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| 10 Million Years of Rain; An Age of Mud and Venom | |
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| Topic Started: Oct 27 2016, 06:46 PM (3,025 Views) | |
| Monster | Oct 27 2016, 06:46 PM Post #1 |
Space Oddity
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10 Million Years of Rain The Holocene is long over. The Earth has seen the dawn of a dozen new ages, and with each period came a plethora of fantastic creatures and landscapes. Empires rose and fell, beset by hardship and disaster. Humans, acidic oceans, ice ages,asteroids, a brutal volcanic winter, and desertification all took their toll over the millennia. Still, life flourishes, and for each lineage coldly snuffed out and reduced to dust and bones another emerges to take its place. Incredible, fragile and breathtakingly beautiful, life on Earth soldiers on through everything thrown at it. Diversifying, innovating and surviving. Our tour begins 200 million years from now. The supercontinent Ameurasia has largely broken up, and biodiversity has started to recover after the latest mass extinction event. A deadly combination of desertification, glaciation, colossal flood basalt eruptions and anoxic oceans made for a punishing 20 million years. Many once great clades did not survive. Tetrapods in particular were badly affected. Some of the most successful lineages of all time dwindled and were destroyed over the ages, finished off by the bleak and hostile deserts that engulfed the land. There was no refuge in the seas, and they grew stagnant and quiet. But it wasn't to last. As the new continents moved further and further apart, the rains came, and the swamps and forests reclaimed the ancient deserts. The Earth was once again a welcoming place for vertebrates. They filled every new habitat, taking advantage of this new abundance of fruits, flowers and insects. This is a now a hothouse world. Global temperatures average 30C, there are no ice caps and much of the planet enjoys high precipitation. Large areas of the former continents are now submerged beneath warm, shallow seas. The Ameurasian deserts are almost gone. Forests and wetlands spread (almost) pole to pole, accounting for most of the planet's terrestrial ecosystems. Megafauna is rare; the old mammalian megafauna has been absent for a long time. Instead, the forests teem with thousands of smaller species of mammal, bird, lizard and amphibian, most weighing less than 10kg. They slink and scurry in the shadow of the lizards, snakes and amphibians are taking their places as the new giants of this world . Giant fish patrol the waterways and wetlands. A host of strange winged creatures fill the skies and forest canopies. Some of these creatures would be familiar to us; others have no current equivalent. Even the trees in the vast forests would look odd to us. It is humid, swampy, lush and green. It has been like this for the last 10 million years. But things are slowly changing. The continents are becoming more isolated from each other. The climate is cooling, ever so slightly, and in places the forests are receding. Grasslands and tundra are encroaching, little by little. The beginnings of a new age of megafauna can be seen. Herds of grazing animals hint at the former glories of the Cenozoic Era. This is a world in transition. This project explores the wildlife, biogeography and ecology of this lush, changing, watery world. Contents Currently in order of posting; better organisation to come with increased volume of published material! Spoiler: click to toggle |
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Flashlights, nightmares, sudden explosions. 'active' {tumblr} {Veles} {10 Million Years of Rain] Commissions: Open. | |
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| trex841 | Nov 28 2016, 09:21 AM Post #46 |
Entity
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? Forgive me if I don't quite understand how that works... Regardless, I'm excited to see how that aspect of the world fleshes out. |
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F.I.N.D.R Field Incident Logs A comprehensive list of all organisms, artifacts, and alternative worlds encountered by the foundation team. At the present time, concepts within are inconsistent and ever shifting. (And this is just the spec related stuff) | |
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