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Avalonian Fauna
Topic Started: Oct 6 2009, 11:32 AM (5,272 Views)
VulcanTrekkie45
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Hey everyone. I was hoping you guys could give me a hand. I'm in the middle of a project on another forum called Avalonia Alone, in which Avalonia didn't break up into New England and Western Europe as it did in our world. I've got a general idea for climate, which you'll find in the thread. But I was hoping that you could give me a hand with some of the animals native to the island. My guess is it'd be dominated by multituberculates, with some creatures that are descendants of the last common ancestor of placentals and marsupials. But I'd live some more specifics. If you'd like to help me out, that'd be awesome.

Also, if any of you are good artists, I'd love drawings as well.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

There seem to be quite a few microclimates, and we haven't made life for them. Cockroaches?
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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VulcanTrekkie45
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Well, the fauna there would most likely be avian-based. If you're talking about the alpine tundra regions, we're talking about the high mountains. Not much lives there in our world, so major life would probably be restricted mainly to birds.
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The Dodo
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VulcanTrekkie45
Nov 18 2009, 10:18 AM
The cold could be a concern for both animals, but I think I've got a solution. In Eastern Avalonia, there is a chain of volcanoes, generating their own microclimates. Those reptiles would have no problem living in any of the hot springs or any other such phenomenon generated by the volcanoes.
Well it looks like there is room for choristoderes.

In alpine tundra things like deers and i think bears can live there so there would probably be some large multis there.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

Caniforms, perhaps?
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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VulcanTrekkie45
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Caniform analogues, definitely. They form the majority of predatory animals throughout the world. However, the caniforms of Avalonia would be mutlituberculates, who only evolved to resemble caniforms.
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Carlos
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Considering that multies were kinda rodent like and with only a few teeth, I'd say they would be more likely to produce Thylacoleo like forms than canine like ones
Lemuria:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

Terra Alternativa:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/

My Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/Carliro

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VulcanTrekkie45
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True, but I'd consider the thylacoleo species to be caniform analogues.
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Holben
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Well yeah, but most marsupial predators look like placental analogues.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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VulcanTrekkie45
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Here are a couple things I posted in the project thread on another forum that might be of some use/interest:

A prologue detailing Avalonia's formation:

Glaciers marched across the surface of the world. For centuries, millennia, aeons, they carved and scraped their way from the poles. They laid waste to a barren world. Northern ice met southern ice at the equator, locking the living oceans away. The world slept, and for millions of years, was nothing but a snowball. But even as life’s spark was in danger of being snuffed out by the ice, its salvation was slowly waking. A mere 2,000 miles from the South Pole, a piece of the ocean floor was slipping underneath what one day would become Africa. The melting crust made the crust swell, pregnant with fresh magma. After countless millions of years, the earth came to term.

The sea floor cracked, spewing out magma, slowly building a chain of volcanoes. They built slowly, taking thousands, millions of years, before reaching the ice above. These new islands broke through the ice, and in doing so, saved the world. They did not only belch out lava, but large amounts of gases. The volcanoes wrapped the world in a blanket, and soon the ice began to melt. Before they were done, tropical conditions reached from pole to pole. The bloom of plants in the oceans of the world was so large, that the seas turned green. Life exploded in this new world.

Yet, the land was still barren. The islands were just bare rock. The saviours of this new world were still black. Living water lapped at the shores of lifeless islands. Silently, these islands drifted across the face of the earth, quietly building their chain. Countless aeons passed, without so much as a whisper of life on the islands. Until one day, when they were near the equator, some seaweed latched onto one of the islands a little too high. While some strands dried and burned to death, some persevered. It drew water from the rivers criss-crossing the island, and spread across this wet little chain. As more time passed, and plants came and went, a layer of soil developed, and the plants evolved. Finally, these islands were alive.

The islands continued to drift across the world. Eventually, they collided with a larger continent, fusing the islands, and creating something new: a micro continent. Seas closed up. Some dried up, some did not. Many lakes and ponds formed along the foothills of the mountain range binding the old islands together. Animal life became trapped in these small bodies of water. However, with the large forests replenishing nutrients and oxygen regularly, they thrived, becoming the first animals to live in freshwater in the history of this little world.

As the young continent became more tropical, seasons began to alternate between wet and dry. During the dry seasons, many of the ponds dried out. Much of the life did not survive. But, some did survive, and adapted to the new conditions. Lungs developed. These fish learned to spend more and more time out of the water. And then one fish left its tiny pond forever. Here, on this tiny insignificant subcontinent, this continent that ended the global ice age is where animal life first came onto land. Plant life was very abundant already, and animals on land flourished. More aeons passed, and they spread across first the micro continent, and eventually the world.

The young continent continued to drift, attached to what would one day become Europe, on a collision course with what would one day be North America. The sea to its north began to close, and eventually the two collided, throwing up great mountains and creating a supercontinent. But life continued to flourish on this continent. It was covered in primordial forests and jungle, filled to the brim with all sorts of plants and animals. But that was soon to come to an end. The only remaining coast was on a shrinking sea. Its mother continent was coming back for a reunion.

The collision started to the east of the tiny continent. For millions of years, the coast at the head of the sea was a rugged once, perfect for small niches of life to develop. But the collision moved westward. And disaster struck the world once again. In a far off place that would one day become known as Siberia, the planet opened its vengeful maw, spewing out enough lava to bury our continent of Europe under 500 feet of lava. Everything died. The once lush subcontinent was reduced to desert. And then the sea closed up, leaving this once beautiful continent nothing more than a basin in the midst of a mountain range.

