#the archaean

[esamastation]

wvyld: Desmond wakes up in Angelgard — to find a guy in chains who feels Very Evil (daemons) to the Eagle Sense, but also. uhhhh. you know. it's just — the chains are going through his flesh it's. yeaah he may have to go against his intuition with this one, this is no way to treat an eldritch abomination....

Guess what I didn't write? Any of that. I did however write Desmond in FFXV. :D

-

He sleeps the deep, deep sleep of the Earth. He dreams of mountains, of ravines, of endless pressure and crushing weight. He sleeps, and dreams, and his dreams have the weight of gravity, the drag of continental plates, the churning of magma and rattling of earthquakes. They're slow dreams but they're not peaceful.

They're also never enough to distract him from the weight still resting on his shoulders. The weight he can never put down. The heat of it pounds down on him, burning him, crushing him. Weight and heat are the same, when you really think about it. Mass makes gravity makes pressure makes fire makes explosion. Gravity makes stars. Makes planets. Makes earth. It's all the same.

There's always some weight upon him. That is his task and nature, as an Astral. A shitty gig, if there ever was one.

He breathes in deep and then falls deeper into slumber. Deep into memories of other worlds and other planets and man that once was and doesn't really matter anymore. The Meteor is heavy, heavy, heavy, burning, burning, burning. He sleeps and dreams deep, deep, deep.

And then someone Sings with the Voice of Stars and drags him from Beneath - and for the first time in eons, Awakens him.

It's not a pleasant feeling, to become aware once more under all the weight of the Cosmos' Rage.

"God of the Earth I beseech you!" A small voice calls out from somewhere below. "Enter into a covenant with the Chosen King so that he may reclaim the Stone and purge the Darkness from our Star!"

It takes a moment - a stretch and press of time dilation under weight of infinite gravity - to remember what speech is. What the little voice is saying makes no sense, even then. "WHAT," he says, with the Meteor roaring like hellfire in his ear, deafening him.

There's a little human somewhere near his feet, tiny, tiny thing, blond and pale and wearing white. She reminds him of something from eons ago.

"The Time of the Prophecy is at hand!" the human says, grand and commanding and barely audible. "The Darkness Eternal threatens our Star and only the King of Light may defeat it! To do that, he will have your power - you must enter into this covenant!"

The words make no sense. "WHAT KING?" he asks. "WHAT COVENANT? WHAT DARKNESS? THERE'S ONLY THIS DAMNED THING," he shifts under the weight of the Meteor. "AND THE ASSURED DESTRUCTION SHOULD I EVER PUT IT DOWN."

The little human wavers and he realises - his voice is too loud. He's shouting at her. His quietest voice is deafening to her. Even so, she keeps shouting back. "There are worse dangers now! Even now the Darkness grows stronger - every day, it claims more of our Star's Light. Without that Light, there is no Life, without Life, there is no future! The Meteor doesn't matter now - "

"THEN WHY THE FUCK AM I STILL HOLDING IT?" he asks sarcastically, and the little human is thrown back, faltering under his power. Oops. Poor thing. "WHAT IS THIS DARKNESS YOU FEAR SO MUCH, THEN? WHAT IS SO BAD THAT YOU'VE AWOKEN ME FROM DEEP SLEEP?"

The human struggles to her feet, using her little staff to prop herself up, and faces him with a stern look on her face. "It is the Scourge of Stars!" she says and lifts her staff. "I will Show you!"

And she does. She shows him a Disease. A plague that causes transformations and shadows, that infects flora and fauna and twists them into living ash. It makes monsters they call Daemons, and it has been coming up again and again for the last two thousand years. No one knows where it came from, but people have a Prophecy about it.

The Draconian made a Prophecy about it. Apparently that's what they call that guy now. And the little human - the Oracle? The Oracle tells it to him like he's supposed to know it. Like he's already part of it.

