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Project Mithras; Thinking outside the box
Topic Started: Jul 3 2008, 03:13 PM (857 Views)
Xenothinka
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Before I start this Project ,I need someone to teach me a small amount of taxonomy and someone who knows latin to help me with binomial nomenclature.
I would be thankful if someone could help me if not I will just have to do without.
I have been interested in exobiology since I first saw Star Wars.Since that time I have drawn (rather badly) my ideas of an extraterrestrial creature.To come up with an idea I had to think outside the box,in other words I had to think of features that no living thing on this planet has.My first exobiological creation was a "sucker foot" used by creatures that live on the most fragile of landscapes.Due to the foot's large surface area the creature would not sink into its delicate habitat.Now,after hundreds of ideas were written and drawn I will combine all of them into one project,Project Mithras
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Giant Blue Anteater
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Hello Xenothinka. Welcome to the Speculative Evolution forums.

Taxonomy is basically grouping different organisms into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, etc. For example, this is the complete taxonomy of Homo sapiens:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Superclass: Tetrapoda
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: sapiens

An organism is classified depending on what it is and it's features.

If you are looking for Greek or Latin words, Google is your friend here. Type "Latin word for *word*" in the search bar.

Have fun!
Ichthyostega

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Intelligence is awareness of ignorance. Stupidity is ignorance of ignorance. Think about it.
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Xenothinka
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How's this for my first taxonomy?

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Victusoffa
Subphylum:Simpletergates
Superclass:Ampusinpoda
Class:Undatribulia
Order:Superdivum
Family:Pulmogeridae
Genus:Pulmocrinis
Species:montisbestia
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Livyatan


I don't think you should start by classifying individual species. You should start developing a basic plan as Nemo-Ramjet did with Snaiad. Then you move further along into groups and subgroups with species coming along after you already developed a basic system.

English to Greek
English to Latin

Another English to Latin
The grand Livyatan on deviantArt: link

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Xenothinka
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So I should plan out a cladogram first,alright,thanks!
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Livyatan


Basic plan means the basic morphology of your life forms. Should they have two heads, where is the spine, etc.
The grand Livyatan on deviantArt: link

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Saxophlutist
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Also, it would be neat to come up with separated taxons from just "Animalia" and "Metazoa".
Something to remember is that, even though they were made to be animal/metazoa-analogues, they still aren't animals by biological definition.
Try something like, Mithrazoa, or something that describes them separately from animals.
Also, starting with higher level taxonomy is good. It can get tricky at time, but it helps a lot.

What is your planet like by the way?
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Xenothinka
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Mithras is slightly bigger than Earth and has over two moons that are also full of life it also has a young sister planet called Candelifera which is full of primative life.Both planets and their moons have less gravity than Earth so this allows massive creatures some, bigger than mountains to roam on Mithras and its moons and allowing large towers of single celled organisms to develop on Candelifera and its moons.The planet was the first planet with highly developed life to be discovered,the other planets had very primative life.
Mithras was named after the roman soldier god of life while Candelifera was named after the Roman Goddess of childbirth.Mithras' moons are respectvely called Daughter and Son and the actually orbit a binary planet systmem with Candelifera's moons.
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Livyatan


It is amazingly unlikely for like to not only appear on two planets in the same system, but for the moons to have life as well.
The grand Livyatan on deviantArt: link

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Xenothinka
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Well Candelifera and Mithras are two of what could be googols and googols of planets so it is very unlikely we would find something like my planets in real life but still we only have seen a small portion of the universe so a system something like this could be possible.
Mithras's moons could have actually started out as part of Mithras when it was already full of biological chemicals,but a cataclysmic impact could have ripped out large chunks off of Mithras thus we have life on both the moons and the planet.For Candelifera humans have landed on both of it's moons as well as the planets in the far future,this means that the microbes that the humans have brought along with them could have evolved on Candelifera and its moons.
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Xenothinka
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here are the plants and creatures I created while I was in the Xenobiology forums,please note that I was inexperienced in Biology at that time so some of my descriptions could be childish :

Air Tree

The most common tree of my planet, being simple this tree is not very hard to study.
This tree looks like any Earth tree only the leaves are shaped like lips and the entire tree is coloured red.The lips are adapted to suck in tonnes of air every day the weird thing is that the air tree remakes the air in a very difficult to understand process.The easiest way to put this process is that they simply have air stored in every cell of their body.As air is sucked in the pressure makes the bubble shaped cells explode releasing the same quantity of air that was sucked in but it is more complex and too hard to understand.Why does this plant need air if plants need oxygen to survive? The answer is that these plants have evolved so quickly that they have almost become animals but somehow there is a kind of evolutionary restriction preventing them to become animals.

