoying to the readership…I just actually call them “knights” or “Xs mounted on/riding Ys”.

[tlaquetzqui]

Might have only the dark elves ride talking Simbakubwa, and then have the goblins ride talking Machaeroides, the sabertooth oxyaenid. I would of course need to make the 10-kilo Machaeroides significantly larger; the equivalent of a 5-foot 7-inch Mongolian man with a 12-hand horse (Mongolian horses are very small), for a 3-foot 8-inch male goblin, is a creature 2 feet 8 inches at the shoulder, 5 feet 4 inches long, and weighing say 160 pounds. They usually reconstruct oxyaenids and hyaenodonts with weasellike ears and catlike tails, but doglike ears and foxlike tails are equally plausible. Then I have to figure out how to do a horse-sized one for hobgoblins and elephant-sized ones for bugbears.

[tlaquetzqui]

Discovered that the closest living relatives of hyaenodonts like Simbakubwa and oxyaenids like Machaeroides…are pangolins. Those three and the Carnivora make up the superorder Ferae.