"I DON'T KNOW YOUR PROPHECY," the Archaean - that's what they call him now, apparently - answers. "I'VE NO PART IN IT. I WAS UNDER BURDEN BEFORE YOUR STARSCOURGE EVEN APPEARED. THE DRACONIAN'S WORDS, SPOKEN EONS HENCE, HOLD NO SWAY OVER ME."

The little human falters. "But - but the Cosmogony - the Prophecy says - "

The Archaean strains under the weight of the Meteor. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT A PROPHECY IS, LITTLE ONE? IT'S SOMEONE VOLUNTEERING SOMEONE ELSE FOR A TASK THEY THEMSELVES WILL NOT DO. THAT'S ALL."

The little human shakes her head. "No, no, it has to be the Chosen King, the Draconian said - "

"IF THE DRACONIAN REALLY WANTED THIS DARKNESS GONE, HE'D DO IT HIMSELF," the Archaean says, unamused. "HE CERTAINLY HAS THE POWER. JUST LOOK AT ME." He shrugs his shoulders and the Meteor upon them, sending tremors through the earth beneath his feet. "WHO DO YOU THINK CAST THIS THING UPON ME?"

The Oracle clutches on her staff, her eyes wide. "The Draconian sent the Meteor down upon us?" she asks, horrified, and falls to her knees. "W-what? No, that's not possible. I don't - that can't be."

Well. That seems rather telling and alarming.

The little Oracle can't take this conversation for long, it seems like - his voice is too much for her, as it tends to be for most humans. There's no way around it, though. He can't do much for her. The Archaean simply cannot put down his burdens, not for a long, long time, not until the half life of the damned thing runs its course. Until then, it's just him between the Meteor and Eos - and an explosion that would rock the whole solar system, if the two ever met.

He can, however, detach a small portion of himself to act as his avatar.

-

"Well, don't you look far less tiny from this angle, huh," the Messenger says, cracking his neck and getting used to being human sized again. "Hello, Oracle."

The Oracle stares at him, wide eyed. "You - you're the Archaean?"

"Small part of him. It's a bit of a long term gig, holding up the Meteor," the Messenger says and peers up at himself, standing tall as a mountain under the Meteor. Already his larger self is going back to slumber - much easier to bear the weight like that. "Six thousand years down," the Messenger says, shooting finger guns at himself. "Six million more to go."

"Y-you -" the Oracle stammers and then goes down into a bow. "My Lord, I am your humble servant - I beseech you to listen to me, for our blight is true and dire."

"I believe you believe that, and it probably is pretty bad," the Messenger says and motions to the Meteor. "But if that thing goes down, it will destroy this whole planet. Into itty bitty space dust," he adds, just to drive the point across. "So, no. There will be no Covenant. The Archaean will not move. Not for a long, long time."

The Oracle looks at him, stricken - her lips actually quiver. "B-but I foresaw - this is meant to happen - all the writings -" she trails away, staring at him. "Is it really impossible?"

"It really is. If it was possible to put down the Meteor, the Meteor would be down, trust me, and I'd not be here," the Messenger says and shakes his head. "I'm sorry - whatever the Draconian has been telling people, the Archaean has no part in it. Our hands are tied."

The Oracle looks at him like she's going to cry. "I - all my life I've been preparing - training for this moment - I was supposed to awaken all the Artrals for Noctis - I -" she stops, drawing a hitching breath. "It's all been for naught - the Darkness will win? Our star will be destroyed?"

"Okay, okay, let's back up a bit," the Messenger says with some alarm, lifting his hands soothingly to calm her. "Why don't you tell me about this terrible fate about to befall all of us, and we'll figure it out?"

So, she tells him. Faltering and stuttering, she tells him everything she knows.

It's a lot.