Buongiorna Bush

This is the most common flowering plant in my planet they have evolves spiral shaped leaves and DNA shaped flowers.This plant is the most enigmatic living thing in my planet, no scientist knows why the leaves and flowers a shaped so strangely.THese flowers do not fruit and that is also enigmatic.What we do know about this plant is that it acts like an Earth plant and that it has been used to cure cancer.THe name Buongiorna is named by my planet's goddess of shapes.

Adam plant


This plant is very rightly named because the Bible says that the snake gave Adam a fruit from the Tree of Knowledege and he gave a piece of the fruit to Eve and then they were driven out of Eden by our Lord.This plant is the most common fruit plant in my planet.It is also a very enigmatic plant but most of the mysteries have already been unlocked.The fruit this plant gives of is a very beautiful and sweet fruit but it holds a dealy poison.Many people have died by its manipulative aroma that somehow makes you eat it,scientists do not know why this happens and when they do they might save an eights of my planets population of humans as the other seven eigths have died because of this plant. The plants are being slowly killed off by the Fire Age an age where billions of ultrasmall solarwaves hit our planet ,this is the only plant that cant survive this and no one knows why.

Fire Cactus

This animal/plant has one of the most effective ways in defending itself.It sets itself on fire .It does this by rubbing two tentacles together inside its petrol filled body fortunatately the animal/plant has a fireproof body so when it burns the creature does not feel a thing.The only predator that is successful in eating it is the
Fire Eater . The Fire Cactus is not named because it uses fire to kill its predators and prey.It is named by the color of it.Most of my planets inhabitants are very attracted to this plant and merchants sell dry ones for their version of St Valentines the " Reticus Day".Reticus is the god of love and is normally portrayed as a six armed humanoid with a fire cactus head.The humans that landed on my planet are given these plants so they can live in peace with the inhabitants.The flowers this plant produces die as soon as it comes into contact with Earth's air this unusually is the only living thing on my planet that does so.The reason is that the flowers collect light when the Fire Age comes to surviveso since the plant is animal like the plant knows that the fire age is not going to start on Earth and its flowers die at once.The cells of the plant are located under the soil while the thing you see is actually a thin fireproof papery fabric that the plant produces, pretty much like cotton.

Ballon Plant

This plant is the biggest plant in my planet.They live very high up in the sky and they can survive extreme tempearatures.They have evolved their own supply of helium so they can stay floating in the air.They are carnivorous and the feed by the use of long sticky tendrils hanging out of a 3 meter long hole.The plant senses if a flying creature touches one of the tendrils and gets stuck to it.Once it senses the creature it brings up the tendril and leaves the creature suspended inside its body.When many creatures are left inside and it weighs too much,the plant drops to the ground an prepares itself for terrestrial life .It starts growing roots and is no longer carnivorous but the rotting creature inside the body is now sucked clean off its body juices and absorbed into the plant the skin and bones are then left to become dirt.The flowers this plant producesare very beautiful despite the ugly plasic bag like appearance of the plant.Its nectar is like water to my planet's inhabitants and the plant itself is sometimes used as torture rooms where the person that is being tortured is left to breathe in helium until it dies.The fruits this plant produces need to be consumed because they absorb the plant's food and the plant can soon die.

Dome Plant

This plant looks like half a sphere with around 5 entrances all around it.Inside the plant are long extremely sticky vines.A an animal enters the plant, looking for shelter,it gets stuck to a vine and gets digested as it is brought up into a stomach like bag that is near the top of the plant.This plant is closely related to the Balloon plant.It is more or less like the Ballon Plant in its terrestrial form.The plant itself is as big as a three storey hose so it is easy to spot.Many of these plants are hollowed out by the Mithranians and then decorated.The Mithranians that build them do not return until it's their birthday,where the entire family spends the day in there..The Dome plant can move but it needs water to do so.If we imagine the water as a giant Air Hockey table and the plant as the puck and the we imagine that the air comes from the puck then it is easy to know how the plant moves.Air is channeled from the top of the plant into several little stoma on the underside of the plant which pushes the plant off the water by millimeters.The plant itself is one giant leaf so it is very light.This plant does not need roots as it gets its water by absorbing it as the water goes on the"body".Its flowers are rich in pollen but they are not attractive.They are brown and they look rotten.Scientists think that the plant has evolved a sort of repellant to the pollinators and the pollen will only be eaten by a Filterstilt once it has been blown off by the wind.