With mountains on all sides, rain could no longer reach what was left of the forests. The trees were the first to die, leaving only savannah and grasslands. The lakes, ponds, and rivers dried up. The grasses died. With nothing left to bind the soil, it began to blow, creating the only weather that would be seen here for millions of years: sandstorms. Dunes formed where fish once swam. Where trees once stood tall and proud, only dust devils reigned. For hundreds of millions of years, the sun blazed high in the sky. It seemed that this once proud continent would never be seen on the face of the earth again.

But that was not to be. After over 100 million years, the currents under the crust began moving in the opposite direction. The seas returned to the continents. Rain came and wore down the mountains. The continent was stretched lengthwise, opening an interior sea, and making the western part become a series of peninsulas. The climate became much milder. Life returned to the continent. Forests once more appeared along the coasts and the interior plains. New creatures, someday to be called dinosaurs, roamed the forests. Tiny mammals came along, preying on the eggs of the larger dinosaurs and on smaller ones themselves.

After a couple million years more, the reborn continent split from both east and west, becoming an island once again. Storms picked up as the ocean widened. Within a million years, storm after storm was slamming into the coasts. The continent became a steaming, thriving jungle. The ocean continued to widen, and the storms became more intense. For nearly a further 100 million years, the jungles dominated. A subduction zone began to form as the continent very slowly drifted eastward, throwing up a new chain of volcanoes. Soon after the formation of this new range, disaster struck once again.

In a place we know as India, the earth once again opened up, spewing forth great amounts of lava. Soon after, a rock from space crashed down to the Earth’s surface. The two blows killed most life on the continent. The jungle gave way to a desert, leaving very few plants to sustain what animals did survive. The continent cooled, and many of the reptile species died. The only ones to survive lived in the warmth of the eastern volcanoes. Many mammals also survived, and were ready to become a dominant life form.

As other continents continued to drift, the world cooled from the steamy world that the continent had existed as for millions of years. A new forest grew. The steam turned to fog. Mammals flourished here, living fossils of a time long since past. For millions of years, the mammals stuck to the trees in the lowlands and along the mountainsides. But, over time, they came down from the trees, and exploded. They filled every available niche. Eventually, the southern continent known to us as Antarctica drifted over the South Pole. The continent continued to cool, and glaciers began to advance once again. From the North Pole, ice sheets crept south, and the western peninsulas froze over. The eastern heartlands lost much of their forests, in favour of tundra. The mammals that survived adapted over the thousands of years of arctic conditions. Many grew larger, bulkier. The continent now had its first large herbivores.

Tens of thousands of years passed. The glaciers then began to retreat. The climate warmed. The forests returned. Then the glaciers returned. And retreated once again. Over thousands, millions of years, the cycle continued. The glaciers would advance, only to retreat after tens of thousands of years. During one era when the glaciers had advanced to cover the western peninsulas, a migration began. The first migration of land animals to the continent in 120 million years.


And some land area statistics:
Total Area: 1,771,285.1 sq. km (approx. the size of Libya)
Tiriberanaigh: 371,136 sq. km (approx. the size of the Caspian Sea)
Tiruillin: 340,143.4 sq. km (approx. the size of the Republic of the Congo)
Alinikilot Peninsula: 313,082.2 sq. km (approx. the size of Poland)
Tirnachrosbhóthar: 165,280.1 sq. km (approx. the size of Jiangxi, China)
Dóiteáin: 159,176 sq. km (approx. the size of the Adriatic Sea)
Tirategig: 143,568.2 sq. km (approx. the size of Tajikistan)
Egipe Peninsula: 85,883.5 sq. km (approx. the size of Madre de Dios Region, Peru)
Tiraist: 71,131.7 sq. km (approx. the size of New Brunswick, Canada)
Meguaig Peninsula: 60,842.7 sq. km (approx. the size of Lake Huron)
Úll Peninsula: 19,623.8 sq. km (approx. the size of Chechnya)
I-Únamakika: 12,274.5 sq. km (approx. the size of Fiordland National Park, New Zealand)
Tigesin Peninsula: 11,967.3 sq. km (approx. the size of South Gyeongsang, South Korea)
I-Epeguitig: 9,673.6 sq. km (approx. the size of Carinthia, Austria)
I-Mon: 2,248.1 sq. km (approx. the size of Moray, Scotland)
I-Geata: 2,011.1 sq. km (approx. the size of County Wicklow, Ireland)
I-Creig: 1,518.5 sq. km (approx. the size of Mexico City)
I-Bán: 1,433 sq. km (approx. the size of Kauai)
I-Menigu: 291.4 sq. km (approx. the size of Cebu City, Philippines)
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

How did you get the stats?
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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VulcanTrekkie45
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I got them from the map itself. The program that I used to generate it can select extremely specific parts of an image, and then tell you the area of the selected portion, in square pixels. All I needed to do is convert from square pixels to square kilometers.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

Pretty amazing. I'm stuck with Windows XP and slow broadband speeds.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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The Dodo
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Nice prologue, noticed some of the information was a little old like it is now believed that early tetrapods began walking on land by first evolving to walk along the bottom of swamps, still good though.
Stats are great.
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VulcanTrekkie45
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The Dodo
Nov 24 2009, 12:24 AM
Nice prologue, noticed some of the information was a little old like it is now believed that early tetrapods began walking on land by first evolving to walk along the bottom of swamps, still good though.
Stats are great.
What's old about the information? I'd really like to know in case I need to change some of it.
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The Dodo
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Well I found most the information okay, a more knowledgeable person might be able to pick out mistakes I can't. I've already mentioned the early tetrapod thing, I also noticed you talked about grasses in what I assume id the Permian which should be taken out. Also I think Lichens were among the first plants to make it on land, although their plant with a symbiotic relationship with fungus, not sure about that one though.
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