-

So maybe sleeping away the eons under the Meteor's weight wasn't the smartest idea. Turns out, he's missed a lot. Like, apparently, the Fall of Solheim? Which, in the human time frame, happened eons ago, of course - six thousand years is ancient time for humans. Since then, there's been other nations, empires, kingdoms - like the one they're currently in, the Kingdom of Lucis, the one the Draconian chose. Which has since fallen into ruin, because of war.

"So," the Messenger says. "There was a Chosen One who was supposed to be the first king of Lucis, but he got sick with this Starscourge and was betrayed, so he was made the Accursed instead and the Kings of Lucis descend from his brother, the usurper. And now the current last heir to the throne is supposed to kill his many, many times grand uncle to defeat the Scourge once and for all. With Astral's power and the Crystal."

The Oracle, now sitting down on a rocky ledge looking small and sad and hopeless, nods.

The Messenger rubs at his forehead. "And that didn't clue you in to the fact that Draconian is making this shit up as he goes along?"

The Oracle's shoulders slump. "Gods are fallible, I know," she says. "But I thought the Revelation of Bahamut was true. Everyone always said it was. Even the Kings of Lucis believe in it, and they're the closest to him."

"Sounds to me like nothing is true, really," the Messenger muses. "But okay. I have a question - what, exactly, is the Crystal you keep mentioning?"

The Oracle looks up, and sort of sputters at him. "It - what - how can you not - " she chokes out. "It's the Heart of our Star - "

"The heart of a Star is mostly hydrogen and helium and thermonuclear fusion under pressure," the Messenger says and folds his arms. "I've never heard of this Crystal of yours. Is it something the Draconian made, maybe?"

"I-it was gifted to mankind so that we may know lasting prosperity -" the Oracle says before faltering and frowning at her own knees, confused. "It gives powers to the Kings of Lucis. It has protected the Kingdom for centuries, and they have protected it. I don't…"

The Messenger scratches at his neck, not sure what to tell her. It sounds like a lot of stuff the Astrals can do. The Archaean could probably whip up a magical rock too, if he wasn't under a bit of pressure at the moment. Well, he could probably still do it.

Under pressure is how gems were made.

Bit beside the point, though.

The Oracle looks up at him, actual tears in her eyes. "Everything I have been told my whole life is a lie, isn't it?" she asks as the tears spill out. "The Revelation of Bahamut is a lie. The Draconian dwells in the Crystal, it's his chamber, his fortress and for two thousand years the Kings of Lucis have bled for its upkeep."

Ouch. "Don't know what to tell you, Lady, this is all news to me," the Messenger says awkwardly. "Maybe we should set the whole… existential horror aside for a moment. Tell me more about this Accursed."

-

Six thousand years he bore the weight of the Meteor just fine. Now that he's stepped away from it, this is what he gets from it - a tension headache.

"So this guy was a healer fighting this Scourge, he was the Chosen One, supposed to be the king, the First King of Lucis, this great magical nation to be…" the Messenger says, just to clarify, while rubbing at his temple. "And then he was betrayed, usurped, and kept prisoner and tortured by the Kings of Lucis for two thousand years."

The Oracle nods slowly.

The Messenger hums in understanding. "Yeah, I kind of see where he's coming from."

The Oracle winces. "Yes, same," she admits with a sigh and then continues her increasingly depressing explanation of all the things he'd missed.

It's getting late by the time he has the full picture. Time is relative when you're Ancient Astral Being, or whatever, but as a Messenger he experiences daylight the same as your regular humans and the sun is going down below the horizon. Which apparently means the Daemons of the Star Scourge are going to come out.

"Alrighty, I want to see these Daemons and the Scourge for myself," the Messenger says, stretching his arms. "I'm guessing the radiation from the Meteor is keeping them away from here?"

"The light, yes," the Oracle says, lifting her staff. "I have the power to keep them at bay. I can also create Havens, sacred ground that will repel them."

"Neat - don't do that just yet, though, I want to see them," the Messenger says. "After that we can hopefully figure out something that won't involve the Archaean's power."