Mountainhoofed Acidswallower

This beautiful animal takes camouflage to the extremes.It burries itself in tonnes and tonnes of dirt and it only leaves its extremely large hooves (that look like mountains) and their mouths outside.When under land it regurgitates acid and closes its mouth immediately.The acid makes the mouth look like a lake and soon symbiotes called Needle swimmers start appearing in the "lake" to suck out body fluids of the animals that fall into the lake.This helps the Muntainhoofed Acidswallower because it cannot digest the organs and bones of an animal, it only digests the fat and skin of the animal.These animals only move when it is mating season,they suck up the acid with the dissolved animals in it they digest it and then with a rumbling sound they roll to the side and slowly they stand up. As you see what lied underneath you notice that it looks like a large mountain of matted fur.At one end of this "mountain" is the sexual organ that looks like a butter flies proboscis when the male finds another male or female their "proboscis" intertwines and sperm is delivered.This is what male and female do but when male and male encounter each other and mate the sperm combine into one and at passes into the male with the longest proboscis.You might wonder how can there be a female if they are asexual? The answer is that a male has the "proboscis" outside there body while a female has it inside and it has no sperm.Later I shall explain how the animal navigates through a planet, the prey this animal feeds on, the problems these animals have caused, the measurements of this animal and how the animal breathes. This animal can easily measure 5 kilometres in height because of its massive hooves.Its length is 3 kilometres and its width is 2 kilometres making it the biggest extra terestrial animal ever seen by our descendants.Of course its massive size has caused lots of problems one of them being that it can cause megavibrations that can terrorise many towns this mega vibration is over 10 times the sound of an aeroplane.It can also crush entire cities in just 4 footsteps,cause small earth quakes,and it can even cause tsunamis but it has only been recorded once.These creautures are slowly been transported into an empty but habitable planet in order to keep the original planet from which it came from safe.
This animal has a strange way of breathing,the "matted hair " is actually millions of strands of microscopic lungs.These organs are used if it is walking but when it is lying down it unveils large tentacles with suckers at the end to suck up any air into the lungs inside the beast.These tentacles are also used to push prey into the acid as the tentacles look like an Air tree( that i shall describe soon) so the animals are fooled into believing that they are safe.
This animal mainly feeds on Filter Stilts (i shall desribe these soon) mostly because the Needle Swimmers eat only these for unknown reasons.One hypothesis says that the Filter Stilts keep food impurities in an extra gut and this is what Needleswimmers like most.
This animal navigates in a strage way as well,it's large ears listen out for any sound this sends messages to its first brain,these messages are sent to the second brain and it brakes them up into complex patterns then they travel back into the first brainand it transports them into a special organ which our scientists aptly named the Imagen.What the imagen does is that it makes an image depending on how much sound has bounced off from the random object and the animal walks to
where it thinks the image is.Of course the imagen is not a reliable source of sight as the image might be wrong and that is why they go into villages without knowing that people are fleeing from it. It is very very light.It only has one bone ,that protects its organs, the organs and the bone are made of an extremely light material lighter than any on Earth.It grows its own food supply ,the lungs.The long strands of matted hair.The lungs are absorbed into its skin and it is immediately replaced by another one so it has two kinds of food sources ,the lungs and the animals. Although the food supply is not enough to let this animal live .The animal keeps the energy it produces from being used up.The gravity on this planet is half as much as the Earth's.The most unusual aspect this animal has is that it is the only animal in the planet that is 50% aerogel making it lighter still.The animal does have muscles but it relies on the currents that go around the aerogel to move. The bone in its body takes up the other 50% of the body,adding pressure to the aerogel making it hard but still light and it can bend.To add more pressure it has an organs I have named the "pressurisers" what these do is that they push out air at enormously fast rates. There is one near each leg and when the creature stands all of them are activated sending tonnes of pressure throughout the body and hardens the aerogel.The aerogel does not break because pressure is pushing against pressure.When the beast walks the organ that is in the leg the creature lifts turns off while the others are left on so the creature can bend the leg easily,once it steps on the ground the organ on that leg immediately turns on and the cycle carries on.These organs are only on the legs the body is pressured by the only bone in the body that is 3km long but very light.The organs and the lung tendrils together weigh a mere 2kg making the beast the biggest lightest animal in my planet.


Sky Spear

The sky spear is in reality a conglomerate of air borne fungi,algae and bacteria.They have evolved to live like one animal and not multiple animals.The fungi serve as the creatures skin,the algae serve as the tissue and mucles and the bacteria serve as a stomach.The Sky Spear is quite small the largest being 5 cm.The sky spears are actually a small undeveloped form of a creature called the Trident Bird.Somehow they evolved seperately and they do not look too much alike.The Sky Spears do not see so what they do is that they fly endlessly until they hit something and completely devour it.They fly in swarms and they are the most abundant animals in my planet one swarm can consist of over 300 billion.No animal can survive the Sky Spears but one which Ill describe later.The sky Spears do not realy look like a spear they look more like a fork because they have three prongs at the end of it and the tail is a bit bended.Their color varies ,it can either be a sort of dark greenish yellow or a dark dirty brown.Their skin is dry and very rough because of the fungus.some people believed that they evolved from lichen brought over from Earth by my planets inhabitants.The lichen might have come into contact with very rapidly evolving bacteria forming in a matter of days,a Sky Spear.The Sky Spear flies by ejecting gas made by the bacteria as they go through the process of fermentation.The bacteria get the sugars from an animal the Sky Spear eats.The sky spears are not particularly dangerous to my planets inhabitants because they have evolved super tough skin as hard as diamonds due to the experiences their ancestors went through because of the Sky Spears.The first lichen should have been brought from Earth over 20 million years ago as fossils in my planet suggests.This means that the ancestors evolved more rapidly than us.