"Right," the Oracle says, taking a slow breath to steel herself, preparing to lever herself back to her feet with her staff. "I will do all I can, even - even if I cannot fulfil my original duty. I will do everything I can to cure our star."

"That's the spirit," the Messenger says and holds out a hand to her. "By the way, never caught your name."

"Lunafreya - Lunafreya Nox Fleuret," the Oracle says and takes his hand. "And you, my lord - what can I call you?"

"Not your lord, for a start," the Messenger says and pulls her up and to her feet, thinking of a name. Oh, well, why fix what's not broken. "Call me Desmond. Now, what say you we get out of here Lunafreya?"

Lunafreya nods and follows him away from the crater. Behind them the Archaean stands still, steadfastly shouldering his stellar burden, like he always did. Desmond casts him a last look, shaking his head - the last six thousand years had not been kind to him. The Meteor's radiation really brought out the Isu in him too, it looks like. Awkward.

One of these days he would stop being such a sucker about world ending disasters. One of these days.

Not today though.

-

Lol. Lmao even.

Here you can see in real time my daily word limit coming at me as I pass it somewhere in the middle of this and the writing starts getting increasingly nonsensical as it goes on. Anyway. Desmond as the Archaean, just because the white streaks on Titan made me go 👀

Also we're just ignoring Gentiana's existence here entirely. And pretty much all sense and logic.

It's 2 a.m. I'm tired.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

ID: a “tree of life” diagram showing bacteria, archaea, and eukaryota as well as their “roots”(which actually look like roots, and the times genes were transferred between different groups (including plastids and mitochondria)

End ID

show the birds aren’t dinos people this diagram i think they’ll explode

Oh horizontal gene transfer

[pretty-boys-on-a-roadtrip]

[litchi-jelly]

just finished episode ignis and i am feeling not so good

[fletchasketch7893]

Spoiler Alert for Rainbow Six: Extraction (Not really spoilers, since this was made from trailers) Content warnings: Violence, loud noises, bit of goo/blood Game: Rainbow Six: Extraction Song: "Good to Meet You, General" from the Splinter Cell: Blacklist soundtrack Side note: This is technically the second time that I reused a song between edits, the first being the Puss in Boots edit. Additionally, this edit is much more of a trailer re-scoring than a full on game focused edit. ( Personal project)

[mezoverse]

Sarissa taking care of some hatchlings for her clan.

The three are all quick new designs I did for this pic, so I don't have names for them yet.

[o-craven-canto]

Weird thing is, even though nuclear DNA places Eukaryotes squarely within Archaea, the Eukaryotic cell membrane resembles that of bacteria (acylic esthers) and not that of Archaea (isoprene ethers). I believe the leading hypothesis on that is that when mitochondria started exporting some of their genes into the host cell's nucleus, they also sent there genes for bacteria-style membrane synthesis.

abiogenesis & endosymbiosis timeline

I put this together after reading Nick Lane's The Vital Question. The proposed timeline:

3.8bya: The earliest evidence for life is isotopic fractionation. The carbon (and iron, sulfur, nitrogen) atoms in graphite in Greenland are non-randomly sorted, which indicates the presence of cells whose enzymes have a slight preference for the lighter forms of each. However, geological processes can also produce non-random sorting, so this evidence is ambiguous.

3.5bya: Less ambiguously, we have microfossils that look like cells, again with isotopic signatures.

We think bacteria and archaea split off really early, close to the beginning of life (abiogenesis) itself. This is because their cell walls and membranes are so different it's hard to see how one could have evolved from the other. They probably emerged in parallel when they became independent at all. (Quick sketch of abiogenesis, and bacteria/archaea divergences.)

3.2bya: We see bacterial activity in rust bands in rocks. When bacteria strip electrons from iron dissolved in the oceans, the oxidated iron precipitates out into rust and sinks down to the ocean floor.

All bacteria and archaea respire (strip electrons from a donor 'fuel' to generate ATP, which fuels cellular activity). Many donors are possible – common ones are Fe2+, H2S, or H2O (which respectively become Fe3+, S, and O2 after the electron is stripped). Water is the last to be cracked as a donor.

2.4bya: It's cracked now, by some bacteria (archaea never manage it), which leads to The Great Oxidation Event. The oxygen is first absorbed by the oceans, the seabed, and land surfaces. It'll take over a billion years before the oxygen 'sinks' are exhausted, and oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere for real.

1.8bya: A bacterium somehow ends up inside an archaeon cell, and somehow they don't die about it. The bacterium becomes a specialized energy-producing unit, allowing the host cell to grow larger and more complex. They become the first eukaryote, invent sex, and spawn all complex life. (You can read my RPF about it btw.)

1bya: This engulfment – endosymbiosis – happens one more time, to produce chloroplasts in plants.

0.5-6bya: Atmospheric oxygen levels are rising for real now. We see large complex eukaryotes for the first time. These creatures have specialized tissues whose failure threatens the entire organism, and it becomes advantageous to separate out the germline (the part of eukaryotes that divide forever, e.g. sperm and eggs) and make the rest of the body just durable enough to last as long as the most failure-prone tissues. Death by design has entered the world.

[starrywilliams]

END OF DESIRE

sub!abby x reader

summary: abby hates distractions when she’s reading, but this distraction is very welcome.

notes: short bc i don’t have the motivation to write anything long…!!! i used the iliad for this bc she has it and it physically hurts me to not write as lore accurate as i possibly can

warnings: not proof read !!!! cunnilingus, fingering, (both abby!receiving), yeah it’s just kinda filthy idk…

nsfw under the cut!

leant up against the headboard was a trembling girl, fingers tightening around the faded paperback with all her strength. “keep going abby.” you whispered, “if you stop, i stop, okay?” you reminded her of the agreement, nails pushing gently into the flesh of her thighs, a small whimper falling past her lips.

she took in a deep and shaky breath, pushing the glasses back up her nose. “helen has nothing but her b-“ she gasped softly as she felt your tongue drag over her clit, earning a harsh stare from below. “b-beauty. and the charm it casts on all men,” another whine escaped her throat as you left small, wet kisses around the edges of her pussy.

“without aphrodite she would be n-nothing.” she stumbled over her words, struggling to focus with your touch between her sensitive thighs. “you’re doing so well, don’t stop.” you smiled, the incoming cruelty begin to pervade your consonants. “and aphrodite plays the same role on olympus as on ear- fuck!”

she whimpered as your tongue pushed into her, hips bucking off the bed. you slapped her thigh, reminding her of what she was supposed to be doing. “shit, sorry,” she apologised breathlessly, restarting the sentence. “and aphrodite plays the same role on olympus as on earth.”

she swallowed harshly, fingers quickly swiping over her foggy glasses so she could keep reading. she sighed as she felt one of your fingers replace your tongue, pushing deep into her. she met your eyes, understanding that you weren’t gonna move until she continued.

“she gives hera, who wants to diverttt-“ the word faded into a whine as you curled your finger inside her, her head hitting the headboard with a light thud. “baby, you don’t want me to stop, do you?” your coquettish voice had her squeezing her eyes shut, head shaking. “n-no.” she sighed, looking back down to the blurry pages.

“divert zeus’s attention from the battle so poseidon,” abby whimpered breathily, your increasing pace making it impossible to concentrate. “ so poseidon can help the archaeans, the breast-“ a second finger sinking inside of her aching hole cutting off the word midway through. “keep going.” your stern voice left no other option for the desperate girl.

“-band, pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment woven through it.” abby breathed in heavily, legs trembling over your shoulders. your fingers kept up their unforgiving pace, stretching her out in the best way possible. with each thrust inside her, she could feel her high getting tugged closer and closer - whines slipping off her tongue endlessly. but she was supposed to be reading.