Filterstilt

This animal is one of the many Linguapods that live on Planet Mithras.This is mostly studied because it feeds like no other Linguapod.Most Linguapods leave their tongue oout to trap flying creatures with a sticky substance but this one sticks out its tongue to filter the air makin the air pure.It feeds on seeds and pollenand if any unwanted paricles gets caught on its tongue it is stored in a seperate gut and secreted as a foul smelling defensive liquid.The Filterstilt has very long legs and a wrinkled ball like body.Its eyes are hidden behind very thin flaps of skin that protects its eyes from dust.The tongue(which Linguipods always leave out and only leave it in at the moment of their sleep which is when they start digesting)Is covered in small hairs making it easier for the Filterstilt to catch its food.The tongue can be a lethal whip to predators as it is very flexible.The Filterstilt is unusually the only one that can do this mostly because this creature has a human IQ unlike the other Linguipods.Another thing that this animal has that other Linguipods dont is chupons on both of its feet.The chupons act as toes and it keeps the animal from sinking into the dirt.Other Linguipods have long needles for legs so they find it hard to walk on land.There is another type of Filterstilt(the Umbrella Filter Stilt,Linguapedes Spurcamen Prolixus)that uses large lips on its tongue to suck in the air ,catches the pollen and seeds with the hair inside the tongue and exhales the pure air.

Driffle

The Driffle is the most common sea creature on Mithras.They are usually called Comma Fish because of their Comma like shape.They consist of a large ball like body and a needle that curves upwards at a low angle.They are like Jelly Fish here on Earth as they are drifter and they only have a stomach for an organ.They can survive without food for a long time because they do not move and food depends on luck.The way they feed is that, as they drift into an edible thing that has been stabbed by their needle they push out acid from their stomach with the help from complex movements of their body and then the acid liquidizes the prey's organs.As the prey is liquidized from the inside the Driffle sends more acid into the prey with an incredible force sending some of the liquid out into the Driffles body.The complex movements and the feeding all rely on the pressure in the water they live in and the pressure in the body.to make the complex movements to push out the acid the cells that make up the Driffles body stretch out making the "skin" extremely thin so the water pressure can squash it.The Driffles do not reproduce they spit apart like bacteria fortunately they do this every month and the Mithrans control their numbers.Mithrans are afraid of these creatures because if you get stung by a Driffle the acid will work so quickly that the part of the body that han been stung must be amputated or transplanted as soon as possible or the acid can spread into your body and kill you in a matter of minutes.Mithran children normally get stung by them as they pick them up because of their apparent cuteness

Enjoy!

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Xenothinka
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I haven't written for some time.
Anyways heres another one of my creations.

Spinx

This animal is the most common of Mithran pets,it is slightly bigger than a dog and longer than a cat.It emmits a high pitched squeek when happy,this squeek is considered adorable by the Mithran.Like cats and dogs here on Earth there are wild varieties of Spinx.The biggest and most ferocious is the Anacando Spinx,it constricts its prey just like an anaconda and it stops it from strugling by biting its neck with its long sharp teeth.When its prey is dead the Anaconda Spinx starts ripping off large chunks of flesh and swallows without chewing it.The smallest kind of Spinx is the Vegeterian Spinx who(due to its small size) can burrow into various fruits with its shovel like claws and it could spend more than a month eating the same fruit.Most Spinx are carnivores apart from the Vegeterian and Fairy Spinx,the large Spinx eat like Earths lions but the smallest ones (which are called Mithran Leeches) feed on blood.
When the domestic Spinx was wild is would climb trees looking for any traces of Syccha nests (the Syccha are like earth's Termites but they build there nests in massive trees).The squeek would have been used as a sort of play fight signal that Spinx pups would use.
A human being would dedscribe a spinx as an elongated rat with a very fat tale but that description is not very accurate.The animal does have a very similar appearence to a rat but it does not have rodent teeth instead it has very small sharp teeth like a ferret.Its head is very slightly crocodilian in appearence and it would take a spinx expert to explain why it looks crocodilian.Its feet have specially adapted nails that have been fused together to create a sort of spade structure.This stucture allows the spinx to scratch away bits of tree bark in order to get to the Syccha nests.
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