“fuck, w-why did you stop?” she said, voice hoarse and desperate. between your vexed eyes, glaring up at her, and the disbelief lining your slight grin, it didn’t take long for her to piece together your reasoning. “i’ll keep reading, just-just don’t stop, please?” she rambled, slightly high-pitched in her frantic desire, pulling the book back up before her face.

“there is the heat of love,” feeling kind, you’d started again, the sound of her struggling to get out her words coherently far better than anything else. “the pulsing rush of longing,” you could feel the need rushing all over your fingers, she was fucking soaking.

“the lover’s whisperrr-“ abby whined, feeling your lips attach to her aching clit, tongue swiping over the swollen bud. “irresistible.” she stuttered, all attention drawn to the stimulation that threatened to envelop her entire body soon. but she knew better now, she had to keep going.

“madness to make,” her thighs were shivering around your head, pussy pulsing around your fingers, while a spare hand laced itself into your hair - keeping you as close as she possibly could. “the sanest man go mad- fuckfuckfuck,”

her hips were grinding against your face, incomprehensible noises spilling out of her throat as you continued to fuck her. “go on baby, you can do it.” you mumbled against her clit, feeling her tighten around your fingers within seconds.

“ohmygodthankyouthankyou-“ her barely coherent words slipped aimlessly out of her mouth as she gushed all over your fingers. you kept going, replacing your fingers with your tongue, tasting her desperately. when you tried to return to her clit, you were hastily pulled away, the sensitive girl shaking her head as her thighs snapped back together.

“you wanna keep reading? i can always get the-“ you started, stopping at the notice of her eyes - renewed with a fresh desire. “oh, okay.” you laughed softly, realising it was your turn now.

[abwwia]

Barbara Hepworth with the Gift plaster of Figure for Landscape and a bronze cast of Figure (Archaean) November 1964. Photograph: Lucien Myers. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness.

[vickysaurus]

Happy New Year!

Let's imagine it was the Earth itself that was going into its 2024th year. That is to say, we're compressing the entire history of the Earth into just the past 2023 years. What events would have happened when?

Well, not too much is certain about the first couple decades after our planet formed, until around 50 CE when we were hit by another proto-planet, Theia, and the debris formed the Moon. After a couple years of the planet cooling down again, the oceans formed out of boiling rain. The timing of the origin of life is very uncertain, but there are chemical signs it may very well have happened as early as the second century. Around 200 CE, the gas giants did a big funky orbit-swapping dance, and in the process inflicted the Late Heavy Bombardment on the rest of the solar system, meaning the Earth was suffering a ton of meteorite strikes for the entire third century.

The first indisputable evidence of life is from around 330, and the first stromatolites appear around 470. Those are basically the first fossils, stones created by layer upon layer of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria living and dying on top of one another. But even with oxygen producers evolving, it would take many centuries before oxygen became a major part of the atmosphere: not until the Great Oxygenation Event, which happened during the ninth and tenth centuries. That's also about the time the first complex, eukaryotic cells evolved through a symbiosis between an anaerobic archaean and an oxygen-breathing bacterium. The bacterium became more and more focused on just the oxygen-breathing task inside the larger cell, until its descendants were mitochondria, which as you all know are the powerhouse of the cell. The next seven centuries passed by with only slow, gradual changes, and life continuing to be unicellular and difficult to find in the fossil record.

(1735's Snowball Earth, by me)

From 1704 to 1730, the entire planet froze over. After merely two years of thaw, it happened again, this time lasting from 1732 to 1742. But these snowball Earth episodes set the stage for the evolution of animals that began right after. Across the mid-18th century, the bizarre Ediacaran biota, with its strange symmetries, fronds, and fractal-like pattern filled the oceans. In the early 1780s they went extinct, possibly due to a temporary drop in oxygen-levels, only to be replaced by a great variety of quite different creatures in the Cambrian Explosion.

(Class of 1799, by me)

Starting in 1784 and running for a few decades, the Cambrian period saw the origin of most of the modern animal phyla, reaching its most famous form in the Burgess Shale fauna of 1799. During this time, most animals still lived on the sea floor, either attached or crawling, with relatively few actually swimming creatures. Plants started tentatively moving onto land around 1817, and in 1825, the rising of the great Appalachian mountains caused a severe drop in global CO2 and thus temperatures, leading to the Late Ordovician mass extinction.

(Horseshoe crabs and sea scorpions on a beach in 1834, by me)

Bony fish first showed up during the 1830s, and around the same time plants were getting serious about inhabiting the land, evolving roots and vascular tissues so they could properly grow there. Millipedes and the ancestors of spiders were the first animals to follow them onto land. Our own fishy ancestors did not take their first step until 1857, by which point the arthropods were well established there and the plants had figured out how to become trees. The Late Devonian extinction, partially caused by the evolution of said trees and partially by the south pole freezing, played out in two pulses over the late 1850s and early 1860s.

(Swamp prominently featuring Meganeura and Mazothairos in 1889, by me)

Arthropods and vertebrates continued to gain adaptations to life on land. The insects became the first creatures ever to fly in 1878, and the high-oxygen atmosphere of the time would be especially good to them. Around 1884, a group of vertebrates called the amniotes, after the membrane that kept water inside their eggs so they could lay them on land without them drying out, split into two groups: the reptiles and the synapsids (which we mammals descend from). The next few decades would see the synapsids in particular being extremely successful as the supercontinent Pangaea formed. Until 1912, when a massive episode of volcanism caused the worst mass extinction of all time, the Great Dying, scouring the Earth of a huge portion of its life.

(A 1930 scene featuring the three branches of archosaur: dinosaur, pterosaur, and pseudosuchian, by me)

The 1910s were a period of slow recovery during which strange new forms of animal evolved. Many different, unrelated reptiles, such as the ichtyosaurs and plesiosaurs, went to sea, where they would continue to provide some of the most impressive creatures for most of the 20th century. On land, the dinosaurs first appeared in 1920, though for the next decade or so they'd live in the shadow of their pseudosuchian (crocodile-line) cousins. In 1934, Pangaea began to break up, resulting in another terrible pulse of volcanism that caused a lot of extinctions and left particularly the feathered and furry survivors with a lot of empty niches to fill, allowing the dinosaurs and mammals to diversify greatly. The last common ancestor of all modern mammals lived in the early 1940s, and by 1957 the dinosaurs had figured out flight, with Archaeopteryx usually being considered the first bird. Other dinosaurs took on an incredible variety of sizes, shapes, and forms. Some of the most famous ones include Dilophosaurus (1942), Diplodocus and Stegosaurus (1955), Iguanodon (1969), Velociraptor (1991), and Tyrannosaurus rex (1994).

(A tropical lakeside in the year 2000, by me)

In 1995, the world was struck by a meteorite, wiping out many groups, including the marine reptiles, pterosaurs, and ammonites. The surviving mammals and dinosaurs went on to diversify across the next couple of years and had formed thriving new ecosystems in the tropical world of the turn of the millennium. The first known bat lived in 2001, and the whales returned to the oceans next year. Around 2009, the world's climates turned colder and dryer. Antarctica froze over and grasslands spread widely. Our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos lived in 2021, and by new year 2023, our ancestors were getting brainier and more proficient with tools. That's also when the north pole froze and the Quaternary ice age cycle began. The first known members of Homo sapiens lived on 10 November 2023. The latest ice age started on 14 December, and ended at 2 AM on 30 December. The great pyramid of Giza was built at 6 AM on 31 December and On The Origin Of Species was published at 23:22 PM.

[gaynaturalistghost]

@openlyhot just tagging you here, not sure if you saw the stuff above (here’s a link to the Evolution of Ocean Color) but I decided to get into even more chemistry because it’s SO WEIRD and there are lots of great chemists who’ve worked on this but the info is really hard to find.

So there’s two parts to your statement but I wasn’t sure if you meant oxidized iron bound to oxides or just oxidized iron. Anyway. I learned new cool stuff! Hope this is interesting : )

Iron facts

Science Made Alive

The coolest paper

My favorite part of the “wine-dark sea” conspiracy -romans or w/e described the sea as a red thing so they must have not been able to see blue- is that (a very very long time ago) the oceans were actually red. And cyanobacteria (named IN LATIN for the word ‘blue’) were responsible for oxidizing all the iron out to no longer be red. It’s just fun.

[velocityvsreality]

Archipelago of Archaean Bosk

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

but if birds are dinos, are we still monkeys, or by a stretch, fishes? Microbes? Ok tahts a big stretchnactually, just fish

Aha! We are fish, but we're also Archaeans!

Microbe just means a microscopic organism. However, all eukaryotes descended from Archaeans - specifically, Asgardians - and thus, we are Archaeans!

With a surprise eubacteria (for some of us, more than one) inside :)

[yee-qi]

"Color of Royalty" Stromatolites Archaean, 2.7 billion years ago, Vaalbaran seas (near Australia) This is during the heyday of the purple bacteria that are hypothesized to have dominated the earth billions of years ago. These organisms were some of the first major species to rule the planet, in a time long before there was anything to eat them. This is part of a longer project i'll be calling "perspectives" for now! idea is to chronicle a history of life on earth through the "eyes" of many different species in many different styles, basically.

This is the first picture in this project, which I didn't feel was enough to post alone. "Pale First Dot" Last Universal Common Ancestor Hadean, 4.4 billion years ago, global ocean (could be anywhere, really)

[geologyjohnson]

I've been working as part of the BASE project for the last 18 months, drilling the 3.22 billion year old Moodies group in South Africa to get fresh unweathered material in the least deformed sections. We finished drilling late last year, and last week we were able to sample the core.

To say this material is well preserved is an understatement. It's better preserved than some Phanerozoic material I've worked with.

My role will be to look for organic walled microfossils in the fine grained sedimentary rocks. Previous researchers found some large organic spheres in the Moodies in 2010, but those rocks were from a gold mine and the spheres were badly preserved. Our material has not been affected by hydrothermal gold mineralisation so we are hoping to find some nice fossils. Regardless, as you can see below, the microbial textures are beautifully preserved with lots of primary features.

Click on each photo to read the explanation in the caption.

You can learn more about the BASE project here https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100076245104891

Here's the paper talking about the fossils from 2010

[o-craven-canto]

Archaean landscape

Cambrian seafloor with trilobites and jellyfish

The giant placoderm Dunkleosteus, hunting (look how watery that seafloor is, I love it)

Storm blowing through a Carboniferous forest

The early marine reptile Mesosaurus

The primitive ichthyosaur Mixosaurus

Triceratops grazing (beautiful, but a tad outdated reconstructions!)

Mosasaurus -- the reconstruction is a bit more croc-like than it should, but that water! That motion!

The rhinoceros-kin Metamynodon, wallowing

The early ape Dryopithecus

The great Eurasian forest during the Quaternary Ice Age

The Sicilian dwarf elephant Palaeoloxodon falconeri

The South American sabertooth cat Smilodon

A hominid identified as Homo heidelbergensis (I would imagine it a bit more human-like)

Woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, digging for grass through the snow

Hunting Megaloceros

Making the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, about 27,000 years ago

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Paleoart by the Czech painter Zdenek Burian (probably mostly painted between 1950 and 1975?), published in Zdeněk V. Špinar, Zdeněk Burian, Life Before Man, 1983